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Shu Lea Cheang’s latest feature film, UKI, is celebrating its world premiere at the Filmfest. This sci-fi viral alt-reality movie is a sequel to I.K.U. (2000).
Reiko is robbed of their body data and dumped on Etrashville, a giant landfill for electronic waste. There they resurrect as “UKI the virus” in order to sabotage a biosystem developed by the GENOM Corporation to manipulate sexual pleasure through pills. Defective humanoids, transmutants, techno-data bodies and an infected city join forces with the UKI virus. UKI is a suspenseful digital collage of game software-generated animation combined with live-action film and visual effects.
Meet the director
Shu Lea Cheang
Shu Lea Cheang is a leading multimedia artist. With her approach at the intersection of film, video, Internet-based installation, software interaction, and durational performance, she is considered a pioneer in Internet-based art. Born in Taiwan in 1954, Cheang earned her bachelor’s degree in history in Taipei in the mid-1970s and subsequently moved to New York City to study Cinema Studiesfilm. Shortly thereafter, she joined Paper Tiger TV, a collective that broadcast live weekly programs on public-access television. Grassroots in nature, the collective sought to revolutionize television by playfully challenging its underlying ideologies in a do-it-yourself approach. Her operating radius has simply adapted to the technological developments and media available at a given time, such as by expanding into the networks of cyberspace in the late 1990s. Her works have been shown at international festivals such as Sundance and the Berlinale, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the ICC in Tokyo, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and presented at biennials and art shows such as the Documenta in Kassel and the Gwangju Biennale.