The ideas held in my 'making coffee' and shower actions were discussed with a philosopher / musician / artist / poet called Gary (Who, I am jealous to admit, has worked with Byörk and The Prodigy).

Below are some relevant quotes from our emailed conversations.
Special thanks to Gary for permission to reprint his words.

G: 'Epic questions [such as "What is Art?"] are clearly intractable because we all expect and indeed know them to be intractable. What we seek from asking these questions isn't knowledge in the sober and concrete "Today is Wednesday" or "the walls in my room are terracotta" way, but an intoxicated state in which we become bewitched by our misapplication of words. This misapplication leads us to feel that the words refer, or are party to, some essential or ideal entity to which we are drawn. In effect we have traversed the line between Logic and Epistemology (knowing what knowledge is) and poetry and inspiration.

It is a prime exemplar of ideas acting as opiates.

This transcendental effect is of key importance to us as artists, it is in a large part, I think what motivates us to work. I also think it's a large part of what motivates general interest in art, the human capacity to appreciate the abstract - people buy books, records and paintings because they like the "idea" of a piece, it compliments something within their own conceptions about their identity, situation or world view.'