Sunday October 24
1:40PM PST
In this focused artist talk, iconic net artist Shu Lea Cheang presents her two current major world-building projects in development.
CycleX is a non-profit intercultural land trust located in Andes NY, dedicated to cross-disciplinary artistic/farming pursuits with a focus on nurturing future farmers.
CycleX designates its 23 acres of land as a free-form laboratory where plants and fungi are acknowledged as both food and medicine. With a focus on bio-diversity, mycology, and permaculture practices, CycleX establishes itself as a hub to foster cultural and technical exchange among the seasoned and the young generation of farmers and artists.
UKI is conceived as a sequel to the artist’s cyberpunk feature I.K.U. (2000, premiered at Sundance Film Festival). I.K.U. tells the story of GENOM Corp, an internet porn enterprise who dispatches I.K.U. coders to collect orgasm data. Made into mobilephone chip, GENOM introduces orgasm on the go and makes a huge profit. In post-netcrash UKI, the data deprived I.K.U. coders are dumped on the Etrashscape where coders, twitters, networkers crush and crashed. This expansive work, which materializes as a constructed, 3-dimensional, virtual world and feature-length film, shows how radical simulation and science fiction world-building practices can generate alternative possible futures in a striking, techno-dystopian parable.
Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker. Cheang constructs networked installation and multi-player performance in participatory impromptu mode. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination. She builds social interface with transgressive plots and open network that permits public participation. Her genre bending gender hacking art practices challenge the existing operating mechanisms and the imposed boundaries of society, geography, politics, and economic structures. As a net art pioneer, BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first work of web art commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She crafts her own genre of New Queer SciFi Cinema with her feature length films FRESH KILL (1994, cybernoia), I.K.U.(2000, cyberpunk) and FLUIDØ (2017, cypherpunk). From homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her current retreat to post-netcrash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love, bio hack in her current cycle of works. She represented Taiwan with 3x3x6, a mixed media installation at Venice Biennale 2019. She is currently working on UKI, an interruptive cinema and UNBORN0x9, a hacking performance with Future Baby Production.
