Writing
Memento Immorti (MFA Thesis)
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I am fortunate to have experienced only two deaths in my life. When I was fifteen, my last words to my grandmother were spoken on a payphone at the campground where I spent every summer with her and my mother. She told me she would make the two-hour journey from her home in Massachusetts to see me that weekend. Two days later she died from a brain hemorrhage.
My cousin Danny ended his life early. One day while arguing with a close friend about a jammed shotgun, the gun accidentally discharged into his friend’s face. It was never clear who pulled the trigger, but Danny spent the next year in jail for it. Two days after being released from jail, Danny overdosed in the same room where his friend died. He was twenty-seven.
Death is a tragedy. I believe that all persons should have the ability and the right to decide how long they live. My terror in the face of impending death is expressed in the series of videos comprising my thesis exhibition.
As technology expands we incorporate it into our work, our lifestyles, our bodies, even our conception of who we are. With respect to this last point, I believe that soon our conception of personhood will be vastly more inclusive. To understand why this will be the case, it is important to highlight the distinction between what it means to be a person and what it means to be human. “Humanness” is generally regarded as a set of biological traits that defines us as a species. Even though the genomes of humans and chimpanzees are tremendously similar, for instance, there are enough subtle and important differences between the two to classify them as separate species.