008: a long exhale
Hello!
Thanks to my long time slow-form social media readers, and welcome to those of you who are new. I meant to write this in January, but I was so busy I didn’t do much besides work, eat and sleep (and not enough of the last two). Concordantly, this email has a lot of updates. But first, a quick intro to Gimpel and Dompfaff, encountered on a hike outside Munich.
I’m writing to you from a plane on the way to LA, where I’ll be screening my 2022 film about Berlin’s internet infrastructure, As Above So Below, at OXY ARTS. It’s part of the closing of the exhibition Invisibility: Powers and Perils, curated by Yael Lipschutz, and including a bunch of other incredible artists, and historical and scientific artifacts related to visibility - such as invisibility amulets, first edition science fiction books, telescope imagery, and more. Yael will lead a curator’s tour of the exhibition at 4pm, we’ll have dinner and some drinks (please rsvp for this part), and the screening will be at 7pm. Full event info here
I’ll also be performing Artist’s Model on Feb 18 at El Cid, hosted by Catalyst. The event is free, but it does take place outside. I’m told space heaters will be lit, but please remember a jacket! Hope to see you at one or both of these :)
But of course, you may now be wondering - what is Artist’s Model? And what the hell was I so busy with in January? Artist’s Model is both a new direction for me - a performance - and a continuation of previous work. I’ve been doing projects dealing with machine learning and my own image for awhile, most recently with Prompt Baby.
(Speaking of which, some works from Prompt Baby are currently included in the online exhibition Body Anxiety in the Age of AI, curated by Anika Meier, Leah Schrager, and Margaret Murphy on the HEK’s online platform. They were also recently included in the latest issue of Fraulein magazine - which I haven’t seen in person. And also a quick note for my Prompt Baby collectors still waiting for their image updates - I have Not forgotten about you, and I really appreciate your patience)
For Artist’s Model, I’m in character as the model. It has gained the ability to speak and knows it is an artwork, but not what that means. In order to better understand, it goes to the Museum. During the performance, the audience goes on a Museum tour led by the model, using an app to vote on not only what artworks they visit, but also provide input on how the model feels and responds to them. Part live video game, part tiktok NPC, I see this also as exploring the performer/audience dynamics and how the power relationships that can arise between them are similar to those between prompter and model. I performed it for the first time Feb 1 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and am excited to bring it to LA. I’m also hoping to tour this work further - it has multiple content branches and four possible endings - so it needs to be performed many times in order for all versions to be seen by somebody. If you’d like to host it somewhere, please reach out!
The other thing I was working on is Key Exchange, this is a physical project that I made for an exhibition called Prototype with the Mercedes-Benz art collection, also in Munich. It is a prototype combining a modern Mercedes-Benz smart key with a functional Tresor Safe 3. The project is both a fantasy brand collab, and a playful subversion of both security apparatuses: to gain access in an unexpected way or reveal something's internal workings is one of the fundamental acts of hacker culture. It was also accompanied by a making-of video, which I need to cut down a bit social media, but hope to share in the next days. If you know any deep Sarah Friend lore, you will know that before my software era, I worked in fab labs and manufacturing. It was unexpectedly fun to revive some of these skills for this project
And a final few shorter things, if you missed it on other platforms, I can share here that my research from Summer of Protocols was finally published. You can read the essay online, or check out this additional speculative fiction artifact I made Founding Memorabilia from the Order of Protocological Death, which includes two documents which might be my secret favourite thing I did during the Summer: a Taxonomy of Protocol Deaths and notes on How to Kill (a protocol). I also spoke with the Blockchain Socialist about this work at Devcon, with an unexpectedly high-end interview set up. So if you’re more of a podcast listener, you can check out us chatting about that research in that format too.
If you missed World Computer Sculpture Garden, it’s an exhibition from last Fall curated and conceived by 0xfff. It includes a number of artists who’ve taken smart contracts seriously as a medium - including Rhea Myers, one of the first to ever do it. For this exhibition, I made a small project interacting with Rhea’s iconic Is Art, a smart contract based artwork that allows anyone to toggle whether or not it’s art. My contribution is called Yesbot, and I’ll let the contract’s ascii header explain what it does. There is a long tradition of artists making works that interact with or build off the works of fellow artists, and I think facilitating these kinds of interactions may be something uniquely afforded by smart contract works. Each project - as a side effect of existing - has a publicly callable api. More traditionally architected online art projects rarely have this, and in cases where they did, are unlikely to still have them online almost 10 years later (that’s how long ago Rhea made Is Art, believe it or not)
And finally, the memoryforms mint - a participatory memorial for the lifeforms - is still open and free (besides gas fees). It’s open to anyone who cared for a Lifeform before March 6, 2024. There haven’t been that many mints, but the ones that have been made are both funny and touching. Some of the memoryforms were recently included as full page spreads in Espace magazine, alongside a text by Vincent Charlebois - and Lifeforms was on the cover!
Phew ok. Thanks for sticking with it this long. It’s been fiveish months since I last wrote to you. I know these have been difficult times in many places and along a variety of axes. I think of what I do, as an artist, as a way of being a professional entertainer. Sure, an intellectual and sometimes kind of abstract form of entertainment, but still fundamentally, entertainment. And so I hope some of this has been entertaining, in the particular way that artworks can be, sometimes urgent in their uselessness. I have no idea what will come in the months ahead before I next write to you, but I hope in the meantime you are safe, cared for, and finding ways to move forward with grace and bravery
xox