‘Public Consultation’ is an ongoing performance project which explores disciplinary care. It brings together research into new prison architecture, socialist leisure spaces and dog training. How we speak to dogs in order to mold them into contemporary society is used as a mode of address for examining the soft community discipline of new prison architecture as it relates to a radical history collective spaces. For this performance the artist engaged in embodied research, working as dog walker under the brand name ‘Shona’s Woofy World’, recording the experience, its social media and interactions with clients. The resultant performance attempts to herd different segments of the audience around the floor in the tone of a dog-trainer, with short interchangable phrases in the form of commands: “tossing chewed-up squeaky toys around while yapping at us to be more civic-minded, engage better with local and national government, but not to show our teeth. It’s a whip-smart takedown of the pseudo-economic jargon that pervades public arts funding.”

It has so far been performed as part of experimental music events at Dissenter Space ‘Voices in Buildings’ reviewed here and Summerhall, Edinburgh.