Sarah Friend

A close up of the mirror in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, in which you can see the depicted couple reflected from behind and even a very tiny rendering of the painter himself

when people say artists need to work with emerging technology more in order to be relevant, it's not a controversial new take. it's an old take, literally an ancient take

for most of human history painting was the state of the art of image-making technology

Sarah Friend & Arkadiy Kukarkin’s "The Lives of Infamous Men" generates live video where politicians, clips, and Foucault collide 🎥

Created for the Internet Archive x Gray Area Trillionth Webpage Net Art Commissions. 🌐

More ⤵️
blog.archive.org/internet-arc...

@isthisa.com @GrayArea.Org #Wayback1T

SETI over SMTP This is a less-than-quarterly newsletter from Sarah Friend containing projects, artworks, writing, and other updates

just a reminder that I have a newsletter and if you subscribe TODAY then TOMORROW you will get my first email update of the year

buttondown.com/isthisa

Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones, 1997, quoting The Economist, "The World in 1995"

Alt text: A digital collage of screenshots from multiple web-based artworks and projects commissioned for the Internet Archive’s Trillionth Webpage. Visible elements include a poster reading “Pandora’s Aquarium,” a pink “Hello World Wide Web” page with text about the early web, a photo of a building with “1,000,000,000,000” on its roof, a book cover titled “The Lives of Infamous Men,” a webpage titled “alive internet theory,” pixelated and abstract graphics, an eye-like illustration, clusters of digital images on dark backgrounds, and overlapping browser windows, all arranged in a layered, mosaic-style layout.

This, and works by Arkadiy Kukarkin, Chia Amisola, Jesse Walton, @mai.bsky.social , Olivia M Ross, Ophira Horwitz, Raúl Feliz, Rodell Warner, and @isthisa.com turn preserved data into presence & memory into experience.

We'll feature them all in upcoming weeks.

3️⃣/3️⃣

Protective Rituals for Posthumans From sycophancy, to disempowerment, to psychosis, we need ways to reify our cognitive boundaries

oops! correct link: open.substack.com/pub/isthisan...

Two hands holding a phone in a dark blue lit room. On the screen is a drawing app called Sigil Pro. Text is imposed on the image with the title of the article, Protective Rituals for Posthumans, and the substack url, isthisanart.substack.com

New substack today 💥

I started seriously asking myself "do I actually take steps towards cognitive defense when interacting with AI, and what are they?"

substack.com/pub/isthisan...

spiraling lying in bed thinking about all the times my heart was closed when it should have been open

that it will become AI? lol

many esoteric traditions involved cognitive protection rituals that one should engage in before contact with entities that may or may not be malevolent, full of temptations, deceptive, or seducing

this is more important now than ever before

anyone who has read Accelerando will know the lobster-themed AI takeover was long coming

A photo of a woman's stomach wearing an insulin pump and cgm sensor. Both are small devices stuck to her skin with adhesive, one on each side of the belly button. She has visible tattoos and is wearing a black crop top and jeans

One big thing I did in 2025 was finally receive a huge upgrade to my cyborg parts-and I decided to write more about it to get started on one of my 2026 experiments: writing about software

Read the full post on substack: open.substack.com/pub/isthisan...

stumpy the greyhound (and a sort of unofficial mascot of the media arts scene here in Berlin) is unfortunately battling soft tissue sarcoma, however this process has revealed his latent divinity, plz pray for his complete recovery

wow Luftstößegate. This madness must be stopped

Screenshot from Columbo. He his talking to his dog, which is sitting is the drivers seat of a car. “Okay, I’m gonna put you in charge. You take care of the car. You’re a responsible dog. When I get back, if the car’s okay, I’ll give you another cookie.”

“If the car’s gone,”

“I’ll give you another cookie anyway”

“because I love you.”

Happy Columbo’s Day

A photo of a dog, maybe a Shiba Inu, sitting in the driver's seat of a car so that it looks like he is driving

telling my kids this was waymo

v tru

tbh I think I mean popular and also more literally disruptive - I think the resulting social dynamics could be chaotic/unpredictable and will cause a lot of change

here's a shower thought that might make people mad:

AI boyfriends are going to be way more disruptive than AI girlfriends, because the average man is already used to way more self-sacrifice, subservience, and dare I say ... sycophancy ... from a partner than the average woman

humans could learn a lot from how dogs jump up and down and run around in a lil circle when they're happy, just saying

celebrity wearing a pink crop top that has been edited to say "They don't build statues of internet researchers"

wondering today if the current rise of the online "critical internet researcher" (I support them) is a product of the first truly social media literate generation with useless graduate degrees now being out of the academy

consider the word "phlegm". why

wow maybe we should use this? if you ask English learners, they often complain about the utterly unhinged mapping of spelling to pronunciation. legitimately it makes the language a lot harder

also this can be read already by a fluent English speaker without any trouble and looks based?

considered going and submitting my work to Neurips, but as a non-student non-academic apparently I'm in the highest ticket price category

why bother having an arts track at all, if the only non-academic ticket is the highest-price industry one?

agree, I'm planning an intro to coding for curators and one of the units is on vibe coding. It's a little disingenuous to teach programming and pretend these tools don't exist

in this household Lain is famous

feel so vindicated about James K covering Duvet, after going around saying she sounds like bôa for years to mass confusion

ladies, is it a red flag if your bf is mean to Chat?

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