Happy Slap

The affect of digital media and virtual reality on conventional notions of physicality and representation is initiating a radical rethink on how we define and understand body/performance art. The question of how and where we locate the internal and external self, an issue that is crucial for artists who use their bodies, is further emphasised through new technological mediation. I am primarily interested in how new technologies facilitate different sorts of exchange between artwork/artist and audience. I contend that the intersubjective relation generated between the work and audience – the phenomenological experience of a public performance of self – is consequently revealed as erotic.

Happy Slap is a short performance made on a mobile phone, to be presented as a Quicktime movie on a computer or on another phone. The work was devised in part as a response to the ‘Happy Slapping’ craze that has swept the UK in the past year and also as a continuation of my artistic practice, which is concerned with the relationship of the body in performance to new technologies. ‘Happy Slapping’ is a strange phenomenon that has emerged as a result of the flood of cheap mobile phones with cameras and, for the most part, is something that teenagers participate in. Basically, a Happy Slap is a set-up in which an unsuspecting person is filmed on the phone whilst someone else runs up and hits them. The resulting film is then sent on the phone to assorted friends and family. Part Jackass, part slapstick, the action is usually harmless and everybody has a good laugh at the result. But there is a darker side to this craze. Happy Slapping has been a feature in both rape and murder cases and as such it is now considered by some as encouraging violent tendencies.

‘Happy Slap’ is a little dark, private performance in which I ‘slap my self silly’. The music playing over the top of the work is ‘Is This Love’ from the cartoon Cinderella to suggest perhaps that this is an enactment of perverse self-love/violence.

As an artist, I work with my body. My body is the site, the material and the process of the performances I make. My performances are imbricated within the technologies of their making and almost always accompanied by a camera. The syrupy music in the two short works submitted acts as a contrast to the action. The work is lo-lo-fi and involves no editing save for a cut and loop. The surface of the image struggles for coherence because of the constant movement. Likewise the body struggles with itself, caught as it is inside a loop of it’s own violent passions.