Dev Makker
Three Sides of a Coin
Cashier: “And what is the declared value of items within this package?”
Dev: “One hundred dollars—I think.”
That's what I said as I shipped my most valued possessions from San Francisco while moving back to New York City. I hesitated: How do you assign a dollar amount to things you couldn’t bear to lose? With a background in economics and accounting, I found myself caught in a familiar paradox: the conflict between depreciation, utility, and sentiment.
Three Sides of a Coin investigates the instability of value through a film, a book on the history of the pawn trading industry, and a vinyl record of sounds generated from data. In these items, I explore the tensions between sentiment and market logic, sacrifice and appraisal, and systems of value and their translation into forms beyond understanding.
