Ludic Method Soirée

Shu Lea Cheang
hosted by Prof. Margarete Jahrmann, artistic PhD program, University of Applied Arts Vienna

The theory and practice of artistic research are concerned with specific ways to approach art, science and epistemic things. Their goals are sometimes written fictitiously, presented in playful formats and made public in processes of exchange. The methods of artistic research comprise – in a structural coupling – contradictions, a joyful science and an associative memory play. Ludic agency is caused by ongoing psychophysical soirées — the first one of the winter semester taking place on 16th October, 7 pm.

Opening words by vice rector for research Putz-Plecko

We are honored to welcome the renowned artist Shu Lea Cheang, taking up elements of her actual Biennale di Venecia piece 3x3x9 in a participatory activism court – please join in! Register as “player” under the address: margarete.jahrmann@uni-ak.ac.at

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist, filmmaker, networker working with various art mediums and film formats, including installation, performance, net art, public art, video installation, feature-length film and mobile web serial. As a net art pioneer, her project BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination, crafting her own “science” fiction genre of new queer cinema. From homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her current retreat to post net-crash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love, bio hack in her current cycle of works. This year, she is representing Taiwan with a solo exhibition 3x3x6 at Venice Biennale 2019. Her current projects in development UNBORN0x9 (a hacking performance) and UKI (an interruptive cinema) are funded by DICRéAM, CNC (Centre National du Cinéma) in France. http://mauvaiscontact.info

In her current installation 3x3x6 (on view at Venice Biennale till November 24, 2019), Shu Lea Cheang reflects upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition and investigates 10 criminal cases in which the prisoners across time and space are incarcerated for sexual provocation and gender affirmation. The exhibition constructs collective counter-accounts of sexuality where trans punk fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations hacks the operating system of the history of sexual subjection. For Ludic Society presentation, Cheang takes up the case of “Regina V. Saunders” (1991) in which the defendant, Jennifer Lynne Saunders, age 18, was sentenced to six years in prison for two counts of indecent assault. Excerpts selected from the court hearing that took place at Doncaster County Court in 1991 convene a performative re-enactment of gender play, gender fxxxking.