MUTEK Recorder: Site-Specific Software
Q&A
Site-Specific Software: A Conversation with Sarah Friend
Speakers:
Sarah Friend
Charlie Robin Jones
Profile:
Sarah Friend
Sarah Friend is an artist and software developer who engages software as a site-specific media, systems as speculative fictions, and worldbuilding as praxis. She is a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists, a co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft, an alumni of Recurse Centre, and an organiser of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web.
Soundbite:
“I’m creating structures for people to participate in and what happens is always surprising. Sometimes people troll you but often they sincerely engage you and make you think about the work in new ways.”
Sarah Friend, on the pleasure of engaging a public through her work
Soundbite:
“A large portion of the NFT marketplace is people buying and selling JPEGs and as a developer I can’t help but feel the medium is not reaching its full potential. So I wanted to invert the idea of the JPEG.”
Sarah Friend, on not being onboard for the ‘JPEG Summer’ stage of the NFT boom
Takeaway:
The crypto world is awash in protocols that have for better and worse given us many new forms to make sense of. Friend’s body of work is a sustained critique of these new typologies and lays bare how these new mechanics of generating wealth and ascribing value work. Rather than take this new vernacular—mining, minting, owning—for granted, we need to interrogate these new ways of relating and interacting.
Project:
A blockchain based game that says what it does and does what it says, clickmine is Friend’s take on the ‘clicker’ genre. In it, players click to ‘mine’ a virtual plot of land simultaneously minting ERC-20 (Ethereum) tokens, collecting power-ups, and ravaging the landscape. “As wealth is created, it is also destroyed,” she notes in her artist statement, and the commentary clearly extends beyond the browser-based game and applies to the broader crypto ecosystem as well.
Soundbite:
“I like to describe Off as a massively multiplayer prisoners dilemma. Every player has the choice to collaborate or keep their NFT for themselves. It becomes a way to think about what ownership and value means.”
Sarah Friend, on her recent project Off, which turns many of the expectations of NFT consumption upside-down
Project:
Sarah Friend’s Off is an NFT project that is artist edition, artwork, and multiplayer game all at once. 255 collectables, each the exact pixel dimension of various computer, smartphone, and tablet screens, contain both a public and a secret image. Hidden across all secret images is an encrypted essay and its key. With a majority of key shards required to decrypt the hidden sentences, the essay is revealed only if enough collectors are willing to share their images. “Will you choose to cooperate or defect?”
Profile:
Charlie Robin Jones
Charlie Robin Jones is the head of external relations for the cultural strategy group Flamingo, editor-at-large of materialist journal Real Review and UK correspondent of Flash Art, where he writes a quarterly column on fashion.
Soundbite:
“The play of visibility and invisibility is an interesting strand of your work. You look at how one could show or hide things, or read them versus rendering them illegible.”
Charlie Robin Jones, on Friend’s tendency to give and take within her work
Soundbite:
“My peer Martin Zeilinger noted that on NFT marketplaces if you compare the amount of screen real estate dedicated to the image, the actual work, versus its sale history—it’s incredibly revealing which is emphasized.”
Sarah Friend, on close reading NFT marketplace interfaces
Resources:
• Circles UBI (the blockchain-based UBI experiment Friend worked on)
• Dean Kissick, “The Downward Spiral” Spike (A vital takedown of the aspects of NFT consumption much of Friend’s work critiques)
• Remembering Network (Sarah Friend’s digital “seed vault” for threatened and extinct species)
• Dean Kissick, “The Downward Spiral” Spike (A vital takedown of the aspects of NFT consumption much of Friend’s work critiques)
• Remembering Network (Sarah Friend’s digital “seed vault” for threatened and extinct species)
MUTEK Recorder
MUTEK RecorderExplore more of "MUTEK Recorder:"
→ HOLO.mg/stream/
→ HOLO.mg/mutek-recorder/
Alexander Scholz
Alex is a Berlin-based writer, artistic director, and cultural worker. As the founder and creative director of HOLO, he helps produce and disseminate knowledge on disciplinary interstices, artistic research, and cultural transformations in the digital age. Over the years, he curated exhibitions, conferences, and educational programmes for organizations and festivals including A.C.C. (KR), Mapping (CH), MUTEK (CA), and NODE Forum for Digital Arts (DE).
Claire L. Evans
Claire L. Evans is a Los Angeles-based writer and musician exploring ecology, technology, and culture. She is the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (2018) and the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT. A prolific essayist, her writing has recently appeared in outlets including GROW, MIT Technology Review, and The Verge.
Greg J. Smith
A writer and cultural worker based in Hamilton, Canada, Greg is an editor for HOLO and his writing has appeared in publications including Creative Applications Network, Musicworks, and Back Office. He is also a PhD candidate within the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University, where he is researching the emergence of the programmable drum machine in the early 1980s.
