Humanity has a pretty messed up relationship with monetary value. There’s the $200 billion USD cryptocurrency market , where huge sums of capital seemingly with nothing more productive to do go to tumble and multiply, while public institutions and infrastructure slowly crumble form under-investment. How do we value the Earth as climate change continues to threaten life across the globe? How do we value human life as migrants and refugees are detained, families are torn apart, and people die while in the custody of border authorities ?

Just how did we get into this twisted scenario, where the US stock market is closing in on a history-making bull run, while millions of people can’t afford healthcare? But more importantly, how do we get out of this spot?

A new work by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei (currently based in Berlin) and New York-based Irish artist Kevin Abosch called PRICELESS seeks to spark a mentality-changing conversation around the value of human life, and specifically the treatment of refugees by nations, using the Ethereum blockchain.

“For me, [blockchain] is not about the technology, but an opportunity to set up a new system that could dismantle the old system, or at least offer a new possibility for communication,” Weiwei told me in an interview conducted over email. “It’s not about a potential for creating art, but, rather, to question the existing system and the potential to create a new system outside of the established one.”

PRICELESS is primarily made up of two standard ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, called PRICELESS (PRCLS is its ticker). One of these tokens is forever unavailable to anyone, but the other is meant for distribution and is divisible up to 18 decimal places, meaning it can be given away one quintillionth at a time. A nominal amount of the distributable token was “burned” (put into digital wallets with the keys thrown away), and these wallet addresses were printed on paper and sold to art buyers in a series of 12 physical works. Each wallet address, a random-looking string of numbers and letters, is a proxy for a shared moment between Abosch and Weiwei (an example: “Walking In A Carefree Manner Down Schönhauser Allee”). In sum, technically worthless pieces of paper, imbued with a valueless token, and representing something even more ephemeral and, yes, priceless. The question: How do you value this?

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“From the moment we’re born, people try to ascribe value to us—'Oh, that boy is so full of potential, or oh, that girl is worthless'—it’s something society does to us and it’s something we do to ourselves,” Abosch said. “Our project is just another thing to engage people in the hope that they will spend a little bit more time reflecting on the perversity of how most of us ascribe value to things.”