This should be really interesting. Henry Moore Institute,Wednesday 11th March, 6pm. Artist talk by Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment - 'Air' It's also free of Charge.
Tim Etchells is an artist and a writer based in the UK. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the performance group Forced Entertainment and in collaboration with visual artists, choreographers, and photographers. His work ranges from performance to video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction. Etchells' published work includes Certain Fragments (Routledge, 1999) and The Dream Dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer). Addressing the element of Air, Etchells, who has collaborated with artist Asta Groting on one chapter of her ventriloquism project 'The Inner Voice', will speak about language, voice and silence, and about presence and absence in performance, drawing on his own practice and that of others in the zone of contemporary performance and art. This event sits alongside the concurrent Henry Moore exhibition 'Asta Groting: 1987-2008' and the Henry Moore Institute gallleries are open until 9pm on Wednesday evenings. This presentation is free of charge and it is not necessary to book. It is part of a '4 Elements' series of talks in March at the Institute and Tim will be followed by Jens Hoffman (California College of the Arts) on the 18th March and Mark Godfrey (Tate Modern) on 25th March.

I suppose I ought to put a more theoretical stance forward for those of you with a more conceptual interest in audiences.
An initial two strands that could be looked at. One is reception theory and the other is the ‘death of the author’. Reception theory focuses on the scope for "negotiation" and "opposition" on the part of the audience. This means that a "text"—be it a book, movie, or art work—is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that the viewer interprets the meanings of the art work based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text/art work is not inherent within the work itself, but is created within the relationship between the work and the reader. Some key texts:
Holub, Robert C. Crossing Borders: Reception Theory and Poststructuralism
Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.
On the other hand the phrase ‘the death of the author’ has several interpretations, all of which relate to reception theory. "Death of the Author" is an essay by Roland Barthes that you can find in his collection of writings ‘Image-Music-Text’. Barthes said that you need to liberate texts from their authors, as an ‘understanding’ of the author forced false interpretations on what the text actually said. For instance the classic example is the one John Berger in ‘Ways of Seeing’ uses when illustrating the way we read Van Gogh. Berger proposes that we read the Van Gogh painting of a cornfield through a filter of the following text ‘This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself’.
Derrida however takes the issue further. He asserts, there is an "absence of the sender, the addressor, from the marks that he abandons, which are cut off from him and continue to produce effects beyond his presence and beyond the present actuality of his meaning, that is, beyond his life itself..." Consequently, the act of being an audience, for Derrida, is always already an acknowledgement of a two-fold absence: "the absence of the referent and the absence of the signifying intention."

Derrida would further argue that deep reading or close observation by the viewer can perform the "reverse of what its author intended"; Derrida presents a counter-logic which opposes any authority of the author, he states "the names of authors have here no substantial value." He may have been aware of what Duchamp described as, ‘the stink of artist’s egos’ and in a time of celebrity culture it is a refreshing reminder of how our delusion of control over our lives is in fact just that. The Jade Goody case being a very clear example of how ‘readers’ can take over the ‘reading’ of someone’s entire life. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology or Signature Event Context. Fredric Jameson’s The Prison House of Language is a good introduction to Deridda and the ‘I’ problem. Going back to art, Robert Morris’s the ‘I’ Box could be read as a reflection on the complex nature of authorship. Perhaps in a far more profound manner than either Barthes or Derrida. However all of these issues touch upon a key point in relation to the ‘Audience’ module. As a maker/producer you have no way of fully controlling audience reaction to your work and one of the ‘rites of passage’ that an artist has to go through is an acceptance of this.