They say you have to suffer for your art and for Sophie Noonan that means getting rather chilly.

A third year student at Camberwell College of Arts, she will be standing in a room in a former solicitors’ office in Brighton, inviting members of the public to dress and undress her as part of a live project (an alternative to a thesis) on the theme of identity and how it can be examined through performance and installation.

With work that has also included making “bizarre, grotesque body pieces” for models to wear to provoke a response, she hopes to tackle questions of personal identity and society’s obsession with appearance.

Noonan’s themes feed into Participation, an exhibition she is staging with four fellow students which questions the effectiveness of public participation in art.

As recent shows such as the Hayward Gallery’s Psycho Buildings and Brighton’s recent Chameleon and Win!Win!Win! shows demonstrate, “interactive” is the buzzword of the day, but does it add to people’s experience?

Sophie, who took her foundation art course in Brighton and admires the city’s “buzzy” arts scene, is joined in the exhibition by Natasha Cox, Natasha D’Aquiar, Philip Morris and David Dunnet, who will be helping her in challenging traditional art gallery etiquette with a series of installations and performance pieces.

One piece sees spectator become participant when the sitter’s eye is filmed in a gallery context, while another, Interview Encounters, asks visitors set questions designed to trigger reactions.

Philip Morris and David Dunnet present two works which explore reaction to everyday objects that are often taken for granted. Morris riffs on the limitations of found materials against the consistent demands of structure with a chair he has created, the significance of which can only be assessed by the person sitting on it. Dunnet’s specially-adapted typewriter prints colours instead of letters, so the user becomes implicated in the act of translation.

In Noonan’s brave experiment, she will wait for people “to alter her identity” with their decision to clothe or unclothe her. Exploring notions of spectatorship and interaction, she aims to create an experience in which the visitor’s position shifts constantly from voyeur to participant.

“The whole experience is mainly to promote a debate about participation and the different realms of it and how viewers see it affecting artwork,” she explains. “There are four different rooms and we want people to have a different experience in each. It’s a testing ground, really.”

* Nov 26, 6pm-9pm, Nov 27-28, 11am-4pm, free, for details email Noonan_sr@yahoo.co.uk