Sarah Friend is a Canadian artist, researcher and software developer based in Berlin, Germany. Her work explores games, economics and the self through engagement with emerging technology.Her 2021 work Lifeforms consists of NFTs that must be given away within 90 days of being received or they die, structurally resisting the extraction and speculation common to NFT art.,
Friend's early technical career included work as staff engineer at Consensys and as smart-contract lead for Circles UBI, a blockchain-based community currency built around universal basic income and social trust networks.,She was also technical lead on Culturestake, a project using quadratic voting for arts funding decisions, and is a co-founder of the software development cooperative bitspossessed.As a researcher, she was a Creative Resident at IDEO in 2024, studying digital pets.In 2023, she was a research fellow at Summer of Protocols, examining the death of digital things such as social media platforms and MMORPGs. She has also taught at institutions including HEAD Genève, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg and Gray Area, and was a visiting professor at The Cooper Union in New York in 2022.,
Her work Clickmine is a blockchain-based clicker game in which each click mines a virtual plot of land and mints an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, using wealth's creation and destruction as its subject. Clickmine was co-commissioned by Furtherfield and NEoN Digital Arts Festival.In 2023, she contributed to MoMA's “Hello World” postcard project, creating a pixel-art stamp based on a prompt from Dmitri Cherniak.She is also the founder and a co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency and exhibition space built inside the game Minecraft, which operated in partnership with MacKenzie Art Gallery from 2021 to 2022.
In 2018, her work was included in “Perfect & Priceless: Value Systems on the Blockchain”, Kate Vass Galerie's inaugural blockchain art exhibition.Later solo exhibitions include “Off: Endgame”, curated by Rhizome, and “Terraforming” at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin.In 2022, she was longlisted for the Lumen Prize NFT Award. She has said “I've been working with media and software art since before NFTs existed”.She has written for Texte zur Kunst, Outland, Spike Art Magazine and Coindesk.
