A Fable of Tomorrows

Location: University of Salford, Development Lab

Time: 10:00 – 17:00 on Saturday and Sunday

A Fable of Tomorrows is a speculative design installation consisting of digital and interactive objects that reveal fragments of a fable from the future.

As a phantasmagoric video panorama immerses viewers in visions of deep time, a mysterious artifact poses ancient riddles which would take approximately one human lifetime to solve. Developed during a 2024 U.S. Fulbright in Norway, the work materializes how power relations proliferate through fables, riddles, and archives.

The fable invites meditation on memory, computation, and temporality that exceeds human experience but can nonetheless be mediated through play.

About the artist: Sarah Edmands Martin is a designer and researcher whose work takes place at the intersection of visual communication design, critical fabulation, and media aesthetics. An assistant professor of design at the University of Notre Dame, she considers the sociocultural impact of print, screen-based, motion, and augmented visual forms and how they might better serve collective futures. Her writing appears in Ethics in Design and Communication (2020), Eye on Design (2021), and Digital Transformation in Design (2024). Her design work has been recognized by PRINT, Graphis, the Paris Design Awards, London International Creative, and Creative Communication Awards, and featured in museums or galleries in Seoul, South Korea, Tijuana, Mexico, Washington, D.C., Rzeszów, Poland, Bergen, Norway, and across the United States.