Sophie Rogers' Prelude: Three Minutes to Midnight is an installation and visual loop from a live game environment that isolates the atmosphere, soundscapes, and world-building of an upcoming interactive video game developed in Unreal Engine. The work engages with thresholds—both conceptually and literally—holding the audience in a state of sensory attunement while exploring multiple, entangled experiences of time, including deep geological time, atomic time, ecological time, and the personal experience of time passing.
The project takes its starting point in 2007, when climate change was added as a contributing factor to the Doomsday Clock—a non-linear metaphor introduced by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to represent proximity to global catastrophe. With climate change formally acknowledged alongside the threat of nuclear weapons, the clock moved to three minutes to midnight, compressing atomic, climatic, geological, and political temporalities into a single moment. Drawing on the work of Karen Barad, the installation understands nuclear materials not as remnants of a concluded past, but as matter that continues to circulate, decay, mutate, and act. Atomic violence and its legacies are dispersed across landscapes and bodies, embedding past events into the present and shaping future conditions. Catastrophe is approached not as an endpoint, but as an ongoing temporal condition.
The project departs from real-world moments of entanglement in which traditional distinctions among nature, technology, and the human collapse into one another—such as radiotrophic fungi decomposing radioactive waste at sites like Chernobyl. In response to ecological ruin, and drawing on the work of Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway, the work investigates natural examples of survival, persistence, and collaboration in damaged environments. These organisms live with toxicity, adapting in contaminated conditions through symbiotic relationships rather than restoration or repair.
The world-building is further informed by Fredric Jameson’s concept of 'world reduction'—a technique associated with writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, in which fictional worlds are constructed through a process of radical abstraction. The project treats game engines not as a neutral medium, but as a paradoxical space. While worlds can be imagined, they are bound by predetermined parameters rooted in military development, structurally encoded with the rules of the physical world like gravity and atmospheric systems. Working within and against these parameters, the work uses apparent scarcity and emptiness as conditions for attention and attunement rather than absence.
The visual loop initially appears quiet and eerie, inviting slow exploration and sensitivity to subtle material cues, vibrations, and sounds. Shifting from a desolate ocean shoreline into the dark, terminal chambers of a stratified rock formation, the work introduces hybrid organisms that share a strange mixture of synthetic, organic, and seemingly human matter. Within this space, the logic of traditional gameplay is inverted. Rather than prioritising control, optimisation, or extraction, agency remains partial and unstable. By decentring the viewer's actions and shifting perspectives, the work presents a world with its own motives, agency, and desires. Prelude: Three Minutes to Midnight replaces traditional gaming notions of dominance with mechanics of attunement, creating a platform for connection and speculative re-imagining.
A private view will take place at the gallery on Thursday 2nd July, 6-8pm.
