SHIFT is a process-oriented artwork that examines the economics of labor, bridging the gap between the real world and the increasingly commodified virtual world. The web3-enabled SHIFT platform offers the rental of digital work clothes as wearables in virtual worlds. Using blockchain technology and smart contracts, SHIFT autonomously manages the rental process and issues a 'proof of work' certificate in the form of NFTs, which includes information such as the blockchain address, timestamp, location, and fee amount paid in the project’s cryptocurrency. 

Exploring the differences and interactions between the value of labor as a product and the value of labor as a workforce, SHIFT examines artistic production, understood both as labor activity and as the creation of consumer goods distributed in an art market based on a complex web of interactions between artists, cultural institutions, dealers, and collectors.  

At the same time, SHIFT investigates the recent emergence of cryptocurrencies based on blockchain technologies, which are having a significant impact not only on the art trade but also on the economy of both real and digital goods. While the term ‘shift’ refers precisely to the concept of the work shift, it also describes the shift in labor values from the real to the virtual world that is increasingly emerging with the rise of teleworking and virtual spaces now referred to as metaverse, accompanied also by financial speculation of virtual goods. The ‘proof of work’ issued by the artist to hirers of digital work clothes is also a reference to a type of consensus mechanism that cryptocurrencies use to verify new transactions.  

Honauer thus examines the new norms of work carried out by both machines and humans, the socio-economic values derived from it, and the new practices of monetization in the art world, and proposes a reflective and experiential perspective on the link between the physical and the digital, and how we can navigate and understand it.