MAY 21, 2016, CLICK FESTIVAL, ELSINOR, DENMARK
By Shu Lea Cheang "UKI is conceived as a sequel to my scifi cyberpunk film I.K.U. which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2000. I.K.U. tells the story of IKU (orgasm in Japanese) coders, the replicants dispatched by the internet porn enterprise GENOM Co., who are made into sex machines to collect human IKU data. These programmed humanoids’ accumulated IKU data are ultimately downloaded by IKU runners (a la Blade Runner) and made into color-coded IKU chips for mobile phone plug in and consumption. In post-net-crash UKI, the data deprived IKU coders are dumped as pieces of electronic trash amidst the discarded electronic parts and bytes in the e-trashville located somewhere in the Deep Continent. Inhabiting with the trans-mutants, the hackers, the coders, the migrants, the refugees and the native labourers, the defunct IKU coders unpack their electro-body parts, attempt in rewriting the body codes to reboot themselves back to existence. Trading sex for codes, codes sexing codes, the defunct IKU coders are ultimately infected with body and software virus, emerging amidst the noise blast to declare themselves UKI the virus. Meanwhile, GENOM Co. exits the Net, resurfaces as a BioTech enterprise, takes human body hostage to initiate BioNet, a network made up of re-engineered red blood cells (erythrocytes) which are able to micro-compute and alter human DNA composition. GENOM Co. sets out to conspire a profitable biotech engineering scheme : reprogram human orgasm into auto-generated, self-sustained pleasure that bypasses the need for human interaction, moreover working hand in hand with pharmaceutical industry to further harvest IKU data transaction. UKI the virus, mutated and propagated, takes up the mission to infiltrate the occupied human body, to sabotage GENOM’s BioNet organismo production and finally to reclaim her own lost IKU data."
http://u-k-i.co/UKI2009-2016/performance/html/concept.html
Participants: Shu Lea, Jacob Remin, Xenia Lopez, Mija Milovic, Danielle Dahl, Mia Skovgaard, Johannes Rannes, Josefine Struckmann, Kristoffer Raasted, Christian Stadsgaard, Doris Bloom, Sally J. Ingvorsen, Nicolas Armand, Anders Bach Pedersen, Luna, Anders Børup, John Alex Hvidlykke, Moral Defeat, Elisabetta Saiu, Claus Poulsen, Yann Coppier & Henrik Yeller