Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), a dystopian science fiction film about corporate robots with identity crises, ends (in the director’s cut) with an origami unicorn falling to the floor as a couple enter an elevator. One is a replicant, and the other may be as well; their future is left deliberately ambiguous. Shu Lea Cheang begins I.K.U., her “Japanese sci-fi porn feature,” with her own take on that scene. Reiko, a replicant, and Dizzy, a technician with the Genom Corporation, step into an elevator whose doors then open to reveal floor after floor of a wonderland of sex in the year 2030. After Dizzy activates Reiko, an “XXX” tattoo glows on her wrist and she is set loose on a picaresque journey of sexual encounters. Her mission: to harvest orgasms. Her tool is her arm, which morphs into a penislike probe that enters her partner’s vagina or rectum and downloads raw pleasure. When her hard drive hits its quota, Dizzy packages the collected ecstasy into chips that are sold in vending machines. The virtual pleasure is called I.K.U., after the Japanese for “I’m coming”–iku.
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Cheang will be present at a free screening of I.K.U. at 10 PM on Friday, July 13, at the Julia Friedman Gallery as part of her “SciFi Digi Porn” exhibit, which includes six ten-foot-long sequences of stills from I.K.U. and a mural of images from her casting session for Fluid. The opening begins 5 at 118 N. Peoria. Call 312-455-0755 for more information.
