There’s a popular myth that back in the 1990s, artists and writers were optimistic about the internet and thought it was utopia, until it turned out it wasn’t. That’s not how I remember it at all. The question of whether the internet was a “good thing” or a “bad thing” simply wasn’t relevant to the internet avant-garde. What mattered to us was that it was real, and remaking the world. What we took to be our task was finding a language to describe it that both accounted for its transformative power and located sites within the changing landscape it made where we might make some kind of life. Shu Lea Cheang understood this from the start.

Like many of us, Cheang came from the world of alternative analog media, and it helped to have experienced the contradictions of trying to make meaning in the broadcast-era media landscape. It was valuable training in the traps lurking in media technology, economies, and culture in general. She has evolved a language and a series of practices for working in and against a media environment that is toxic, unstable, and extractive. Not to reduce it to this, but it’s relevant: this was always some sort of queer project. Queer people must live in a media environment that is hostile, yet which produces pockets of ambiguity and possibility. They’re not alone in that. It’s related to the tactical media moves of transsexuals, the undocumented, sex workers, the racialized, controlled substance users—anyone who has reasons to not always appear to be what they appear to be. 

The theme of control came up early in Cheang’s work. It’s worth remembering that Gilles Deleuze copped the idea of a control society1 from William S. Burroughs, for whom control had a relation to at least one other concept—the interzone: “A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum. . . . Larval entities waiting for a Live One.”2 It’s a liminal place of possibility and danger where law, including supposedly “natural” law, is suspended. Power always has its interzones, where everyday life is not about prodding the disciplined subject into some useful function under threat of punishment.

The interzone is about the technics of drives, where bodies want what they want. Drives are not desires. A subject desires what it lacks. A drive is the body intensifying. Power, whether of states or corporations, maintains relations to both desires and drives. Desires get a lot of attention from artists and theorists, but drives, not so much. Cheang is interesting to me as an artist who invents languages for the way technics modifies power’s relation to drives. Her curiosity pertains to drives that exceed desire and the law. This isn’t just the romantic celebration of the out-sider. Her work centers the bodies of those with marginal- ized drives as ambivalent figures: gay bodies, queer bodies, trans bodies, cyber bodies, drug bodies. These bodies, these drives, feel the sting of two kinds of power. One is not the law, but the police. In the interzone, the police are lawless, pure agents of their own violent drives. The other, more contemporary power is the corporation. The interzone persists because it has its uses, and those change. 

Cheang’s work clocked the emergence of corporate uses of the interzone: for recruitment, marketing, product placement, research and development, extraction. The interzone became the corporation’s petri dish. The activities of the interzone, where drives are serviced, are not exactly labor or leisure or play or art. From the point of view of the corporation, they’re extractable modes of life. The corporation extends control into the interzone, not for purposes of suppression, but for purposes of extraction.

The theme of control came up early in Cheang’s work. It’s worth remembering that Gilles Deleuze copped the idea of a control society1 from William S. Burroughs, for whom control had a relation to at least one other concept—the interzone: “A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum. . . . Larval entities waiting for a Live One.”2 It’s a liminal place of possibility and danger where law, including supposedly “natural” law, is suspended. Power always has its interzones, where everyday life is not about prodding the disciplined subject into some useful function under threat of punishment.

The interzone is about the technics of drives, where bodies want what they want. Drives are not desires. A subject desires what it lacks. A drive is the body intensifying. Power, whether of states or corporations, maintains relations to both desires and drives. Desires get a lot of attention from artists and theorists, but drives, not so much. Cheang is interesting to me as an artist who invents languages for the way technics modifies power’s relation to drives. Her curiosity pertains to drives that exceed desire and the law. This isn’t just the romantic celebration of the out-sider. Her work centers the bodies of those with marginal- ized drives as ambivalent figures: gay bodies, queer bodies, trans bodies, cyber bodies, drug bodies. These bodies, these drives, feel the sting of two kinds of power. One is not the law, but the police. In the interzone, the police are lawless, pure agents of their own violent drives. The other, more contemporary power is the corporation. The interzone persists because it has its uses, and those change. 

Cheang’s work clocked the emergence of corporate uses of the interzone: for recruitment, marketing, product placement, research and development, extraction. The interzone became the corporation’s petri dish. The activities of the interzone, where drives are serviced, are not exactly labor or leisure or play or art. From the point of view of the corporation, they’re extractable modes of life. The corporation extends control into the interzone, not for purposes of suppression, but for purposes of extraction.

