Four hearts stand in glass containers on a shelf. As symbols of life, they are connected to digital price tags that display a changing “Life Value”. The title 82.3 refers to the average life expectancy in Germany, a number that plays a central role in life insurance calculations.
Life insurance companies use life expectancy and the Sterbetafel (mortality table) to estimate how long a person will live and what their future is financially worth. These tools turn uncertain lifetime into a predictable value, even though no individual life can ever follow such a calculation. The system treats time as something stable and measurable, even though it is not.
The work highlights how unlogical and absurd this logic is: a life cannot be priced, and time cannot be capitalized in a meaningful way. The crashes of the four values occur with minimal time offsets, showing that even the collapse of such systems is not perfectly synchronized. This slight desynchronization reinforces the fragility of a logic that tries to control the future through numbers.
