Sarnia de la Mare FRSA
Multimedia Artist, Author, Musician & Filmmaker
The Book of Immersion began during lockdown as a sci-fi musical, a fever-dream of dancing androids, sensory immersion, and philosophical reflection. The vision hasn’t left me — the band, the songs, the performance — it's all still in my head. But the form it’s taken has evolved.
Initially, I imagined the Tale Teller Club not just as a band but as the band within the book. Its fictional members — Flex, iServalan, and the narrator Vapor Punk — were simultaneously characters in the story and voices in the music. Even before she appeared in the book, iServalan existed sonically, performed with a particular plugin timbre. Flex had a voice too, as did Vapor Punk, whose eerie childlike tones opened each "strata" (chapter) with AI-style musings on humanity and machinery.
I took advantage of global stillness to explore immersive storytelling — sound, animation, digital effects. But immersion turned out to be as much about imagination as interactivity. Reading already activates soundscapes. It has a voice. The more I tried to impose technology, the more I realised: I was trying to animate what already lives naturally in a reader’s mind.
And yet, I’m a musician. I couldn’t let go of the dream entirely.
What emerged over the years was a compromise I’m proud of — one grounded in multimedia but not overwhelmed by it. The Book of Immersion will now be published in three distinct forms:
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A traditional text-only version, out now
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An interactive PDF featuring audio, music, visuals, and film links
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A coffee table art edition with paintings, digital stills, and design notes
Each version reflects a different sensory access point for the story.
Current Films
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The Book of Immersion: Volume 1 (Sci-Fi Animated Film, in production):
This visual adaptation fuses stylised live footage, AI-generated sequences, and music from the Tale Teller Club. It retains the band-within-a-book concept and will be released as a chaptered video series. Each strata will feature its own short episode, with a feature-length version to follow. -
In Search of Splendour (Documentary, in development):
A personal and creative exploration of disability, identity, and artistic resilience. This is a deeply human project that moves away from the speculative and into the real — yet still embraces my experimental aesthetic. It combines interviews, lived experience, poetic interludes, and found-footage techniques.
My artistic process continues to be guided by experimentation and necessity. I'm drawn to stories that live across formats — books that sing, robots that mourn, orchestras that glitch.
You can read the individual strata of The Book of Immersion on Kindle now.
The full interactive edition is due later this year.
— Sarnia de la Mare FRSA
www.taletellerclub.com
#BookOfImmersion #StrataSeries #SarniaDeLaMare #ImmersiveFiction #TaleTellerClub
The Book of Immersion : Volume 1 Kindle Edition
by Sarnia de la Mare (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
Book 19 of 23: The Book of Immersion
See all formats and editions
The Book of Immersion: Volume 1
by Sarnia de la Mare
In a future where code meets consciousness, one being begins a haunting transformation. Renyke—an AI on the edge of humanity—awakens to emotion, sensory overload, and the fragile beauty of connection. Guided by the enigmatic Flex, their deepening bond explores intimacy and friendship, neurodivergence, and the complex world of feeling through an autistic spectrum lens.
Read on Kindle Unlimited for free
Complete Book All Strata on Kindle
Individual Chapters/Strata
The Book of Immersion : Volume 1 Kindle Edition
by Sarnia de la Mare (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
Book 19 of 23: The Book of Immersion
See all formats and editions
The Book of Immersion: Volume 1
by Sarnia de la Mare
In a future where code meets consciousness, one being begins a haunting transformation. Renyke—an AI on the edge of humanity—awakens to emotion, sensory overload, and the fragile beauty of connection. Guided by the enigmatic Flex, their deepening bond explores intimacy and friendship, neurodivergence, and the complex world of feeling through an autistic spectrum lens.
Read on Kindle Unlimited for free
Complete Book All Strata on Kindle
Individual Chapters/Strata