Lifeforms are NFT-based entities that need regular care in order to stay alive. How do you care for a lifeform? Within 90 days of receiving it, you must give it away. If you don’t, the lifeform will die and all ability to interact with or view it digitally will disappear.
This mechanism inverts the typical logic of the art market - which is to buy, hold, and hope the work increases in value so that it can be re-sold at an opportune moment. Instead, lifeforms ask the "owner" to become a custodian or caregiver that must consistently maintain or care for the lifeform in collaboration with others.
It is simultaneously an artist edition of NFTs and as a series of relations between the collectors of lifeforms that is intangible, ephemeral, and in a deliberately ambiguous relationship to the market.
ABOUT SARAH FRIEND
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 is represented by Galerie Nagel Draxler and has exhibited at and worked with MoMA (NYC), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Kunsthaus Zürich, HEK (Basel), Haus der Kunst (Munich), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), bitforms (NYC), Albright Knox Museum (Buffalo), Rhizome (NYC) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin) among others.
