ᐧCanadian but now Berlin-based artist and software engineer Sarah Friend talks about:
Living in Berlin as an ex-pat among an ex-pat community so large that it tends to keep her and others from properly integrating into a big German city, and yet the Ven diagram of her kind of people - artists and people in tech - is in full force there; her day-job projects vs. her own art projects, which sometimes have a little overlap (she’s working on a Universal Basic Income-based cryptocurrency called Circles as a recent paid gig, for example); how she got started in software engineering (on her own, self-taught, early-20s), born out of her disillusionment with the class realities of the art world vis-à-vis her fellow graduating art students, as well as needing paid work coming into the great recession job market, and becoming an Occupy-er; her Remembering Network, an interactive digital memorial to all the species that are reaching extinction; and the existential questions, in light of that piece but other works she makes as well: when does something become art, and when does it not? And the way she sometimes she’s her art-making as having an extra limb: it would be a phantom limb if it were somehow taken away.