007: three in three
Hi friends,
This is a hopefully brief email with some openings and release dates. Most importantly (and maybe you should be concerned about my well-being) I’m doing three drops in three weeks. Before any of that though, a photo of what my dog does while I’m at the studio
Firstly, Good Death, the new interactions around Lifeforms, will now be launching on Sept 4. I apologize for the delays since I first announced it (more on this towards the end). Some key information: There’s a rumour going around that I’m going to “kill the lifeforms”. I stress that all of these interactions are going to be voluntary (on the part of you, the lifeform caregiver). There will be something for you to participate in immediately if you either 1) currently have a living lifeform that is older than one year or 2) you interacted with lifeforms in any capacity before Mar 6 of this year. Creating lifeforms is still possible and will be until Sept 4. I had previously said I would leave it open until a week after these changes launch, but I changed my mind. Sorry. It will now close on the same day they open. Neither mint will cost anything outside of the transaction fee, but unfortunately both will have somewhat high transaction fees (I think $30-40). This is because they’re both fully onchain and (ultimately) on mainnet.
Secondly, Prompt Baby, a project connected to my explorations of nsfw AI images, is launching on Modularium on Aug 28. That’s in 6ish days! Prompt Baby is an edition of 69 prompt credits, where the collector can submit a prompt to the model I fine-tuned on images of myself. Each prompt will be prepended by “A photo of Sarah Friend” but otherwise the field is open. I will review the prompts and run them personally, and I may reject them or request modifications. Once accepted, the NFT will updated with the prompted image. I see this as an opportunity for the artist and collector to collaborate, explore consent and identity, and model an alternative to the harmful proliferation of deepfakes. Each work from this drop will cost 20 TIA. This series will also be accompanied by Screenshot Folder, an open edition of screenshots from an upcoming video work that are bundled as a “collector pack” of 5 images.
The third upcoming drop is with Ensemble on Sept 12. Ensemble is a platform specializing in process materials from artists. With them, I’m releasing three original sketches from 2017 of interfaces for Clickmine, which were submitted with my original commission application to Furtherfield and NEoN Festival, which feels like a million years ago (Actually, one of these images is still on this page about the project). They will be released for 0.5 ETH each. If you’re interested in these, reply here and I can put you in touch with Mackenzie Davenport (who runs Emsemble) directly.
For those in New York, I’m part of two physical exhibitions opening in the Fall too. One is Incidental Container, a conceptual project and group show conceived and organized by Jason Isolini. Earlier this year, each work in the show was installed in a CubeSmart self-storage facility using their “first month” promotional deal. Now, at Public Works Administration opening on Sept 7, browser-based documentation of that exhibition as well as tote bags (personal storage devices) printed with the code of the documentation will be exhibited. My included piece was Bargaining Table, a work I made for my exhibition Endgame (also at PWA!!) which has been loitering in the liminal space of New York storage units ever since.
The second NYC exhibition is called Human-alike, taking place at NARS Foundation curated by Linda Rocco from Oct 11 to Nov 13. For this I’ll be including a new sculptural work using phones and engraved mirrors in the spirit of my 2022 work Threshold meets … influencer hell.
… and as promised, to return to the subject of delays from my ongoing lifeforms memorial project: There are a few reasons that this project are delayed that are personal and I won’t get into here, but there is one that’s useful to share, which is that I’m beginning to feel like it’s unsustainable for me to keep single-handedly developing web apps while keeping up the other aspects of my professional life. There are good aspects of doing it all by myself - but the bad aspects are exhaustion and work release dates getting postponed and postponed. I’d like to do something about that. I think the thing that takes the most disproportionate amount of time (compared to my skill at it) is frontend development. Most of my projects are React (older ones CRA and more recently Vite). If you happen to be a frontend developer who would be interested in working together, let me know. I can’t say I’m usually working with large budgets, but it would still be nice to get a sense of those who might be interested, especially if something comes up where I have more flexibility to seek help. In particular I am planning something ambitious to start hopefully next year ✶ ⋆.✧̣̇˚.