My favorites of Cheang’s works along these lines are the feature films I.K.U. (2000) and FLUIDØ (2017). In I.K.U., the Genom Corporation sells a portable electronic device that delivers downloadable orgasms, but first must harvest orgasm experiences from the sexual interzone that it can privatize and sell. In the world of FLUIDØ, HIV is no longer a fatal disease. In some people it caused a mutation; their bodies now create a psychoactive drug, which leads to human trafficking and a new drug trade. In both, Cheang finds a visual language for the circuit of drives, bodies, interzones, control, and corporate power. 

These films are conceptual porn, a really hard genre to get made, and hard to watch, too. Porn images latch onto drives and stimulate the body. You’re not supposed to think about it. It’s supposed to get you off. But these are films about how drives are nodules of the body that can be connected not just to other body-nodes but to media vectors. The interzone always has its ways of communicating, discreetly, across space and time. Reaching out to attach drives to stimuli—bypassing borders of state, law, family, self. I.K.U. anticipated the way the internet expanded the interzone. A drive wants ketamine: text the plug, and your delivery will arrive within the hour. A drive wants to get fucked: open Grindr, text a few potentials, hookup secured. A drive wants a hormone: get on the group chat, find a friend with spare t-gel. A drive wants to get fucked up and dance: the address of the rave will be released one hour before doors open via the arcane medium of email. A drive is bored: open Pornhub, scroll, close it—I know that girl. These are the relatively safe, even gentrified, outer edges of the interzone of a major city in the internet era.

The moment when I.K.U. ceases to be a porn movie is when the agent of the Genom Corporation goes to fuck someone, and her forearm turns into a huge dick—Judith Butler’s “lesbian phallus”3—and we cut to a shot from the inside of the recipient’s cunt or asshole showing the probe thrusting into it. It’s the point of view of the orifice itself—something porn never shows. On the one hand, it is just what the drive wants to expand sensation, and on the other, it’s the moment of extraction, the moment the Genom Corporation gets to extract the orgasm it will later commodify and market. 

The drive-based economy runs on what Paul B. Preciado called potentia gaudendi: the power of corporeal excitability.4Cheang was on to this early: whatever corporate power is now, it wants even more than what capitalism wanted. Capitalism wanted to exploit labor. Then it needed consumers, so it manufactured subjects to match the consumable objects. Maybe this isn’t capitalism anymore but something worse. Whatever it is, it doesn’t just want to extract labor and desire; it wants to connect directly to the drive, to stimulate and replicate it. FLUIDØ offers a visual language for the extraction of excitability from the body as an engine of contemporary political economy. One early scene shows a sperm-extraction factory. 

If one through line in Cheang’s work is control, the other is the interzone. One passage into the edges of the interzone is the lesbian-butch-transmasc continuum. Cheang’s Brandon (1998–99) is a pathfinding work between the search terms of net art and trans aesthetics. Pushing the limits of interactive media art, Cheang and a team of collaborators made it in html, Java, Javascript and a server database. Brandon takes its name from Brandon Teena, a trans man murdered (along with others) in a 1993 transphobic killing spree. Teena is the subject of the Hollywood film Boys Don’t Cry (1999), much discussed in transgender studies. Brandon opens up toward all kinds of possible trans and queer life. It is a digital simulacrum of the interzone, always at the liminal edge of control. 

The more recent 3x3x6 (2019) addresses situations in which control does enter the interzone in the form of law and punishment. The title refers to the dimensions of a cell. It was installed in a former prison complex in Venice that once held Giacomo Casanova. He was, among other things, an early safe-sex advocate—a pioneer of the condom. Casanova’s autofictional writing is famous for its female conquests, but between the lines it reads as if the author fucked a few men as well.5 Between fucking, gambling, and dabbling in forbidden ideas, he wound up in prison. In 3x3x6 we meet Casanova X and several other doubles of historical inmates, including Foucault X (lest we forget he was arrested and detained in Poland in the 1950s).6 Then there’s D X, imprisoned for being trans; L X, imprisoned for obscene writings; and FSB X, for sperm harvesting. 

3x3x6 was installed in an early modern prison, but there’s a way Cheang’s work touches over and over on a very contemporary dimension to the relation between control and the interzone. Since the internet, the interzone can be anywhere, and connect to anywhere. It’s no longer just that part of town. It seeps through the social-technical pores, and that provokes anxiety and the desire for more control. Policing extends its net to match. Surveillance becomes a general condition.

