FEED

Sarah Friend is an artist, researcher, and software developer from Canada and currently based in Berlin, Germany. Her work explores games, economics, and the self via engagement with emerging technology. As an artist, she has exhibited at and worked with MoMA (NYC), Centre Pompidou (Metz), SculptureCenter (NYC), Kunsthaus Zürich, HEK (Basel), Haus der Kunst (Munich), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), Someset House (London), Rhizome (NYC) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin) among others. As a researcher, she was a Creative Resident at IDEO in 2024 thinking about digital pets. In 2023, she was a Core Researcher at the Protocol Institute, led by Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation, looking at the death of digital things: social media platforms, MMORPGs, and protocols. She has written for Texte zur Kunst, Outland, Spike Art Magazine, and Coindesk, among others. She has taught at the graduate and undergraduate level, as well as various para-academic spaces, including HEAD Genevé (Switzerland), Rupert (Lithuania), La Plateforme (France), the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg (Germany), and Gray Area (San Francisco, USA). In 2022, she was a visiting professor at The Cooper Union in New York. She is also the founder and a co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency and exhibition space inside the game Minecraft, which operated in partnership with MacKenzie Art Gallery from 2021-22. She is also an alumna of the Berlin Program for Artists. In a technical capacity, she has held roles in both engineering and technical project management, and has taken multiple projects from greenfield, through core protocol design, to production. She was early staff at Consensys, the smart contract lead at Circles UBI (a community currency), tech lead on Culturestake (quadratic voting for arts funding), and is an alumna of Recurse Center. She has also worked advising numerous cultural organizations about their technical policy and strategy.