6:30pm on a Saturday night in a warehouse in Hackney, east London, and a girl has her head in a toilet bowl. Behind her, on the bed, a bloke is out cold; someone has wrapped him in gaffer tape. Perhaps it's a case of pre-loading. Not that they needed to pre-load; there's more alcohol here than at a wedding. A couple of cheerleaders with pigtails and sweatshirts bearing the names of American universities are sitting cross-legged on the ground talking intently, plastic cups of warm white wine in their manicured mitts. Across from them, a guy is being helped to suck beer through a hose.  You don't need to be a sorority chick to recognise the distinctive signs of a frat party getting under way. I do a mental checklist and locate the cliches. Space cake: check! Jocks: check! Beer bong and the requisite geek: check! Few British people, you suspect, will have seen the real thing, but anyone who grew up watching the films of John Hughes (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sixteen Candles) or Paul Weitz (American Pie) will recognise the scene. In fact, anyone born in the last 50 years will recognise this American rite of passage: it's been a fixture of teen movies since the 1960s.  This isn't, needless to say, quite the real thing. Striding through the carnage in a yellow Hawaiian shirt is our host for this evening, artist Ed Fornieles, a sculpture student at the Royal College of Art. He has been filming scenes of teen debauchery all day for Animal House, a multimedia installation inspired by the 1978 movie of the same name. The artwork will consist of the footage shot earlier, photographs from tonight's four-hour performance – featuring 100 willing participants let loose to party – and a sculpture made from the debris left behind.  I am one of 20 people in the unenviable position of being sober voyeurs, invited by the artist to witness proceedings. It's early in the evening, and already I feel about as awkward as the fake palm tree stuck to the ground next to me. The actors mill about chatting, some begin to grind against each other as the music gets louder, and occasionally one detaches from the crowd to perform: a pillow fight, some mucking-about with beer cans. Atmospherically it is about as flat as a two-day old diet Coke; I am squirming with embarrassment.  Fornieles claims he wants to capture that quixotic moment in young people's lives when they arrive at college – when they are away from home, often for the first time, their personalities not yet fully formed. What he found was that teenagers were only too keen to conform a stereotype created by American television and film, and then passed down through generations. "You are so impressionable at that age," he says, "ready for experimentation sexually and socially. I am interested in this stage in a person's life, which is played out again and again. Think of all these millions of American teenagers watching films about the American teenager which are based on real American teenagers who have been watching films about American teenagers."  So Fornieles decided to re-create a frat party in the hope of finding something real at the heart of it. The participants have been given profiles from Facebook to base their characters on for the performance, each one supposed to personify a particular college type, from stoner dude to math dork. They've worked hard on the costumes, and the alcohol is there to do the rest.  Two hours later, and the place is beginning to resemble, if not the euphoria, at least something of the anarchy of Animal House. The cheerleaders' makeup is running rivers down their cheeks, sweaty boys are spraying each other with fizzed-up cans of Bud, two girls are getting intimate in front of a jeering crowd, and in the corner a man is being taped to the wall in the shape of the crucifix. There is a heavy aroma of BO. Fornieles' fixed expression as he tries to stay on top of things is reminiscent of a nightclub owner off to sort out some argy-bargy in the queue. He is trailed by a couple of tearful girls and a tense-looking woman on a mobile phone.  I have had enough, however, and leave, picking my way through the inebriated stragglers, the memory of a man naked but for a pair of purple pants jigging on the dance floor seared into my brain. I wonder what Bluto, Otter and Boon would have thought of this jaded parody of their coming-of-age celebration. As performances go, I suppose it resembled the Fluxus happenings of the 1960s, where participants were encouraged to reach higher states of consciousness in front of an audience, except Maciunas and his followers sought to connect with people on an intimate level. I fear we were all far too knowing for that to happen here.
A student installation tries to make the frat-house party into art – an anthropological experiment, or manipulative voyeurism? Jessica Lack can't decide