All Things Being Equal is a seamlessly looped video that forms part of a larger body of work exploring the notion of suspended trauma; the idea that dramatic/traumatic incidents from the past are continually repeated and replayed, no longer just as personal memories but also vicariously through the ever expanding shared experience of mass media depiction. In both, the document is detached from its original time and place. It perpetually hangs in the conscience, seemingly without conclusion. All Things Being Equal explores a more intimate event, depicting the repetitive movements of a figure in confinement, beleaguered by water. The work was made from a single shot – filming through one event (the water) to get to another (the moving head), but finding no obvious union. In both events, movement is against perceived logic, and away from any discernable conclusion. Here the water moves almost as independent agency and the figure is neither suffocating nor surviving. Visually, All Things Being Equal is stripped bare, borrowing from the sparse aesthetic of Samuel Beckett, where naming and style detract from the essential, and negate the potential to manipulate the flow of narrative time. For this purpose, context is without reference, gender unknown and identity removed as the head is shaved. For Beckett both camera and screen embodied ways to perceive and be perceived and his later use of the ‘intrusive camera’ suggested there is no ‘flight from perceivedness’ and, by extension, the paradox of being and not being.