We were recently visited by our external examiner, given a fifteen minute slot and instructed to have an ‘informal chat’ with him about our work. As always, and more for fear of rambling than running out of words, I made a sort of check list of what I felt was important for him to know about my work. Again, as always I veered horribly off the runway and promptly lost track of the list. I have just rediscovered it and decided that it is worth putting into non-scribble, as a reminder that, at one point at least in this mad final countdown, I seemed to have a reasonably clear grasp of where I was headed.

The power of the performance lecture lies in its permission to borrow indiscriminately from multiple disciplines. Fact, fiction and opinion can co-exist in the same space, even in the same sentence. My history of art course has been heavily factually bias, dry, for want of a better word. Within fine art there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – there is little in history either for that matter, however the defence strategies are very different. The performance lecture has the duel capacity to act as both the medium and the defence. Last year I became increasingly interested in the changing function of the brain in line with technological advancements. Our notions of time, space, and indeed memory itself are now all in flux. I took a class last year called ‘The spaces of Contemporary Art’ which lead me onto an investigation into what other experiences in life we take for granted yet have been manipulated and mediated by a growing technological framework. Peter Weibel’s book CTRL: Space proved most enlightening, introducing me to Foucault’s use of Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic Principle and investigating the ways in which many artists are tackling the subject of a mass surveillance culture.

The performance lecture (or as I have now renamed it, the demonstration) has a real scope for awareness bringing, for raising consciousness. In line with my discovery of Kantor I felt that there was too, a space within this where my objects could also participate, as something akin to, but also more than, a prop. The frame as both an object and an idea proved fascinating subject matter for debate and investigation. It became more than an object, more than an idea but also a metaphor for this abstract notion of surveillance culture with the assumptions it places on what it contains. Recently I have ventured outside the studio frame towards a more obviously terrifying container – the source of where the brain meets the machine, Edinburgh’s Clinical Research Laboratory. It is often difficult to find a source for your investigation. We read round and round subjects and look at the work of others but for me the challenge is always locating that trigger image, space or sometimes person that I can then hang my argument onto, or rather, my defence.