Brendon John Warner - "Coffee Cup Lady & Raincoat Man"

Watching these images from the Australian artist Brendon John Warner’s video for “Coffee Cup Lady & Raincoat Man” provide an intrigued, but somewhat mournful, observer of modern life. Musically the brash and bold synth lines that punctuate the folding and unfolding drones of Warner’s synthesizers give these images a sense of finality. As if we truly are encroaching into the end of late-stage capitalism - where all experiences are mediated by external markets.

Of the video and composition Warner states, “Human connection is increasingly experienced via abstraction. The means through which one interacts with another takes ever changing forms rendering the traditional means foreign. This theme is one touched upon in Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Klara and the Sun’, a book which serves as a well-spring of ideas around modernity and humanity. Coffee Cup Lady & Raincoat Man takes its name from two peripheral characters in this book as they display very human emotions observed by the protagonist of artificial intelligence, Klara. The complexity and oddity of the experience digested by Klara presents as a powerful analogy for the strangeness reconnecting with others has conjured up for many, either as we emerge from recent years of social separation, or due simply to the distance exerted between us by the faux connection of screens and avatars. Alex Botton elaborates on this theme beautifully in his visual accompaniment to the song, framing the odd behaviours among and between random individuals in public spaces with the concept of sonder, for it drawing great inspiration from Ryan Booth’s Street Photography in motion. The video was shot throughout 2022 across Seattle & Portugal.”