“I found myself the accidental creator of a digital pet graveyard”
An interview with ICV Creative Resident, artist, and researcher Sarah Friend
Welcome to the third installment of getting to know our incredibly talented Creative Residents! As part of the ICV Creative Residency, we provide brainstorming buddies, creative support, and a stipend to some of the most inspiring entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers — and wait to see what they do with it.
In today’s edition (get to know Regy Perlera and Mike Bodge in previous dispatches), we’re chatting with Sarah Friend, an artist and researcher based in Berlin whose work with digital lifeforms pushes the boundaries of NFT markets and explores what the definition of “life” actually means. Currently, Sarah is building an ending for her Lifeforms project which offers the possibility of a Good Death for digital crypto-pets. Keep reading to learn more about what’s next for the project, what Sarah thinks happens to the digital lifeforms that outlive us, why an artwork is a communication technology, and her advice for people interested in becoming artists.
Hi! Can you share a brief introduction — who are you and what do you do?
Ofc! I’m Sarah Friend, I’m an artist and researcher based in Berlin. I make things using and about technology, which maybe sounds impossibly broad. Sometimes that means staging events and exhibitions, sometimes online interactive experiences (games?), writing, speculative fiction, and software experiments.
What are you currently working on as part of the residency?
In 2021 I launched a digital pet project called Lifeforms. Lifeforms are NFT-based entities that, like any living thing, need regular care in order to stay alive. How do you care for a lifeform? Within 90 days of receiving it, you have to give it away. Lifeforms have been popular I think — among other reasons — because they engage in an act of market-refusal or market-nonconformity in a context (NFTs) that has been notorious for its embrace of markets. You can’t earn money or invest with Lifeforms because you can’t keep one for more than 90 days
Right now, I’m working on an “ending” for the project — something between a retrospective and a new feature. It has two parts. First, Lifeforms that are older than one year will have a new interaction available to them: a Good Death, where they transition to a new state and no longer need to move every 90 days. And secondly, every address that participated in the lifeforms project before March 6, 2024 will be able to create a Memoryform, which is a new mint shaped by their interactions with Lifeforms.
What does it mean for something to be alive in cyberspace? What does it mean for something to pass on? What do you think happens to the digital lifeforms that may outlive us?
To think about the “death” of digital things is inevitably to think about their life. Did they “live” and if so, what was the nature of that life? When we say that they died — what exactly do we mean? It’s an interesting question in a number of ways — and one I think we’re experiencing culturally in a new dimension as a result of AI. Is a Lifeform alive? Is GPT4 alive? etc.
At the same time, it’s helpful to remember all the ways in which the question is not new at all. Many cosmologies have existed and currently exist in which the boundary between life and death is placed differently. From angels and demons to ghosts and various creatures of folklore, the world has always been full of beings which “live” and can maybe “die” but remain unaccounted for in neoliberal materialist cosmology that dominates today in the West.
I just finished Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies, in which she discusses the Indigenous Australian understanding of the division between Life and Nonlife, and how the regime of colonial resource extraction depends on a very specific framing of those beliefs — and maybe further, how these contrasting ontological systems proceed from and structure ways of relating to climate change. Within the Indigenous Australian cosmology, beings like Two Women Sitting Down (a rock formation), a tjelbak snake (a fog moving around a hill) or Tjipel (a river) are alive. This is profoundly interesting to me to think about in the context of emerging technology.
“Is a digital thing really alive?” is perhaps not the right question. I’m more interested in: “What changes when we believe?”
How do you find inspiration for what you work on? What drew you to this particular notion around “good death” for digital beings?
I mean, Lifeforms have been around since 2021 and some 222 of them have been created but by far the vast majority have died. I found myself the accidental creator of a digital pet graveyard. Also, having made a few online projects that are maybe something like systems artworks or collaborative performances, much of the interesting stuff happens beneath the surface. How did people interact with it? What did people do with these 222 digital creatures for the past three years? I want to make that more visible.
In the economic system of growth-based capitalism, immortality is the ultimate goal — but it’s usually impossible. Should a Lifeform live forever? Probably not. On a more meta level, should the project of Lifeforms run forever? Again, probably not.
