Welcome to BioNet is a new digital science fiction experience by Shu Lea Cheang commissioned by UP Projects for This is Public Space.
Welcome to BioNet situates the audience in a world saturated with waste, corporate power and digital systems. The biological, technical and sexual are deeply interwoven. Pleasure products are uploaded into your epidermis and reprogram your immune system.
Grounded in UKI, Cheang’s ongoing alt-reality cinema,‘Welcome to BioNet’ creates an alternative reality in which the fictional corporation GENOM aims to track, control and reconfigure our biodata. After a massive net-crash, 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 by customised bacteria 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.
The RED PILL (watch "RED PILL - Your Pleasure Our Business" trailer above) is an oral pill made by GENOM Co. which gives instant, ultimate orgasmic pleasure. Derived from the "no handshake" rules adopted during the current pandemic, GENOM Co. uses handshakes as a means of DNA data exchange. Each human body is a network node, with the potential of expanding BioNet through a simple handshake.
In the foreground BioNet optimises the human orgasm and storage of orgasmic memory. In the background, it abducts and formats all human data.
UP Projects have curated Welcome to BioNet by Shu Lea Cheang as part of their digital commissioning programme, This Is Public Space. This is Public Space considers the online realm as a site for public art and creates space to investigate how we navigate between the online and physical worlds, exploring the impact of digital media on our relationships with people and places. UP Projects believes that the digital sphere is a space for experimentation; where art that challenges the role of public art can thrive.
You are now invited to join BioNet, interact with others, consolidate networks and enhance personal e-data. Are you ready to shake hands? How far are you willing to go? Will you make it to the climax?
Join us today in entering BioNet.
About GENOM
GENOM is taken from Shu Lea Cheang’s sci-fi viral alt-reality film-in-the-making UKI and is a fictitious corporation established in an era of post-net-crash.
About BioNet
BioNet is a network created by GENOM who re-engineer red blood cells (erythrocytes) capable of self-generating orgasmic data. BioNet can be understood as a corporate scheme to claim, alter and reconfigure our biodata. Using bacteria as foreign ‘agents’ to enter the human body, GENOM can then reprogram the erythrocytes, to transfuse the membranes of red blood cells. The bacteria move between bodies via handshakes, exchanging data and intensifying orgasms.
About the RED PILL
The RED PILL is an oral pill made by GENOM which gives instant, ultimate consumption of climactic pleasure. "RED PILL - Your Pleasure Our Business" is a corporate BioNet structure from GENOM.
Public Events
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'
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.
