What happens when the web’s most voracious traffic is no longer human? FEED, a browser-based game by Sarah Friend, casts the viewer as an infinitely-hungry monster set loose on the internet itself. After typing any URL into the website’s interface, the viewer inhabits a sprite that resembles Pacman and devours the website of their choosing, dodging the CAPTCHAs (disguised as bombs) scattered in their path. Beneath its ludic surface appearance, the game comments upon multiple challenges concerning internet activity today: AI crawlers inhale websites as training data; archivists race against link rot; clickthrough rates sit at an all-time low and bounce rates an all-time high. Here, the scraper is you, part preservationist and part parasite. Is consuming the web a way of saving it, or the final act of its destruction?
Sarah Friend is an artist, researcher, and software developer based in Berlin. Her practice moves between games, software, and speculative economics. She builds playful systems that reveal how emerging technologies influence value, identity, and trust. Her work has been shown internationally at museums, galleries, and digital art institutions.