NFT Perspective — Interview with Sarah Friend
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Tell us a bit about yourself and your art. What themes and messages do you focus on?
I’m an artist and software developer, and for me those are continuous, connected practices — not necessarily separate from each other. My work is idea-driven, and depending on the context, takes the form of videos, software, games, environments, and events. Sometimes I like to say that I make site-specific work for platforms and protocols.
Besides my work as an artist, I was the smart contract lead on a project called Circles UBI, and am currently working with an art gallery called Furtherfield as the tech lead on Culturestake, a platform for nuanced cultural decision-making.
What are the most meaningful differences between physical art and digital art? Are there any advantages that digital art has over physical art?
Many differences and many similarities. The most meaningful difference in my opinion is also an obvious one: the scalability and sharability of digital content, which is both a tremendous advantage and curse. As we well know, a digital file can be copied endlessly without degradation. Every time you request a website from a server, a new, disposable copy of it is made. It’s absolutely incredible when considered from a historical perspective: many people simultaneously in any part of the world can be experiencing the same artwork, even interacting with each other via an artwork.
The reason I say this is also a curse is that it’s been an ongoing struggle since the birth of digital art for digital artists to find ways to sustain themselves financially. Moreover, the scalability of digital content has challenged the payment pathways of formerly non-digital art forms. Most tactics for monetizing artwork historically have had to do with scarcity. Physical artworks come with it built-in. Ticket sales, editioned prints, etc are all forms of scarcity. NFTs — and the controversies that have surrounded them — embody these tensions between scalability and scarcity.
What got you into NFTs, if you’re in the NFT space?
Yes I’d say I’m in the NFT space — I launched an NFT project a few weeks ago actually, though it’s a bit unconventional. It’s called Off, and it’s an edition of 255 NFTs where each NFT has two components, a public image and a secret image.
Within each secret image is hidden two things: an encrypted sentence and a shard of the private key that was used to encrypt it. Across the full edition of 255 images, an entire essay and the entire private key are hidden. A majority of the private key shards (2/3) are required to decrypt any of the text, therefore the essay can only be read if a majority of collectors collaborate to share their images. I’ve been calling it a massively multiplayer online prisoner’s dilemma. Every purchaser must choose: will they collaborate or defect?
But if anything got me into NFTs, it’s blockchains in general. I’ve been working in the blockchain industry since before NFTs existed, or at least since before NFTs existed in the format they do now (ERC 721). I started working with Ethereum in 2016, back when it was only 1 year old and before even fungible tokens were widely used or standardized. And though I’ve been working in the blockchain industry for awhile now, I’ve actually been an artist for far longer, which is to say, of course I am interested in the intersections.
What value do you think privacy could bring to the digital art space? Are there any unique use cases or ideas that could be unlocked by incorporating new privacy-preserving technology into digital art?
Absolutely, and we’ve already seen some of them. For example, Dark Forest, the game on xdai network that’s inspired by eponymous book and concept from Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. In the subset of digital art that uses public protocols like blockchains, there are kinds of game mechanics and interactions that can be quite difficult to implement when the storage layer is publicly queryable, and easier tools for preserving privacy could definitely be helpful.
One of the big differences between selling artworks as NFTs and selling artworks through a gallery is that the price and content of the collector’s collection are both visible to everyone. Artists and collectors can feel a lot of price pressure and be uncomfortable with this visibility. Replicating the privacy of a gallery-sale with an NFT might be more comfortable and have some benefits, though there’s also a lot to be said for introducing transparency into this aspect of the art world.
Would you be interested in private NFTs that allow you to keep certain information and certain content private?
Yes, depending on what these tools enabled, I would have used them with Off!
Because the game doesn’t really work if the secret images get leaked, I felt like I had to build my own marketplace for selling these NFTs and system for distributing the secret images. As you can imagine, this was a lot of additional work.
Where would you like the digital art / NFT space to head over the next several years?
I’d like to see more experimentation around funding strategies for artists. I’d like to see NFT platforms that afford artists more agency. A lot of them say they do, but where are the tumblr-esque personalizable storefronts? Branding and aesthetics are so important to artists, why can’t I pick my font, or experiment more with my page layout? Where are the customizeable ownership models? Did you know most NFT marketplaces limit the artist resale right, often to around 10%? Who are these platforms to tell artists what resale right they can choose? Etc. It would be very sad if two or three big NFT marketplaces became the next Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
Everywhere. Anywhere. The inspiration is the easy part. The hard part is follow through.
What’s your motto or favorite quote?
“In reality the area of permitted protest of the System is much greater than the System is willing to admit.” It’s from an essay called Towards a Third Cinema, by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino — and is an indictment of the ways that artworks (or actions) that propose to change a system can be absorbed, and even ultimately serve the perpetuation of that system. I first read it more than 10 years ago, and still think about it all the time.
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Learn more about Sarah’s work on her website and social media
