Inside Transformation Digital Art 2026: Sarah Friend

Sarah Friend is an artist, researcher, and software developer from Canada, currently based in Berlin. Her practice critically engages with digital infrastructures – platforms, protocols, and the social, economic, and ethical systems that shape them. She is represented by Galerie Nagel Draxler and has exhibited and collaborated with institutions including MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Kunsthaus Zürich, HEK Basel, Haus der Kunst Munich, ArtScience Museum Singapore, Rhizome, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, among others.

Friend is also the founder and co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency and exhibition space operating inside Minecraft, developed in partnership with the MacKenzie Art Gallery (2021–22). As a researcher, she was a Creative Resident at IDEO in 2024 and a core researcher at Summer of Protocols in 2023, where her work focused on the death and afterlives of digital systems. Her writing has appeared in Texte zur Kunst, Spike Art Magazine, Outland, and Coindesk.

Alongside her artistic and research practice, Friend has taught internationally and worked in technical leadership roles across cultural and blockchain-based initiatives, advising organisations on digital policy, infrastructure, and governance.

During Transformation Digital Art 2026, Friend will deliver a keynote where she will challenge the widespread assumption that digital systems should – and can – last forever. Moving between ancient myths of immortality and contemporary preservation efforts such as the GitHub Arctic Code Vault, she proposes an alternative lens: what if accepting the finite life of digital worlds could lead to more thoughtful, ethical, and sustainable approaches to archiving and care? Ahead of her keynote, we spoke with Friend about digital mortality, infrastructure as culture, and what it means to care for artworks built on unstable systems.

What's sparking your curiosity in media art right now, and what journey might your talk take us on?

 Well, lately I've been thinking about new economic surfaces created by AI and the various protocols it will necessitate. But this isn't unconnected to the subject of my talk, because thinking about artificial "life" is in some ways the obvious counterpoint to the metaphorical "death" that this research began with.

If there were one core question the talk starts from, I would say it is: when we say a digital thing, place, or system dies, what exactly do we mean? "If we can say that it dies, does it mean that it lived?" is one of many logically following questions. I would add: can we find new ways to think about the death of digital things by looking at death in other contexts? What does it mean to have a good death? And maybe also: is death good for anything? 

Why are trust-based infrastructures essential right now, particularly in a field shaped by technological precarity and platform dependency?

The last decade offered a seductive alternative to trust: systems that promised to work without it. Blockchains, smart contracts, and similar decentralised protocols claimed to be "trustless", but in fact replaced trust in people and institutions with trust in cryptographic verification. And while some things can indeed be verified cryptographically, the claims made about these systems are often misleading. They still run on servers operated by people who can be arrested. The code is still written by developers who have opinions and biases. The platforms still depend on economic models that can collapse. 

For many digital artists, institutions, and communities, the constraints these systems were designed for simply don't apply – and it's all too easy to decentralise technology without decentralising power. The truth is that every infrastructure has models for and assumptions about trust. I would recommend auditing them explicitly and pragmatically.

From your perspective, what role does LI-MA play in the long-term preservation of digital art in the Netherlands and internationally – and why do you think this kind of infrastructure matters at this moment?

Most digital artworks will outlive the platforms they were made on and the institutions that first showed them. Conferences like this one, and LI-MA's work in general, show a willingness to think through what that means: not just storage, but active care, documentation, storytelling, and open philosophical discussion of archival practices. This kind of infrastructure is hard to value because its success can be invisible, but it's more valuable than ever before.

Without giving too much away, what's one question or idea you hope continues to resonate after your talk?

I want people to sit with the possibility that forgetting might be necessary – even a form of care. Some medieval scholars who built memory palaces also developed techniques for deliberate forgetting, for clearing space when the old frameworks no longer served. In contemporary cognitive science and AI, there are indications that forgetting (memory pruning) may improve search performance. I want to open a conversation about what forgetting, decay, and death acceptance might look like in the context of data -- and maybe leave the door open for a deeper reflection on what this means about the technological project and "permanence" in general.

Header: Midjourney. Prompt engineering by Josh Davis «abstract composition where solid geometric forms are gradually being enveloped and erased by an expanding black void, exploded technical diagram» Source