Take the Red Pill

How powerfully do technologies affect the social and normative mechanisms of our bodies? This is the question at the heart of RED PILL, the multimedia installation created by the artist Shu Lea Cheang and presented in the exhibition HOPE. The work has become part of Museion’s permanent collection thanks to PAC2021 – the Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity in which it was selected as one of the winning projects.

Swallow the Red Pill, offered by the biotech company Genom Corporation, and two things happen. Firstly, you enjoy a new level of weirdly intense bodily pleasure, simply by shaking hands with people. Secondly, Genom Corporation is able to use the information processing capacity of your body to store, send and compute data. Watch as new contact habits spread through society, and new control mechanisms run like wildfire through people’s bodies. Oh, and, by the way, once you have taken the Red Pill, Genom will have the right of ownership to your body.

This is the scenario foreshadowed in a series of artworks that act as drivers for Shu Lea Cheang’s viral alt-reality science fiction movie UKI.

This film is an extraordinary tour de force that imagines a world ruled by giant corporations, in which scavengers live in immense dumps of electronic waste, where cyborgs and androids move dutifully amongst the lives of everyday citizens, until the tragic day they are made obsolete. This cyberpunk imagery is coupled with a queer attitude towards sexual pleasure and the mechanisms that calculate who or what is counted as human or valuable. Needless to say, in the film, nothing stays still, nothing goes quite according to plan and resistance learns to take new forms. There is no Hollywood ending where justice is restored, and the good guys win hands down. The story also illustrates the different ways in which technology, pleasure and power are always intertwined, sometimes in unexpected ways. Alongside this, UKI blends live actors, computer-generated landscapes, and appropriations of art historical images, such as the cityscapes of Edward Hopper or Stelarc’s robotic ‘third arm’, to build a rich intertext about art and the intensification of perception that art strives to create. The Red Pill installation is made up of two elements. There are three giant 3D-printed pills (each a meter long) containing 3D-printed replica blood cells. Then there is a video advertisement made by Genom, who have altered human cell DNA to adapt people’s bodies to their platform. The advertisement presents the system as reliable, fun and useful, but it is somehow also profoundly menacing. It consists of a series of computer images. First, two schematically rendered hands clasp each other while the sound of a 1990s ‘hardware handshake’ between modems plays in the background. Then, the hands move apart and blue data particles flow upwards. As the sound of the first stage of the handshake changes to the white noise of communicating computers, the image transforms into a torrent of circulating red cells and a chemical diagram swirls above the image. Three blood vessels spring open and a flood of cells pours towards the viewer, eventually falling into two halves of a capsule which slams shut. A slogan then appears under the image of a pill filled with writhing cells, saying: ‘Red Pill by Genom. Your Pleasure Our Business’.

The theme of pills appears in different ways at various points in Cheang’s work. In the net art project Brandon (1998-1999), multi-colored capsules are associated with hedonic escape from sexual regimentation, but their colors are so bright and simple, they are also a warning to be cautious. In 3x3x6, the multi-faceted installation at the Venice Biennale in 2019, pills stamped with symbols celebrating political and sexual freedoms appear cartoonish and exuberant. Then, Red Pill takes us in yet another direction.

Art has always depicted the world around us as a means of reflecting on what happens inside us, in terms of emotion, perception, and experience. With Red Pill, Shu Lea Cheang invites us to reflect on what we might imagine ingesting as a way of thinking about the world around us. What do we swallow when we accept the world as it is?

Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954, Taiwan, CN) lives and works between Taiwan, France and the United States.
A multimedia artist and digital art pioneer, she explores social, political and geographical mechanisms in her work by redefining their limits and boundaries and feeding on science fiction, gender hacking, viral infection theories and video games. The artist took part in the “Kingdom of the Ill” exhibition (Museion, 2021-2022) with the work UKI Virus Rising (2018) and the HOPE exhibition (Museion, 2023-2024) features her work Red Pill, described in the text above.

Matthew Fuller is a cultural theorist who focuses on art, science, politics, and aesthetics. His latest book, written with Eyal Weizman, is entitled “Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth”, (Verso 2021). He is professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.