Sarah Friend

Sarah Friend is an artist and software engineer, with special interest in blockchain and the p2p web. She exhibited work at NEoN Festival in Scotland, Moneylab in London, Gray Area Festival in San Francisco, Microwave Festival in Hong Kong, the Athens Biennale, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media In Germany. She is a proud Recurse Centre alum, and is one of the organizers of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web in Toronto.

Exhibiting

Remembering Network

A memorial to biodiversity loss, hosted on the p2p web

There are 41,415 species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, and 16,306 of them are threatened with extinction. It makes up 27% of all assessed species, 40% of amphibians, 25% of mammals, 14% of birds, and 70% of assessed plants. Early this May, the United Nations released a report on global biodiversity loss, finding that it is in unprecedented decline as a result of human activities.

Take a deep breath and hold that in your mind. As we try to preserve and rebuild our world, we must also bear witness to the losses that came from our past carelessness. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a highly secure seed bank meant to preserve genetic information for future civilizations located on a remote island in Norway. Increasingly, it serves as a memorial, but it’s not accessible to most people as anything more than an idea. Remembering network is also a kind of monument - but one that is collaborative, local-first, diverse, and resilient - to lost and threatened wildlife. It will contain crowdsourced images and genetic information of currently threatened and endangered animals.

Attendees are invited to submit images of animals, to be packaged in archives on ipfs and other peer to peer protocols. Much like the seed bank, which is built to withstand many kinds of extreme climate and weather, peer to peer protocols are similarly designed to withstand network failures and takedown attempts. We'll put our memorial in the safest place we know: all over the world, everywhere.

Sound and production assistance from Arkadiy Kukarkin

Additional information