Sarah Friend (born in Canada, lives and works in Berlin) is an artist, researcher, and software developer. She has exhibited and collaborated with institutions including 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). Her work deals with games, economics, and the self through an examination of new technologies.

Spectrophilia, meaning the sexual attraction to spirits, is used here with a double entendre – not only referencing specters, but also the radio frequency spectrum. This collection of sculptural and printed works from Sarah Friend use various industrial and technical materials to evoke the ghostly. Twisted cables, a baroque intensification of what reddit called “CablePorn”, become like veins or entrails. Broken black mirrors speak to an afterlife of devices, fractured gazing pools, and gravelike stillness. And the series of printed mirrors, Dream House, feature images generated by one of Friend’s custom made machine learning models, where she has removed her own avatar. What remains is only the empty beige house as imagined by statistics – strangely lacking specificity or personality, but of course, haunted.