This piece combines two previous video works that were independently exhibited, in order to return the viewer to a conscious awareness of their occupation – spatially and temporally – of the site of engagement, and to raise questions about the role of the viewer in relation to the act of viewing.

The large text projected onto the wall invites the viewer to reconsider their interaction, offering the option to author their own response by releasing them from the chains of convention, from the prescriptive mode of viewing, and allowing them instead to form an interaction based on the individual’s own desires. The viewer is in control of the interaction.

The small screen situated beneath displays a looping sentence, shown word-by-word, that contrasts the above notion of choice by returning the viewer to a function that is both inescapable, and non-negotiable. Breathing.

‘As I Breathe, You Breathe With Me’.

This juxtaposition of the optional with the non-optional, the social with the biological, alludes to one’s inability to often distinguish between things that we must do, and things that we do simply by virtue of never challenging or critiquing them. These mythologies, first mused upon by the semiotician and essayist, Roland Barthes, and later defined in the cultural hegemonic theories of Pierre Bourdieu, are often accepted on the basis of certain values and opinions enshrined in traditions by the predominant social classes of a people.

Here, the work actively challenges the viewer to reflect and review their own understanding of how to engage with such media, in an attempt to free them from the constrains bound up in the ‘act of viewing’, to refute the passivity of this exchange, and to invite the viewer to consider themselves an active agent through their willingness to devote their time to the consumption of this encounter.