The price of this work is twenty hours. You supply the rate.
The basis this experiment rests on is Original Simulations, an art project I started in 2017 that explores the significance of the original, in art and in quantum physics, through the mechanism of quantum teleportation. What is considered an original? What does it imply? Mathematical simulations of quantum-teleportation principles were used to teleport artworks onto their respective forgeries. The outcomes are changed, beautiful images, giving a new perspective on famous artworks, on quantum teleportation, and on how we assign value. They can be experienced in a virtual gallery, or since 2026 also as aluminium prints.
We now add another layer to the project, to go deeper into the theme of how we assign value. These prints are priced at twenty hours. Those twenty hours are multiplied by the buyer's median hourly rate. An online calculator, part of the project, does the arithmetic, with the German statutory minimum wage as the floor.
These twenty hours do not refer to the hours it took to make the work. That work has already happened. It was long and unpaid, and also joyful and fascinating: reaching understanding, conceiving the concept and the theme, the research, the development, the building. And it was never only mine. I had direct collaborators, the designer He Xiang and the PhD students Sam Pallister and Henry Semenjenko. Thousands of people built the technologies it runs on. The paintings I teleported were made by famous artists across history, the forgeries were made by others still, and whatever value those images carry was given to them by everyone who has ever looked at them and agreed that they mattered. No number could account for all of that, and I am not going to pretend one can.
Twenty hours is what comes next. It funds me and the gallery to make twenty more hours of work like this, under the same conditions each buyer is given, minus taxes.
So the proposition is simple. If you value this and want to own it, show that by enabling twenty more hours of it, at the value you and society already put on an hour of your own working life. Twenty hours is the same for all of us, but the number attached to it varies wildly, and so the price of groceries, a house or a piece of art is not the same in each individual context. 278 euro at minimum wage is, in a sense, the same as 1,600 euro for someone earning 80 euro an hour.
As income inequality rises, and technology pushes extreme scaling and a widening disconnect between human time and the value assigned to it, we ask what contextual pricing could be.
This model is imperfect. Caps like the minimum wage or the forty-hour week are not principles of nature, they are conventions we have set. They may be wildly insufficient, but we use them. Twenty hours, though, remains something every human can relate to. It is less than a day, or two and a half working days, whatever that means.
One hour is not worth more or less than another. Every human hour is as precious as the next. But because we do attach different monetary values to them, the prices of the things we buy with what we were paid for our time are not the same for each of us.
If you want to buy art, you should buy it because you like it, because it has value to you, because you want more like it to exist. That is why the price is twenty hours. The same print costs a minimum wage worker a few hundred euro and someone living from capital potentially many thousands. Both are giving twenty hours.
You cannot live or work in the modern world without using tools built on the accumulated work of enormous numbers of people whose hours went into them uncounted, uncredited and unpaid. Whole economic systems would collapse without the unpaid care work of family members and friends. The software ecosystem runs on a spine of open source development. AI tools are trained on all the human knowledge that can be found and digitised, and in turn they produce in seconds what used to take days. That cuts the last threads between how long something took and what it is worth.
In 2024 I built Loam, a sculpture carrying the names of more than a hundred thousand open source contributors, the invisible people every digital artwork stands on. Loam could still name them. Nobody can name the contributors to a language model.
This is why this work does not ask how many hours went into it. That question no longer has an honest answer. It asks what twenty hours of your own working life are worth, because that is one of the few units left that still means something.
The calculator does the arithmetic. It takes what you are paid after tax and the hours you actually worked, paid or unpaid. It applies the arguably arbitrary cap of the forty-hour week, calculates an imperfect median hourly income, and applies a final floor at the current German minimum wage. None of these values are true. But they are applied, they have effects, and they go into the price we suggest you pay. In the end it is your decision.
Each piece comes with itself, the beauty, the concept and the story you fell in love with or were intrigued by, along with a personalised seal of originality and a signed letter.
The edition of each print is limited to twenty.