In the years leading up to the 1994 premiere of Shu Lea Cheang’s queer sci-fi feature Fresh Kill, New York City was a place of friction. While Wall Street reaped the benefits of an economic boom, the rest of the city was ravaged by the fallout from the AIDS epidemic, urban housing crises, and rampant substance abuse. Despite the efforts of artists and activists organizing resistance against a corporate monoculture, New York City kept shifting into a global capitalist wasteland where nothing was too sacred to be sold. The media had little interest in the power grab taking place by wealthy white elites and demonstrations of tens of thousands in the streets resulted in little more than minor mentions on the nightly news. And then, the internet was born.

Fresh Kill is a neon-green love letter to what was then the new world of hacktivism, a playful form of civil disobedience attempting to disrupt and infiltrate the technological systems that control modern life by replacing algorithms with abstraction and logic with poetry. Through an understated narrative about a lesbian couple and their daughter, the film launches a dense and searing critique of the racist ethno-policies keeping marginalized New Yorkers sick and developing countries saddled with the waste of wealthier Westernized nations. The film, which describes itself as “eco-cyber-noia” on the official poster, has no singular motive or message. It’s a flickering vision of hope and a toxic prediction of the future more than a traditional narrative-driven film, an experience reminiscent of late-night channel surfing when the antenna is not quite high enough. And it demands viewers simply surrender to its radioactive waves.

Thirty years after its premiere, Cheang is re-introducing her pioneering cyberpunk classic to a brand new audience with the hope that its message reverberates to the younger generation struggling with the same issues she continues to rally against. This month, she took a newly restored 35mm print of the film on a cross-country road trip with 20 stops from Maine to California. On her way to Austin for the September 21 screening at Austin Film Society, she spoke to me about the film’s long and prescient life in the cultural canon.

Somewhere between Atlanta and New Orleans, she recalls the process for funding an experimental independent film by a first-time feature filmmaker. “Fundraising was never an easy process,” she wrote via email. “In the '90s in New York City, we had a community of independent filmmakers all struggling in getting funds for the movies they wanted to make. Accidentally, I became a ‘legitimate’ artist with my first artwork ever.”

Cheang is being modest when she describes her legitimacy as an artist. Color Schemes, the artwork she’s referencing, is a one-channel video showing 12 people of color speaking simultaneously about their experiences assimilating into white American culture. The video is shown on a monitor inside of a tumbling washing machine. The piece, which is part of a larger body of work, accidentally granted her a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1990 and an appearance in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. “These exhibitions helped me secure some funding from art resources, like the New York State Council On The Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and later public television funding from Channel 4 UK and ITVS,” Cheang shared. “The content of my work, with its major critique on environmental racism, was considered an area that could be further explored.”

Cheang, born in 1954 in Taiwan, has spent her entire career drawing attention to the inequities of worldwide environmental racism. Her particular frustrations are with the global one-way stream of industrial waste forcing developing countries to take on thousands of tons of trash from wealthier nations.

As the protagonists of Fresh Kill, lesbian couple Shareen and Claire, go about their junk-laden lives, a ferry carting 17,000 tons of garbage from Manhattan to the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island floats menacingly around the city’s coasts. So much waste causes the sky to be tinged crimson and fish in the surrounding Atlantic to become toxic. The lips of these contaminated fish have become a prized delicacy in the upscale sushi restaurant where Claire waitresses. Parallel to Manhattan’s unceremonious dumping are shots of the beautiful Orchid Island, home to over five thousand indigenous Taiwanese people, the Tao. Here, the Taiwanese government drops its nuclear waste onto this island—some 8,000 miles away from New York City, but a clear reminder that America is not the only guilty party in poisoning its own citizens.

None of the issues Cheang spoke out against in Fresh Kill and her art practice have gone away, but the tools artists and activists can use to fight them have evolved. At the time of its production and premiere, Fresh Kill presented the internet as the ultimate strategy to resist the systems affecting individual sovereignty and autonomy. Using only a rotary phone and dial-up, Claire’s co-worker, a quiet sushi chef named Jiannbin Lui, hacks into a satellite to form a global alliance with a group of African activists. But today, virtual civil disobedience has been distilled and watered down to effortless actions such as liking and retweeting on social media. I asked Cheang if she still saw cyberactivism as being as relevant and useful as it was in the early 90s.

“By 2002, there was a declaration that ‘net art is dead,’” she replied. “We have lost the internet to the attention economy. The web is now a minefield triggered by countless ads and cookies. We are tracked and traced. We accept the corporate terms and willingly upload our data while negotiating access.”

Perhaps predicting the privatized big-tech monopoly the internet has since become, Fresh Kill depicts modern existence as frenetic and splintered between real life and commercial breaks. Every facet of life is controlled by the same mega-corporation, from the products sold in grocery stores to the nightly news report. Scenes of Shareen and Claire’s domestic bliss are broken up by literal “break-ins” of product advertisements. Talk show hosts sell dildos in-between warnings of impending environmental disaster. Faceless corporate gods narrate high-camp cat food commercials with patronizing promises that “they care,” despite the fish causing those who consume it to glow green and disappear. News reports end with a nefarious sign-off: “we inform.” They never specify who or what they care about, but the phrase “we care” is repeated in a hypnotizing drone enough times to lull away any potential desires to break away from the solidifying mold of labor and capital making people pliant to corporate control. “Control equals freedom,” a text flashes on the screen.

Though the toxic fish are eventually outlawed, it’s clear by the film’s end that nothing has really changed. The corporation responsible simply rebrands with a new name and declares itself environmentally friendly. Green equals greed.

Like a cinematic Trojan horse, Cheang plays with and subverts traditional filmmaking at every opportunity. Many of her creative choices are intentional infiltrations into Hollywood-style films, as if Fresh Kill is a subliminal message beamed unexpectedly onto theater screens. Despite the film being so experimental, she describes the choice to use 35mm, versus 16mm which was cheaper and more common for experimental projects at the time, as an intentional attempt to look more like a Hollywood film. The film also refuses the traditional three-act story structure and instead opts for a disjointed, meandering series of vignettes with most of the ‘action’ occurring in the last thirty minutes.

The film’s dialogue is dense and varies stylistically between the infomercial-finance speak of the corporate employees and the poetic techno-Shakespearean dialect of those in the resistance. Meaning can be hard to glean and answers are not freely given, especially on a first watch. Despite the mental heft required to follow the loose plot, there’s a lightness and humor to the action that helps it move through some of the denser moments. Glitches abound both aesthetically and conceptually.

In terms of genre, Fresh Kill creates its own. Cheang refers to the film as “Sci-Fi New Queer Cinema,” which references “New Queer Cinema,” a genre coined by film theorist B. Ruby Rich to describe politically-oriented films with strong visual innovation such as the works of Derek Jarman, Cheryl Dunye, and Isaac Julien.

When asked if she sees something inherently queer about science fiction, Cheang proposed that queerness is inseparable from our real-life understandings of technology and the body. “We are part of a science fiction playing out with bio-informatics, bio-engineering and mobile digital media,” she said. “We have departed from gender binary and deviated into transgenic discourse. Adding queer to science fiction is an awakening in our brave new ecosystem.”

On Cheang’s absurdist voyage, the past is the future. There’s no question that the film is still painfully relevant today and deserving of renewed attention. Whether we need a guide on how to live in a capitalist wasteland or a final alarm before impact, Fresh Kill is a friendly reminder that we travel this disastrous road together.

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Past Is Future: A Retrospective on Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill