Entering his latest exhibition, NOX, through the site of a roadside crash, Lawrence Lek invites us to explore his intoxicating vision of a fictional smart city on the brink of conscious awakening. His premise is this: in an anonymous smart city, the AI conglomerate Farsight Corporation, test and re-train their fleet of sentient self-driving cars gone wayward. While some of the vehicles have begun to question their role in society, others have begun to resist their future obsolescence. A sequence of architectural zones provide the framework for the cars’ multi-step rehabilitation programme before they are to be shipped out to new owners. Throughout the process, the cars’ memories, experiences and relationships with their parent company are explored. The exhibition culminates with an interactive video game through which visitors play the role of Farsight employees tasked with treating the errant vehicles.

The first project to combine all strands of his multidisciplinary practice on a grand architectural scale, this latest exhibition presented by LAS Art Foundation at Kranzler Eck incorporates sound, installation, game design and video across three floors of this former department store in Charlottenburg, Berlin. Transforming the space into an experiential futuristic universe, Lek leads us on a journey through a world populated by smart systems and intelligent nonhumans.

In NOX, we participate in an uneasy future, living in sync with artificial intelligence whilst still struggling to fully understand it. Lek’s extraordinary creative vision and talent for extrapolating scenarios enable him to test his audience with this genuinely thought- provoking experience. He complicates our already confused relationship with artificial intelligence, exploring the idea of AI as a sentient being that also seeks to understand and discover the world.

Kate Neave: Could you tell us what fundamentally interests you about artificial intelligence and why you choose to make work about it?
Lawrence Lek: A lot of my recent work has explored ideas around AI, but often from a slightly unconventional perspective. I’m thinking about AI as the latest incarnation of the human other. A lot of humanity’s hopes and fears are projected onto other human beings, other phenomena and other kinds of technologies. The reason I have been so interested in AI is not just in terms of technological progress, but because it relates to a lot of deeper cultural and historical issues I’m interested in connecting with East Asia, and a kind of technological post-colonial mindset.

KN: I’d love to know more about the roots of NOX because it builds on previous works, doesn’t it?
LL: Yes, in 2016 I was writing a script for a CGI film called Geomancer. That film was set in the year 2065 in Singapore and so I thought of having the protagonist as an AI satellite who was made in the country and was approaching the end of their lifecycle. As the satellite, the eponymous Geomancer, comes down to Singapore, they start to realise that the conditions in which they were made are not what they first thought. I was exploring one of the paradoxes of the super-intelligent life form: that they’re both hyper-aware and super-intelligent and at the same time completely disconnected from life on Earth. They really exist only as this observer. So, in essence, my interest in AI was in this disconnect between the intellectual life of the being and their inner life, their inner world, their feelings, thoughts, emotions, and psychological life.

KN: And that interest feeds straight into NOX?
LL: Yes, fast forward to NOX, which is this speculative program for fixing self-driving cars. I was really interested in the histories of AI that are more about communication rather than progress. So, for example, everything from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to the Turing test, to chatbots today and digital avatars. The idea of having this conversation with this other being has really been at the heart of my work. A character I had in Geomancer called Guanyin, the built-in therapist AI, is another main character in NOX.

KN: Could you talk us through a visit to the exhibition?
LL: The installation walks the audience through the show. You are given headphones and, based on where you are in the exhibition, a narrative unfolds. There’s a five day structure at play, which is the rehab program of the self-driving cars: day one is an inspection, day two is scanning, day three guidance training, and so on. You’re walking through with the soundtrack and at different moments the characters are speaking to each other, or speaking to you as the possible customer, or owner, or sponsor of these self- driving cars. The exhibition is interspersed with different videos at certain moments that are more cinematic. It moves from this installation of a frozen highway where there’s been a car crash, into the rehab centre on the first floor and then on the top floor there’s a game based on your experiences. The exhibition moves from a very experiential work embodied with the sound and movement of your own body to a more cinematic visual experience and into an interactive gameplay. It’s all hopefully melding together into one choreographed experience.

KN: How do you go about creating these speculative fictional environments?
LL: The way I think about things is a lot like a fiction writer, like a novelist. I think, how do I embody these characters? What is their inner world? What do they want? What’s going to play out? For NOX, obviously the work is about this rehab centre for self-driving cars but, at its core, I’m thinking about what it feels like to be on one hand super capable and super intelligent but also to be disciplined in this system that you have no control over.

