Focus on Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol and analyze the abstract.
Ceci N'est Pas Un Viol ("This is not a rape") is a work of performance art by American artist Emma Sulkowicz. Released on 3 June 2015, the work consists of a website hosting an eight-minute video, introductory text and an open comments section. The video shows Sulkowicz having sex with an anonymous actor in a dorm room at Columbia University in New York City. It was directed by artist Ted Lawson in early 2015, while Sulkowicz was in the final year of a visual-arts degree at Columbia.The film illustrates the shift between consensual and non-consensual sex. Named after "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" from René Magritte's The Treachery of Images, the scene shows Sulkowicz and the actor engaging in what begins as a consensual sexual encounter and ends with what appears to be non-consensual anal sex. (The text notes that the sex was consensual and only appears to be rape.)The online response in the comments to the video is a central part of the work, described as an example of participatory art. Sulkowicz wanted to know "what the public does with [the video], which begins with the way they deal with it from the moment it's disseminated." Shortly after it appeared, the video was taken offline by a denial-of-service attack. By 9 June 2015, there were 2,700 comments on the site, most of them negative or ridiculing. Sulkowicz said she strongly believed in the video's importance, but that making it had been a "traumatizing" experience.
visual-arts Emma Sulkowicz anal sex New York Ted Lawson René Magritte participatory art denial-of-service attack performance art The Treachery of Images Columbia University