'TANGENT', 2013
'TANGENT' is an experimental video, drawing and sound installation that is the result of a sustained investigation into our relationship with our environment that deepened in complexity when the first Gulf War broadcast a ‘bomb by blast’ spectacle into our living rooms. During this period, the consumption of imagery changed irrevocably: as viewers we became indispensable participants in a televisual industry that entertains as it informs. This participatory role has escalated in recent times. The immediate uploading of images onto the internet has transformed reportage and become a powerful mode of witness that may otherwise remain suppressed. Although the validity of the received image as an objective document is always in question, these images have the capacity to connect us to a wider humanity, to humanise the other; they can be an agency for good. Yet more often they are used to misinform; to dehumanise and divide. Tangent bears witness to this predicament.
The conceptual development of 'TANGENT' was underpinned by, Michel Serres, 2003, ‘The Natural Contract’, in which he poses the necessity of a pact between Earth and its inhabitants. To quote the publishers, University Michigan Press, 'World history is often referred to as the story of human conflict. Those struggles that are seen as our history must now include the uncontrolled violence that humanity perpetrates upon the earth, and the uncontrollable menace to human life posed by the earth in reaction to this violence. Just as a social contract once brought order to human relations, Serres believes that we must now sign a "natural contract" with the earth to bring balance and reciprocity to our relations with the planet that gives us life. Our survival depends on the extent to which humans join together and act globally, on an earth now conceived as an entity'.
