Portal constellation was an experiment in alternative internet navigation practices and social coordination. Via a simple online form, people could submit their sites to a pool and embed a small piece of code on their own websites to display the "portal." The placement of the portal on the participants site was always random, as was the participant's site it would link out to - both changed on every refresh. The unpredictability (both visually but especially of the link location) interrupted the web's navigation by SEO crawler bots, automated processes that specifically weight inbound and outbound links to construct search rankings.

The result was something like a functional webring: a small group of people with websites linking to one another outside of big search. Webrings were a popular way pre-social-media internet navigation framework allowing visitors to travel within the ring and explore the sites together. Webrings made the internet accessible without search engines flattening them all into a browseable list, or social media gamifying them into a public clout score, and without a clean constrained interface giving them all the sameness of "products".

The project was created as part of an online residency with Arebyte On Screen, in consultation with Brenna Murphy, Zaiba Jabbar, Rachel Falconer, and Rebecca Edwards.

Sarah Friend is an artist and software developer from Canada and currently based in Berlin, Germany. In 2023, she was a research fellow at Summer of Protocols, led by Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation, and in 2022, she was a professor of blockchain art at the Cooper Union. She 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.