We live in a time when human experience is treated as inventory. The self is tracked, optimized, branded, and, when no longer profitable, quietly discarded. My work responds to this shift — the transformation of identity into a product that must continually justify its worth.
By adopting the language of contracts, policies, and warranties, I reveal how modern systems recast human realities — grief, aging, uncertainty, reinvention — as defects, risks, or exceptions. Support only flows when it is efficient. Help is conditional. Care requires compliance.
This work does not attempt to idealize humanity, but to question the consequences of reducing it to terms and metrics. When stories become data, people cease to be known — only measured.
So the central question remains:
If our value is conditional, was it ever human value at all?
— Aaron Vick