I.K.U.
Imagine a post-‘Blade Runner’, post-apocalyptic metropolis, populated with
irresistible kinky cyborgs, known as I.K.U. Coders. Equipped with an insatiable
sexual appetite and unicorn-like arms which turn into dildos, they sex you up
in order to extract your orgasm data for their hard drives.
Imagine further the
attractive data collectors, the I.K.U. Runner Units, who eventually catch up
with I.K.U. Coders to “fuck to retrieve” their “full data” hard drive so that a
company calling itself the Genom Corporation can mass produce the erotic
experiences as memory chips. And imagine, finally, that you can buy these chips
from vending machines on any street corner, insert them in your mobile phone
and call up colour coded I.K.U. data to suit your tastes…
Welcome to the
cyber-erotic world of Shu Lea Cheang’s I.K.U., an experimental Japanese porno
film, celebrating the wired body and trans-gendered sexual interactivity of the
not-so-distant future. I.K.U. – Japanese for “I’m coming” – starts off with a
drum’n’bass soundtrack and computer animated graphics.
Mixing the conventions
of sci-fi, hardcore erotica, Japanese advertising and manga, the film unfolds
at the speed of cyberspace through the non-linear logic of a hypertext novel.
The result is a polymorphous ride through the tech-driven libidos of its
players: Reiko, the female cyborg, Dizzy, the transsexual I.K.U. runner and
Tokyo-Rose, a manipulative dominatrix working for a rival corporation.
Cheang
refashions pornography’s boundaries and its aesthetics in order to make a sex
flick for the wired generation. “I did not make this film for masturbation. I
made it for collective orgasm,” Cheang maintains, citing the way cyberspace
fosters communal experiences that are moving sexuality beyond the private and
the personal. “It is like doing drag, like transsexuality, the way we are interfacing
with technology and extending our identity into it.”
The Face comments: “...it
is this intersection of sex and technology that lends I.K.U. its groundbreaking
predigree - and not just as pornography. I.K.U. is one long lavish visual
metaphor for the sexual freedoms afforded by the internet, fantasies you can
indulge with others regardless of gender, social constraints or even physical
possibilities.”
The film will be introduced by the
director.
written and directed by: Shu Lea Cheang;
cinematographer: Tetsuya Kamoto; editor: Kazuhiro Shirao; music: Hoppy
Kamiyama; with : Ayumu Tokitou, Zachery Nataf …
in cooperation with: Slovenska kinoteka in
Retrovizor
