Exploiting a Dystopic Future to Unsettle Our Present-Day Thinking About Sexual Violence Prevention

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ada13-explo-biv-2018.pdf (5.86 MB)

Date

2018-01

Authors

Bivens, Rena

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Publisher

Fembot Collective

Abstract

After researching 215 existing apps designed to prevent sexual violence (Bivens & Hasinoff, 2017), I propose a fictional app called ‘Ultimate Witness.’ Using ‘Protect 2 End’ software, this factory-installed app analyzes real-time data recorded within a 10 foot radius, with the help of an algorithmically curated rendering of attitudes, behaviours, and biomedical shifts that signal future perpetration of sexual violence. Importantly, this is not a desired, future prototype – it is a speculative design (Disalvo, 2012; Forlano & Mathew, 2014). Alongside the app description, I examine what became possible in the future setting – what infrastructures, discourses, and social dynamics emerged – and how that future connects to the present. Based on critical extensions of historical and present-day expert discourses surrounding sexual violence, I use Ultimate Witness to open up space to think and talk about the kind of future worlds we would like to see – and those we may wish to avoid.

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15 pages

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Citation

Bivens, R. (2018). Exploiting a Dystopic Future to Unsettle Our Present-Day Thinking About Sexual Violence Prevention. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 13. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/ada.2018.13.5

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26787

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Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; Issue No. 13: Radical Feminist Storytelling and Speculative Fiction: Creating new worlds by re-imagining hacking (January 2018)