UKI virus rising
UKI virus rising follows an ever-morphing Reiko roaming at the e-trashville till her rising as UKI the virus. Taking its narrative from Shu Lea Cheang’s UKI, a sci-fi viral alt-reality cinema in the making, Reiko, a redundant IKU (orgasm) coder dumped on E-trashville by GENOM Co. strives to reboot their defunct hard drive body. Inadvertently, Reiko’s frenzy self-coding launches herself into UKI the virus.
Meanwhile, GENOM Co. exits the Net and takes the human body hostage to initiate BioNet, a network made up of reengineered red blood cells (erythrocytes) capable of coding DNA with orgasmic data. In its profitable biotech engineering scheme, GENOM Co. further harvests orgasmic data to produce red pills for consumption. UKI virus rising, propagated and mobilized, entering human body…thus the story begins.
Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker working with various art mediums and film formats, including installation, performance, net art, public art, video installation, feature length film and mobile web serial. Her artistic pursuits demonstrates an imagination and desire to cross the boundaries of society, geography, politics, and economic structure, thus redefining genders, roles, mechanisms, etc.
As a net art pioneer, her BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her network installations, including Bowling Alley (1995, Walker Art Center, USA), Baby Love (2015, Palais de Tokyo, Paris), often employ electronic interactive devices to construct open networks that permit public participation. Her multi-player participatory networked performance, including Moving Forest (2008, transmediale, Berlin), UKI (2009-2016) with transgressive plots are realized in collective impromptu mode. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination, crafting her own “science” fiction genre of new queer cinema, terming them eco-cybernoia (FRESH KILL, 1994), scifi cyberpunk (I.K.U., 2000), scifi cypherpunk (Fluidø, 2017). 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.
Born in Taiwan in 1954, lived in New York City for two decades, Cheang is currently residing in Paris.
