digital – Page 41 – Hannah Nicklin

Image shared via a creative commons license by Open Democracy on Flickr.

I am going to preface this post with a defence. Why? Because this is how I have to have these conversations now. I am going to be attending the Reclaim the Night march on the 21^st of November. Reclaim the Night is a march against male violence with its roots in the 70s feminist movement.

A recent survey by the young women’s magazine More in 2005 found that 95% of women don’t feel safe on the streets at night, and 65% don’t even feel safe during the day. 73% worry about being raped and almost half say they sometimes don’t want to go out because they fear for their own safety.

In every sphere of life we negotiate the threat or reality of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. We cannot claim equal citizenship while this threat restricts our lives as it does. We demand the right to use public space without fear. We demand this right as a civil liberty, we demand this as a human right. Source

I understand that the second I say male violence, men reading this will have bristled. I profusely refute the idea that men are somehow innately violent, or unable to control their sexual desires. Rather I believe a culture that continually objectifies women, portrays them as sex objects, as things to be won and lost, and male sexual desire as something un-responsible and uncontainable, men will be taught that they are owed sex, and that women are to be bought and sold. They will be taught that with money, comes power, and power is the currency that males/female relationships are built on, transactional in essence, men must get their due.

Nearly a quarter of 14-year-olds [girls] have been forced to have sex or do something sexual against their will, and one in four 16-year-olds [girls] have been hit or hurt in some way by someone they were dating Source

Male violence against women is an inconvertible fact. Reclaim the Night marches against it. It is firstly an all (identifying) female march, and then followed by a rally with speakers and musicians (men are welcome to the rally), bringing together women, women’s organisations and unions, speaking out against male violence and reclaiming the spaces from which we are told we are not safe, not permitted, that we must be protected from.

How about we remove the need for protection?

Reclaim the Night stands up and says that women are never to blame for male violence, we battle against rape apologists who claim that women’s drinking, flirting, manner of dressing, or sexual proclivities mean they deserves it. We fight against rape myths that say one kind of sexual contact must lead to another, that say that women want it, that not saying no is the same as yes, and that women falsely report disproportionately to other crimes (“the allegations of rape that are false are exactly the same as that of any other crime i.e. 6 – 8%“ Source )

Continue reading Reclaim the Night

This evening I took part in a sound walk-come-performance called ‘As if it Were the Last Time’. It was devised by Duncan Speakman and was put on by subtlemob. It took place on a small number of streets near Covent Garden. It was a (performance? Experience? Neither of these words do -) for two people. We were provided with a map, an mp3, and told to set it going at 6pm on the dot. My critical vocabulary is already struggling with this piece, because it really was very individual. That was the point. For each and every person who took part, the performance (for want of a more accurate word) was theirs. Entirely. And not, in staged theatre, as each audience member receiving the piece from a different perspective. This was each participant doing. The movements, the characters the gestures, the reflection in the shop windows and puddles, and the touch of someone’s hand on a shoulder, were all completely yours. Of your making.

Conventional suspension of disbelief – the time and credence that you pay into conventional, staged performance, pales into comparison to the weight of belief that you pour into this kind of experience. I’m not going to argue that staged theatre is irrelevant, the video game didn’t kill the cinema, theatre is powerful but I do think that this is a form that is incredibly powerful in new ways. A piece of staged theatre is a rip in the space-time continuum, it is a hundred different hours, paid into one, it is a hundred held breaths, a hundred moments of people turning one seen thing, into another. ‘As if it Were the Last Time’ was one whole moment, it was the heat of one breath, it was noticing how the ripples of rain in a puddle shake the light of shop fronts in time to a piece of music. It was stories, yours, of others, and your reflection in the window. It was one voice, lost, and your own, quiet.

You were inhabiting a new world instead of conspiring with another.

The narrative was fractured, the one solid piece of information you were given at the beginning was that the piece was in memory of another, but instead of talking about the person lost, it asked you to find yourself there as if it were your last half hour. It was the story of a person seeing the world as they’d never see it again, you heard thoughts that occurred to them as they saw the same things you did, the memories prompted. The narrative built like a collage, like a barrage of images and sounds and ideas that didn’t fit, and then you realised they were building a whole person. It hurt. And it was wonderful. You felt like you were falling off a building. Or maybe ‘you’ didn’t, maybe only I did.

This was a piece truly (to borrow a phrase from the phenomenologists) about the thickness of experience. It went all the way around the back. It also talked about ‘drifting’ – asked you to find places that were safe, it led you away from your partner, and then back again – and was the closest to the dérive and détournement of the situationists out of anything I’ve taken part in so far (See The Cracks Between the Worlds for more)

There were moments when it faltered, when things weren’t fitting, they didn’t fall into place, but you were seeking, willing them to get back on track, because this was you – your belief at risk. This wasn’t and actor fluffing their lines, it was you, as an avatar of the narrative.

“[an avatar is] amachine that is attached to the psychology of its user. From within that machine the driver can peek out, squinting through alien eyes, and find a new world. And, oddly, the driver can also look into himself, as if gazing into his navel, and find a new landscape inside as well” p.8, I, Avatar

This was a very hard post to write. It might be because I’ve been travelling to and from London for two days. It might be because at the moment I’m horrendously busy and trying to engage my brain on a number of different levels, with a number of different things. Or it might just be that this piece of… experience, was more a part of me than my critical eye finds itself able to analyse.

Those thirty minutes were the most vivid, most high contrast of my week. It was true augmented reality, and I want to take my friends and loved ones back there with me. It hurts that I can’t. But that’s kind of what being is, isn’t it?