What drives your artistic practice? Do you see your work as being in conversation with, or reaction to, anything? Who and what are you inspired by these days?
I think one of the main reasons to make artworks is to participate in a kind of conversation — they’re a communicative act that have some strengths and weaknesses compared to simple language. Speaking very generally, they are more multidimensional, less definite, more emotive, and less succinct. But it shifts. For my part, I could be responding to something I think is interesting or important as much as something I’m frustrated with. Recent inspiration has been coming from Mindy Seu, Bogna Konior, K Allado-McDowell, Yuk Hui, and JP Raether.
You’d mentioned that your own artwork online are life forms that you need to maintain to keep alive — what is the relationship you have with past work, and how does each piece inform what you do next?
Once made, artworks require care — either in my studio (because they haven’t been sold, or exist in some form that is unsellable) or in someone else’s collection. Online/digital artworks require care in a different way (and maybe more) than physical ones, in that they have recurring fees for domains and server space, and occasionally require maintenance as technology shifts, bugs that turn up, or infrastructure that becomes obsolete.
How to conserve digital artworks is a very real issue institutionally as well. As an artist working with software, if your work is acquired by a museum you may be asked questions like:
- Do you give the museum permission to re-implement it in a new programming language, if the one you used becomes un-runnable?
- If it’s impossible to re-implement this in any contemporary programming language, do you give the museum permission to display it in video or some other form?
Museums attempt to truck with “forever,” and leaving aside what we can unpack from that philosophically as well as its pragmatic limitations, they know very well that on a long enough timeline the web browser as we know it may become a relic.
On a personal level, the more artworks I make the more “lifeforms” I look after. I think a lot about how everything we “own” requires care, whether we conceive of it this way or not. I’m reading David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything right now, and they speak to varying definitions of “ownership” within different cultures in regards to the “responsibility to care.” A quote:
“What makes the Roman Law conception of property — the basis of almost all legal systems today — unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will.”—David Graeber and David Wengrow
This may be the antecedent to “digital assets” as we know them in the blockchain world, but it’s hardly the only definition of ownership that has existed or could exist.
Where’s the line between software that’s artistic vs productive — or is there a difference?
There is, practically speaking, a difference. Some that come to mind are in terms of how it gets built, which for me is non-linearly, with design, code, and research intersecting: an interesting glitch can pivot a project and sometimes feature ideas get ruled out because I don’t like the tooling that facilitates them; how it’s assessed: an artwork is free to displease, break artfully, or frustrate a user and may even be better for it; and lastly in terms of the scale (of data and users) that the application has to support. But also framing the question as a dichotomy depends on the assumption that artwork is not, in itself, productive. To me, an artwork is a communication technology. What is the materiality of an idea in the world? I don’t think it’s nothing, just because it may be indirect or difficult to measure.
Let’s talk about tools. What’s in your stack? Can you give us a brief tour of your work station?
Well, I’ve recently discovered the Wagmi stack which I’m fairly sure didn’t exist when I was last spending most of my time writing dapps. Web3 dev tooling has gotten so much better, and React seems to have a more robust set of packages for hooks-driven functional components. I’ve also gotten addicted to GitHub Copilot. I won’t lie and pretend I actually like front end development. I’m happy when it gets easier because I have to spend less time thinking about it. I have a studio where I keep a desktop workstation (Windows, full tower) and work on sculptures, but I still do all my dev work on an 11-year old Linux laptop, which is possibly embarrassing, and a month or so ago I also set up a little floor-sitting workspace in my living room and lately that’s been my favorite place to be.
Any words of advice for other creators like yourself?
It’s difficult to give advice without regressing to cliche aphorisms. Making art is not easy and generally not lucrative. It’s stressful and vulnerable and most people don’t do it that often for good reason. Maybe try not being an artist first. If that doesn’t work, and you’re stuck being an artist anyway and you have no choice, make as much as you humanly can. Don’t worry about making sense so much, people are smart and they will figure it out. It’s okay to be insane but don’t be boring. If someone is willing to tell you that your work is bad, you should thank them.
Stay tuned for more news from Sarah as she finishes out the residency. Interested in becoming our next creative resident? Apply here.
