“Mourning Coffee”

This video work shows six fantastical characters as they try to order coffee. The characters are depicted through the use of hand-crafted masks and costumes, and are given voices by unintelligible garble. This work becomes activated when the viewer assumes the role of an unseen barista, and allows themselves to witness the disintegration of their customers while being overwhelmed by their demands. This relationship between the viewer and the characters is paralleled by the tenuous relationship between agency and physical constitution, which is a theme heavily referenced in the video. This theme is discussed in reference to the writing "Towards Post-Secular Aesthetics" by Abu Farman.

This project addressed the final project guidelines by exploring the ideas of death, aesthetics, and agency presented in Abu Farman’s writing “Towards a PostSecular Aesthetics- Provocations for Possible Media in Afterlife Art”. In this writing Farman asks if art can be made posthumously, and what does it mean to ‘die’ in a secular society. I felt like Farman extended not only what it means to die but also what it means to make art. I used these new horizons to create my own depiction of ‘death’ through disintegration and translate art as agency, and agency as a coffee order. Through my video I addressed the tensions between physical mortality and agency presented in Farman’s writing both in concept and in execution. I used stop motion video to gain more control over how I could document the characters’ disintegration. Stop motion allowed me to manipulate the unruly shaving cream between the shots. The use of stop motion was a small bid to gain control over a process that was otherwise as chaotic and unmanageable as a physical body and mortality.