This is Normal
- This is Normal
The gate to the Hangar media lab’s artist studio is kicked open. This is Normal, the graffiti scribble on the gate is loud and clear. Four tons of e-trash, one day of electronic waste collected in Barcelona city alone, is shoveled into the two thousand square feet of raw space. Junked keyboards, wires, circuits, hard drives, lap-tops, broken robots, and biobots take up residency. The geeks pay their homage to the holy e-trash land, sifting through the massive to retrieve some reusable golden threads. The robots and biobots, code junkies tripping in the data junk market, crank up their drives chasing after the running codes. Code eats code, code sexing code, a bad fuck, some bad codes, relentless spamming, UKI, a virus mutated, launching itself into oblivion. GENOM CORP takes human body hostage, engineering the red blood cells into computing units, making up BioNet. Is there such a thing: a self-sustainable orgasm? programmed and self-fulfilled? Enter UKI, the screaming retrovirus, flirtatious and contagious. Infect a city. Corrupt the Net. Take back your orgasm data. We arrive at 0-state, all-out deep sub vibration.
The normality kills me and we are ever so normal. [End Page 569]
Shu Lea Cheang: Artist. conceptualist. filmmaker. networker. She constructs networked installation and multiplayer performance in collective mode. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination—including two feature films, Fresh Kill (1994) and I.K.U. (2000), as well as BRANDON (1998–99), the first Guggenheim museum web art commission. Her recent work includes UKI (2009–12), sequel to I.K.U., formulated as viral performance and viral game. In 2012 she released Baby Work (presented at ZERO1 festival, San Jose), concluding her locker baby series, Baby Play (2001, shown at NTT[ICC], Tokyo) and Baby Love (2005, shown at Palais de Tokyo, Paris). She is launching [composting the city/composting the net] with a composting performance at transmediale2013 in Berlin. Her website is mauvaiscontact.info.
