Remembering Network was an installation, performance series and set of online interactions as an experimental memorial for extinct, endangered, and threatened species. Participants were guided through contributing to an archive of photos of animals and writing short notes to them. Over time, it incorporated a ritualistic reading of previous contributions, called the Extinction Litany.

The project takes inspiration from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a highly secure seed bank meant to preserve genetic information for future civilizations. Increasingly, the seed vault serves as a memorial, but it’s not accessible to most people as anything more than an idea. Borrowing these ideas about resilience, Remembering Network used IPFS, or the interplanetary file system, a peer-to-peer protocol for storing and distributing files. Much like the seed vault, which is built to withstand many kinds of extreme climate and weather, these protocols are similarly designed to withstand network failures and takedown attempts.

Installations of Remembering Network also featured a generative sound component of birdsong made by Arkadiy Kukarkin, made using field recordings from the Xeno-canto dataset.

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.