There are those who'll check out Shu Lea Cheang's I.K.U. hoping for an art film masquerading as a porn flick. Likewise, there are those who will want the opposite--porn passed off as art. Both camps will be satisfied, and so will anyone just trolling for some cyberotic, psychedelic brain-jolt eye candy.

"My producer, Asai Takashi, would love to have I.K.U. be Toy Story 3," states New York-based director Cheang. "I always think of I.K.U. as a pop fantasia sex film. Imagine in Japan, you can pick up a manga book at a 24-hour convenience store, accessible to kids of all ages, that contains the most explicit, violent sex. And imagine, the U.S. distributor of Romance, after viewing I.K.U. at Sundance, remarked on it as an XXXXXX film. I am losing parameters here."

That may be, but I.K.U. is all about losing parameters, the lines between art and trash, celebration and exploitation, public and private, male and female. "One thing I want to confirm is that I.K.U. does cross the boundaries of gender specification: man on woman, woman on woman and man on man. And then it brings in transsexuality. As for the bondage scene [which involves the complicated knots of Japanese tie-me-up], I thought it's quite sugar-coated. Let's put it this way: we can push a bit for the norm and bring it back a few inches for the ultra-fetish set."

Apparently those weren't enough inches for the crowd at the prestigious Sundance film festival. Cheang witnessed a 40 per cent walkout before the closing credits, something she calls "shocking."

"Particularly, the walk-outs always happen during sex scenes. I think the audience is quite mixed and have various expectations. I.K.U. is quite a mixture of genres and genders. Some may come expecting sci-fi, and others, porn. After the first screening, it went okay, though. I simply spelled it out and challenged the audience to stay.

"My biggest desire for this film is to play in a cinema that is reminiscent of the old porn theatres in Times Square, New York, where men jerked each other off and engaged in sex--a collective orgasm session in the theatre/public space. Yes, you are deprived of the remote, you are out of control. Flow with the sexuality that is coming at you and don't shun it away."

Do androids sleep with electric sheep?

It's tough to explain exactly what happens in I.K.U., largely because the narrative is deliberately chaotic and non-linear (note the choose-your-own ending). Here's a running go at it, though. I.K.U. uses Ridley Scott's Blade Runner as a starting reference point, substituting virtual-reality sexual data collectors ("I.K.U. coders") for replicants and data retrievers ("runner units") for the cops, like Harrison Ford's Deckard, who "retired" rogue replicants. The coder Reiko charges through a picaresque series of raunchy hijinx on a quest for sexual self-knowledge, tangling with the evil TokyoRose virus on the way.

"The film follows porn structure," continues Cheang, "sequential sex acts with little motivation. All sex acts are conducted in public settings. The producer and I started with some location scouting in Tokyo. We want to present a future Tokyo that was very different from Blade Runner's Orientalism. Asai suggested that the tunnel highway and underground parking lots which were built before the War and would stay for centuries in the future. I deliberately want to avoid Blade Runner's neon glitter and TV-screen surveillance." No rain-slicked, garbage-strewn cityscapes here. Each scene presents another cartoonish environment, suited to yet another fetish or fantasy, such as the lurid bubblegum spider's nest that is the lair of TokyoRose.

Another aspect of I.K.U. that'll raise some chatter is the digital animation framing the sequences, designed by the group VJ E-Male. Note that the coders' sex data is represented by digital mosaic patterns. This is a take on the the blurring effect Japanese censors use to conceal genitals and penetration, or rather the resulting eroticization thereof. The coup de grace, though, which pokes its way in repeatedly, is the cunt-cam shots of penetration seen from the inside (penetration is how the coders collect the orgasm data). "The 'pussy point-of-view' shot is considered a soft version of fist-fucking. I wanted to make the collecting of data via fist-fucking. These shots are all made by Mr. Hanaoka, a 21-year-old university dropout. I came across to his sample reel that displayed a fixation on penis study, and it worked out. Hanaoka must have made 300 patterns of the interiors and the movements of snatch."

XX to XY to XXX

It should be pointed out that while I.K.U. is Cheang's first foray into porn, it's not exactly a career change. As an artist, Cheang's chosen media are video and digital information. "The first synopsis I wrote for I.K.U. was back around Christmas, 1997. At the time, I was also commissioned by the Guggenheim for their first Virtual Museum Web project, BRANDON, now in the permanent collection at the Guggenheim Museum (http://brandon.guggenheim.org)."

Taking its name from the transgendered central character of Boys Don't Cry, BRANDON was a theoretical, online court of law that tackled specifically cases of gender identity and the line between virtual and reality. The theme remains in I.K.U., so the revelation with Zachery Nataf, founder of London's Transgender Film Festival, isn't a total Crying Game surprise. "I was much involved with the concept of digi-gender and the physicality of transexuality. I met Zachery in Amsterdam, where he was undergoing various stages of FTM [female to male] surgery. I decided that he could play the Deckard character (maybe a tribute to Harrison Ford's mighty cool male presence--note that in Blade Runner, sexual desire was never consummated between Deckard and Rachel)."

Art, sleaze, or pop anomaly, I.K.U. is being heralded as a sign of things to come. "From Sundance to New York, Berlin to Copenhagen, this is what I'm hearing: 'ahead of its time.' Funny that my last film Fresh Kill, released in '94 and coined as a 'cybernoia' film, was also being called 'ahead of its time' at the time. I'm a bit wary about this remark. The future is now! We are here and there... the convergence of media is being explored. People with capital funds are marketing it. I've declared that I.K.U. is a Net-based movie. It can be downloaded, sampled and re-edited to suit your own needs. The narrative at this junction does not follow a beginning and ending. Its interactivity with an audience is not the click-and-go CD-ROM type multi-thread, but rather a forward, rewind, jumble-up sequence of digital information. You, as a viewer, are active enough to upload your own thread of narrative into the remix. For porn, all motivations are eliminated. Simply, sex is up for grabs." :