A new era began after the hippie era
and the sexual revolution of the late 60s
and 70s. It felt like a breakthrough had finally happened. Sex could be spoken about freely. But did it truly become part of public language?
Did this happen without awkwardness
and without euphemisms? Was it without
that automatic “flagging” that turns the body into a warning label?

Even the emergence of films as daring
as “Zabriskie Point” (1970, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) and “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”(1969, dir. Paul Mazursky), and later
the almost-mainstream “The Dreamers”
(2003, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci), doesn’t make the answer straightforward.

In mass media, direct talk about sex still stumbles over propriety, algorithms,
and the fear of being “inappropriate.”
Social platforms ban certain words. Moderation systems view the female body
as automatically sexualized content.
This occurs even when what’s being shown
is simply corporeality, not seduction.
Attempts to speak about sex
without euphemisms have existed inside art.

These attempts are almost always exceptions and pose risks. In 1972, Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed” at Sonnabend Gallery built a ramp. The artist hid under it, masturbated,
and spoke into a microphone
about his fantasies involving the visitors walking above him. This act radically dragged sexuality from private space into public space. It forced the audience to feel not like observers but like part of the scene.

The nude has long been anchored in art
— in painting, photography, cinema,
and performance. However, the sexual dimension of the body is often deliberately muted. It is pushed into metaphor
or relocated into zones where the viewer arrives already prepared to “consume”
rather than think. Hence the paradox: norms have expanded. Yet, the attempt to analyze sex as a construct feels risky. It is seen
as a system of roles, gazes, power,
and language. Language keeps inventing detours so desire doesn’t have to be spoken aloud.

That is why it matters to turn to “I.K.U.” (2000) — one of the key video projects
by media artist Shu Lea Cheang.
The work demonstrates how sex becomes
an interface. It also illustrates how pleasure becomes a resource. Additionally,
it shows how the spectator’s position becomes a form of complicity.

“I.K.U.” is a hybrid of cyberpunk,
ultra-eroticism, and a gamified future reality.
In this world, a corporation produces sex robots. They are ideal pleasure-devices
for those who use them. At the center
is Reiko, whose body and experience become instruments for extracting “pleasure”
as a resource.

Almost everything here is built like
an interface. The narrative holds itself together through a POV sensation. The gaze seems tethered to Reiko. The viewer— rather
than receiving a conventional “plot” — is fed commands, prompts, and routes. Where to go next. What to do next. Sex unfolds not
as an event between people. It becomes a level to be completed. It is ruled
by pre-written logic and pre-assigned roles.

And this matters: Cheang is not operating
as a “genre director,” but as a media artist, which shifts the optics. The focus is not sex “in itself.” Instead, it is the politics of control. The body is viewed as a device. Pleasure
is seen as data. The border between subject and object is a setting that can be constantly rewritten.

Shu Lea Cheang is a Taiwanese-American media artist working across cinema,
the internet, and installation. “I.K.U.”
is not a one-off “genre experiment.”
It is part of her wider practice. In this practice, technology moves hand in hand
with surveillance, sexuality, and power.
This is especially clear next to her earlier project “BRANDON” (1998–99). It is a web work commissioned by the Guggenheim.
This project uses the internet’s nonlinear structure to speak about identity and media violence. Cheang later continues
this conversation in “3x3x6” (2019).
It is presented as Taiwan’s project
at the Venice Biennale. Prison architecture
and surveillance technologies,
up to and including scanning the viewer’s face, are assembled into a single system. Control becomes part of the viewing experience
in this system.

There are many sex scenes in “I.K.U.”, but they are structured in a way that has almost nothing to do with intimacy or romantic connection. Sex is framed as a consumer product. Orgasm becomes a given. Experience becomes a commodity. The body becomes a tool for producing satisfaction. Everything feels technical, functional — as if interaction has been pre-scripted as a service scenario.

The paradox is that the viewer does
not remain outside this apparatus.
It’s impossible to simply “watch”: the work pulls the spectator into a mode,
and voyeurism becomes part
of the performance. The gamified instructions Reiko receives — and that appear on-screen — are enough: go to the subway, meet
the girl, and so on. These commands don’t function as neutral navigation. Instead,
they serve as instructions for imagination.
The viewer is quietly offered a place inside
the scene. Fantasy switches on automatically.
In that sense, the effect recalls Cronenberg. He has the ability to produce a strange kind
of arousal. One might expect only anxiety
or disgust.

As in “Naked Lunch” (1991), “The Fly” (1986), or “Crash” (1996), the body drifts
into the phantom zone. What’s happening looks artificial. Yet, it hits physically.

And it’s precisely this mixture — technological unreality paired with a bodily response
that makes “I.K.U.” such a sticky experience.

Despite the fact that “I.K.U.” is made
by a woman media artist, the woman
is most often read as an object throughout the work. Even institutional descriptions
do this almost automatically. MUBI frames
the piece as a critique of Western stereotypes, invoking the “dragon lady” trope. However,
the framing itself easily reproduces
the orientalist optics it claims to expose.