Whatever we call the current stage of commodification and social-technical regulation, one of its features seems to be the miniaturization of both control and interzone. Commodification feeds on drives, with less and less regard for whether this disrupts the formation of viable subjects of law, labor, and social reproduction. Whole populations are now expendable, hence just bodies for extraction. People who used to think they were “normal” feel the sharp end of control in the way only the dwellers of the interzone used to feel.

I’ve only seen the previews for Cheang’s collaborative project HAGAY DREAMIN, which will be presented at Tate Modern in spring 2025. Its title refers to an Indigenous story from Taiwan, about a hunter who is visited in a dream by what we might now call nonbinary spirits. I love the renewal of a story from the past brought forward as a treasure, while acknowledging that it is somebody else’s inheritance. There’s a difference between the image of a plurality of genders, sexes, and sexualities upon which commodification might feed (and control might manage) and what those of us so managed might actually want. We want our drives directed toward one another, via a technic over which we have some agency, rather than just being juicy nodes of drive extraction. 

In UKI (2023) we get the return of a theme from Cheang’s first feature film, Fresh Kill (1994), namely the mountains of trash that are the other landscape of contemporary hyper-consumer culture. The servicing of drives in the interzone might be a matter of picking through the detritus left over from the consumption cycle for the bits and pieces we can connect together. Plug-and-play nodes of flesh and tech. Cheang co-curated Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> (2001), an online space for work on the sharing of digital material. The file-sharing culture of the late 1990s was a key moment in the media avant-garde’s exploration of the tactics we might deploy to glean the means of seduction for ourselves out of the trash heap of twenty-first-century media technics. 

<KOP> was initially a Taiwanese project, but it ran afoul of the authorities there and became peripatetic. Part of the digital interzone. Cheang herself is a wanderer, moving from city to city. There are ways to inhabit the periphery of the interzone, to have one’s drives and eat too. Cobble together flesh and tech and language and forms of sociability that skirt the edges of (on the one side) straight lifestyle extraction and control, and (on the other) the space of addiction and abjection. That other is the core of the interzone, where flesh bursts into bug-like pustules, scratching and clawing. Or so Burroughs says. We don’t go there. The art that is interesting plays on the fuzzy edge of the interzone and straight life, where other life might be sustained and enhanced. 

Cheang is a peripatetic artist who finds collaborators along the way. It is as if all the friendly edges of the interzone, everywhere, are all the same city. Some of us aren’t really at home anywhere else except here. The enclosing spaces that produce the interiority of nation, family, citizen-subject, are contested ones for us. Rather than hanker after inclusion, we look toward the interzone, but without wanting to pass too far into that, either. Between straight life and the far side of the interzone is a gap between two kinds of control—between addiction to norms and the norm of addiction. 

Cheang’s work always has its stylistic signature, a slightly heightened and flattened rendering of cool media surfaces. When we first meet Casanova X in 3x3x6,he is floating like Jane Fonda at the start of Barbarella (1968), taking off a spacesuit—but landing in prison. There’s always a light touch. The work wants you to know how contemporary power works, but it isn’t helpful to just feel bad about it. The appeal is not to the viewer as subject who is supposed to feel like an outraged citizen. The appeal is to the drives. It’s an image-based practice that is always pointing us away from Cheang’s own gaze toward the other senses. 

I’ve been immersing myself again in Cheang’s work, sometimes to see things I missed, sometimes to reconnect with old friends. It’s giving me ways to picture the world, conceive of it, as made over by the internet vector. But it is also stimulating the drives. A drive wants to dance, fuck, get high—but not just as products to consume. Rather, as situations to be made with friends or friendly strangers. A difficult business, control—always waiting to connect to drives and extract the energy they stimulate. 

Cheang’s work models ways we might live. A drive wants to stand outside to talk about life. A drive wants to kiki in the toilet stalls. A drive wants to rave ’til dawn. A drive wants to chill at the afters, or go home when it feels like it, and with whomever. A drive is not a subject; it needs no pronouns. It’s an it. Sometimes the way out of the gender binary is to disaggregate the body into its partial drives. What I love about Cheang’s work is that it does not just elaborate a language for perceiving and conceiving contemporary control; it also stimulates the life of the drives, that they might find the pockets in time to thrive.

by McKenzie Wark