Enter a world saturated by corporate power, digital systems and waste where the biological, technical and sexual are deeply interwoven. Welcome to BioNet, can we interest you in joining?
Join us for the launch of Welcome to BioNet a new digital science fiction experience created by Shu Lea Cheang and commissioned by UP Projects for This Is Public Space.
Marking Cheang’s return to net art, this event will offer insight into Welcome to BioNet and the wider alternative reality in which it is situated. Artist and filmmaker, Shu Lea Cheang will be in conversation with Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London who is a long-term collaborator of the artist. The event will conclude with an exclusive preview and live play of Welcome to BioNet with Cheang, Fuller and other members of the audience.
Welcome to BioNet is situated in a world where the internet has crashed and is grounded in UKI, Cheang’s ongoing alt-reality cinema in which the fictional corporation GENOM aims to track, control and reconfigure our biodata. GENOM exits the Internet as we currently know it and takes the human body hostage to initiate BioNet, a biological platform where data moves from person to person. Within BioNet, red blood cells are reconfigured into DNA retainers that can store, reprocess and send data and memories. To motivate users, they are also capable of self-generating orgasmic data. Under this scheme, GENOM also harvests orgasm transaction data to produce pleasure-enhancing red pills for mass pharmaceutical markets.
This new digital commission invites you to join BioNet, interact with others, consolidate networks and enhance personal e-data. Are you ready to join us? How far are you willing to go? Will you make it to the climax?
The launch event will take place in UP Projects’ digital participation space, The Hall, which experiments with the potential of the digital sphere as a space for debate and collaboration. During the event, participants will be encouraged to contribute through the use of polling and Q&A tools.
About Shu Lea Cheang
Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker whose work aims to re-envision genders, genres, and operating structures. Her genre-bending gender hacking art practices challenge the existing operating mechanisms and the imposed boundaries of society, geography, politics, and economic structures. 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 interfaces with transgressive plots and open network that permit public participation. As a net art pioneer, her work BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first work of web art commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. 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. Cheang is currently at work on UKI, a sci-fi viral alt-reality cinema and UNBORN0x9, a hacking performance.
About Matthew Fuller
Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Publications include How to Sleep: the art, biology and culture of unconsciousness, (Bloomsbury 2018), How to be a Geek, essays on the culture of software (Polity 2017), with Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (MIT 2012), with Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys, aesthetics of ecology and impossibility (Minnesota 2019) and with Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics, conflicts and commons in the politics of truth (Verso 2021). With Shu Lea Cheang, he has recently been working on the Sleep Series a series of events of 'art by sleepers, art for sleepers, and art as sleep' and has participated in a number of Cheang's projects over the past two decades.
Telegram
Join our telegram chat today to organise play times and chat with people worldwide: https://t.me/WelcomeToBioNet or via 'Welcome to BioNet by Shu Lea Cheang'
Accessibility
We strive to make UP Projects' events accessible and inclusive to all, if you have a particular access request please email info@upprojects.com prior to the event and a member of the team will assist you. We will provide a recording with closed captions available on our YouTube following the event and can also provide transcripts upon request.
Health and Safety
This commission contains bright flashing lights and/or imagery that may be unsuitable for some audiences. Viewer discretion is advised. Participation by people with photosensitive epilepsy is welcomed and safe until a certain point in the commission (an action must be performed in order for the triggering section to begin). Please contact info@upprojects.com or chat to your dedicated tech support on the day of the event for further information on how to participate safely.