Female bodies are assembled on screen
as “available surfaces.” They exhibit glossy readiness and recognizable adult-film packaging. Their behavior seems
to already know what is expected of it.
This produces the sensation of the male gaze. It is not simply because “a man is looking,”
but because a camera regime is active. It does not register subjecthood. It does not build a reciprocal look.

It does not leave space for resistance.
The camera glides over the body
like an interface. It doesn’t “look at a person.” It reads a surface: smoothness, pose, entry, access.

Yet early on, Cheang leaves room for doubt. She does it not through theory. She uses a scene that reveals the system more clearly than any close-up.

The elevator becomes a key moment. At first, the man follows the expected script: petting, escalation, the mechanics of “bringing
to climax.” Then the shift arrives: he demands not the body, but emotional authorization.
Do you love me? Do you trust me?

In the context of a robot, these questions don’t sound romantic; they sound
like an attempt to obtain power’s alibi.
Reiko is made to satisfy. There is no answer available besides yes. Trust becomes a password. Love becomes a protocol.
This is not intimacy — it’s the legitimization
of control on another level.

Here, de Beauvoir surfaces almost involuntarily: the man wants the woman
to be both servant and companion. In “I.K.U.”, that formula is made technologically literal. Bodily service is paired with the demand
for emotional confirmation. It is as if access alone isn’t enough. What’s needed is consent
as spectacle.

As the work unfolds, this logic doesn’t disappear — it expands, and softens.
There is more “tenderness.” Some heroines are undressed more slowly. They are touched more carefully. It seems as if the men want closeness — not only physical but moral.
On the surface this looks like an increase
in subjecthood, a shift from crude exploitation to “relationships.” But the paradox
is that tenderness often becomes
a more convenient packaging of the product.

It feels better for the consumer to believe
he is not using, but “approaching.” The woman becomes de Beauvoir’s “Other,” whose body and tenderness are used to confirm someone else’s subjecthood. Tenderness doesn’t cancel the hierarchy —it simply makes it look prettier.

And when the work turns into a navigator
of fantasy, the question becomes simple.
It is unpleasant: who is the subject here?
Who is the interface? It flares up in the same scene that first promises a “reversal” of power. A gesture of tied hands suggests that control has shifted. The man stops being dominant
for a moment. But it’s precisely here
that a glitch occurs. The man is suddenly “infected” by a virus and begins to lag.
The image that a second ago read
as a familiar hierarchy breaks apart.

What looked like roleplay suddenly prompts questions about the stand-in body.
Who is “real”? Who is directing the scene? Who is merely executing a script? “I.K.U.” unexpectedly rhymes with Brian De Palma’s “Body Double” (1984).

This connection is not literal but occurs through the mechanics of looking. Reality
is assembled from substitutions, staging,
and desire. The body on screen can turn out not to be a subject. Instead, it can be a screen onto which power is projected.

The most unsettling part is that perception clings to the visual codes established earlier. Even when control seems to swap places
on the surface, the structure of power doesn’t disappear. It simply changes its mask.

The episode with rubber dolls matters greatly. It represents the limit this logic reaches once the last justifications are removed. The doll
is a body without response, without gaze, without will: the dream of sex without a subject at all. It demands neither trust nor love, not even the imitation of reciprocity.

At this point, the work stops pretending
it is about “relationships.” What remains
is the bare infrastructure of desire. What
is needed is not a person but a surface without resistance, an interface
in the most literal sense.

And still, despite the apparent dominance
of the male gaze, Cheang keeps returning
the viewer to an uneasy question. Is the gaze here really unambiguous? Throughout
the work, a recurring phallic symbol moves inside a pink space.

It’s almost a comic-book sign of sex reduced to an icon. But what matters is not phallicity; it’s the position of vision: the gaze is directed from inside. The camera seems to look
from inside the woman — from inside
the vagina — and this produces a strange counter-optic. The phallus stops being
the center of power.

It becomes an object of observation
or scanning. Not “he looks,”
but “he is being shown.”

It’s no accident that institutions describe “I.K.U.” with two words at once
— “stereotypes” and “commodity.” The work hurts in two places at the same time. It shows how orientalist fantasy turns “East Asia”
into the stage design of desire. Additionally, late capitalism turns pleasure itself into data, a resource, an extractable deposit.

And that, perhaps, is “I.K.U.”:’s central effect today. The sexual revolution promised freedom. However, linguistic freedom never became the norm. Speaking about sex
out loud is still difficult. Shame, censorship, and automated ideas of “appropriateness” switch on too quickly. Even harder is speaking
about sex as a system. “I.K.U.” demonstrates this clearly. It pulls desire out of the romantic haze and shows it as infrastructure.
Here, the body is a device, intimacy
is a protocol, and the viewer becomes a component in the circuit.