I am a 1st Year Drama PHD student at Queen Mary, University of London and a performance artist researching the political efficacy of awkwardness in contemporary participatory performance. I completed the MA Theatre and Performance at QMUL in August 2010. I have worked as a solo performance artist and collaboratively since graduating from the BA Contemporary Arts , Nottingham Trent University, in 2003. My performance practice experiments with site specificity, incapability, and awkward audience participation. I recently gave a paper on the efficacy of insincerity in the relational projects of Nottingham based art collective 'Reactor' at Chelsea Theatre's 'Sacred' symposium.

I will discuss the political efficacy of the awkward moments of audience participation facilitated by queer performance artist David Hoyle in his recent show 'David Hoyle’s Factory: A Sweatshop for the Soul', which occurred as part of Chelsea Theatre’s ‘Sacred' season in November 2010. I frame Hoyle as a socially engaged artist who manages to queer Claire Bishop's reductive categorization of collaborative and participatory art into 'feel good', 'feel bad', 'do good', and 'do bad', and her excitable framing of 'antagonism' as a preferred tone for relational projects. This queering is entangled with a tone of awkwardness that undermines the sincerity of Hoyle's declared pursuits of convivial collectivism. In Hoyle's performance awkwardness is often symptomatic of an ambiguity around whether he is politically resisting or socially failing and whether his audiences are capable of coping with the responsibilities forced upon them. I propose that the potential (intentional) misrecognition inherent in Hoyle's embracing of the rhetoric of art's 'Social Turn' relies on an over-identification with demands for social accountability. I will use Slavoj Zizek to discuss the political efficacy of this 'over-identification', as well as framing the tone of awkwardness as inherently resistance to neoliberalism's reliance on a tone of confidence.

I am a lecturer in performance at the University of Salford, specialising in contemporary performance. Recent papers/ performances include
I Just want To Look I Don’t Want to Touch (2010) Blue Coats Gallery, Liverpool.
Dirty Looks (2009) Green Room 
Just Add Butter (2009) International Shortness conference, Tate Modern.
Reclaiming the Remote : Some/Body (2007) Paper @ (re)Actor 2. The Second International Conference on Digital Live Art, University of Leeds.
Some/Body (2007) New performance Paradigms: New languages. An International Symposium.University of Salford.
Some/Body (2006) Performances @ Crew Arts Centre, The Green Room, 
Practice as Research presentation (2006) North West PARIP Group, 

In Relational Aesthetics (1998), Bourriaud suggests it is an ‘audience's’ response to an artist’s ‘provocation’ that activates or brings ‘relational ’ art into being. Gob Squad's Super Night Shot is a good example of this practice. 

The piece involves four performers taking to the streets of a particular city and engaging with members of the public. Everything that the performers encounter is recorded on video and played back to a live paying theatre audience. However members of the public caught on camera have not given their consent to be apart of Gob Squad's piece. How would they feel if they found out? Does it really matter? 

Principle 2 of the ESRC Frame Work of Research Ethics, states 

“Research subjects must be informed about the purpose, methods and intended possible uses of the research, what their participation in the research entails and what risks, if any are involved.”

Whilst relational art is not research, it does involve ‘subjects', who as in Super Night Shot will often been seen within an art/performance context without their knowledge or consent. Is this ethical? 

Using relational art techniques, the presenter will use research ethics to explore the issue of consent within relational art practices.