Speculative Sex: I.K.U. and Neurosex Pornoia with Shu Lea Chang & Eric Pussyboy

3rd August 2016

In the present, pornography is pedagogical and produces the sexuality it represents. Patriarchal and binary biological and neurological narratives of dominant/active males, coy/passive females, and pathologized queer behaviour greet us on the home pages of popular porn websites, together with colonial narratives of the exoticised and fetishised other.

In the future, sexual experience is downloadable, hackable, and uploaded via neurological implants that stimulate your sensory nerves and pleasure centres directly. ‘Speculative Sex’ presents work by Shu Lea Cheang and Eric Pussyboy + Abigail Gnash, using science fiction narratives as medium to re-present bodies and sex.

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker constructs networked installations and multiplayer performances in participatory impromptu modes. Drafting sci-fi narratives through film scenario and artwork imagination, Shu’s work builds social interfaces with transgressive plots and open networks that permit public participation. Engaged in media activism and electronic art for throughout the 80s and 90s in New York City, Shu concluded her NYC period with the first Guggenheim museum web art commission BRANDON (1998-1999). She has since made two feature films, FRESH KILL (Berlin Film Festival, 1994) and I.K.U. (Sundance Film Festival, 2000), and is currently touring acollective biogame ‘UKI-enter the BioNet’, producing a cypherpunk feature film FLUIDØ, and developing ‘UKI, cinema interrupted’ a mobile media application.

Eric Pussyboy (b. Valencia, Spain) is an artist and filmmaker that lives and works in Berlin. In a productive tension with institutionalised learning, he completed a BA in Social Sciences and European Ethnology at the Humboldt-University with a thesis on aqueer non-commercial film festival in Berlin, and is completing a Masters in Gender Studies at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science. Eric is interested in Feminist and Postcolonial Perspectives on Science and Medicine, focusing on neuroscientific approaches to trans people. He started Neurosex Pornoia in 2013 together with Abigail Gnash as a DIY sci-fi queerfeminst postporn project. Since 2015 he has been working on Neurosex3, the last episode of the series that has been developed in collaboration with a group of queer artists, performers and activists.