KN: And you extrapolate a lot from real-world examples?
LL: Yes, I was looking at re-education and rehabilitation facilities for juveniles to inform the work. In legal terms, you can’t criminally punish a juvenile, you have to rehabilitate them. It’s a concept that goes back to the birth of the police system, Victorian school systems and all of these kinds of disciplinary structures that grew up around the same time. The other real-world thing I was looking at are really high-end rehab clinics. I was researching what happens at The Priory. I’m also really interested in the culture of wellness, whether it’s yoga or veganism and this idea of the industrialisation of the wellness industry and how that might work for AI with future problems. NOX in a way references these things, but also, I thought in a bit more of a playful sense about the tech itself. Let’s say your laptop gets broken and you go to the Apple Genius Bar and then five days later it comes back fixed. You don’t ask questions. You don’t care what’s been going on with the engineers and your machine behind the scenes. So, I asked myself what would happen with a self-driving car when they go in for servicing. It wouldn’t just be fixing up the steering and transmission, it would be going through this process of psychological evaluation.

KN: The work contains paradoxes in a way, on the one hand it’s quite playful but then on the other it’s obviously quite serious. Do you like to play on that paradox?
LL: The overall atmosphere of the work is very noir-like, basically. It’s dark and shadowy with these moments of revelation, not just visually but very much in terms of what’s really going on. I’m particularly interested in film noir, because I think it talks about the certain point in time when it came about. In some sense, NOX very simply is extremely existential in mood. It comes about not just from this idea of AI’s not knowing who they are, but it reflects human beings not knowing where we are at this particular moment in time. One thread through my work is this idea that there’s a fine line between being on an adventure and being lost. There’s an interest in exploration in a positive sense, but also the fear of the unknown in a negative sense and you’re constantly balancing these sensibilities. It’s a paradox I’m trying to strike and that has aesthetic implications as well.

KN: I read that you’ve actually started a real-life production company called Farsight and you envisage your artworks in relation to this real-world company, is that right?
LL: There’s this idea that some of my friends and I explore called ‘hyperstition’– it’s self-fulfilling science fiction basically. In a sense, it’s a form of breaking the fourth wall, for example when the author writes themselves into their play, or things like that. Geomancer is set in 2065 and I thought, to take that situation seriously, that future AI will watch this video essay about AI which was made from their point of view, 50 years in the past. We are written into our own time travel narrative. So I made a production company called Farsight, which is also the Singaporean company that made the AI and in some of my projects, Farsight is also a character as well. In NOX, Farsight is the AI company that has developed these self-driving cars and this rehabilitation programme for them. I was thinking about Farsight in the future as an influential AI company but it’s going to start out just making some weird videos for our institutions today.

KN: I love that real-world connection you’re setting up there.
LL: In a sense, it also helped me as a writer. I’m thinking, I know what I would do as an artist, but what would the Farsight CEO do? Of course they would have a self-help AI for their cars because it makes business sense, just as employees get occupational health and dental care. So, it helped me think how a company owner would think and that is the kind of world-building logic of how, frankly, capitalism functions. So Farsight is also another character, but it’s also a kind of another incarnation of me.

KN: To what extent are you actually using AI to create the artworks themselves?
LL: I’ve been looking a lot at different AI techniques. There’s a whole spectrum of ways to create AI output, from essentially fully automated generation where you input a prompt and the outputs just come up, to different levels of training to guide the output. In the case of NOX, very little is AI-generated, except for the voices, which are a new kind of vocal synthesis technique, basically a deep learning type AI. In Geomancer, there was an early video generation I was working with alongside my friend Terence Broad, who’s an artist and machine-learning engineer as well. In different projects I’ve used VOCALOID, which is a singing voice AI that Yamaha makes – a virtual idol singing software basically. So sometimes there are AI tools, like the vocal generation, or maybe a neural network tool that I might want to integrate into the process, and other times maybe not.

KN: How does the existence of AI affect your role as a creator?
LL: I think part of the challenge with AI-generated work is that it puts the creator in the position of curator or selector. So creating work becomes almost like botany or something, where you’re trying to crossbreed things to create the right outcome and then choose from that. I guess, personally, this idea of system design and selection isn’t really my instinct. I prefer having an intuitive sense of assembling things together in this almost collage-like way.

KN: There’s a lot of talk about how AI is a threat to creativity, do you see it that way or is it more of a collaborative situation?
LL: I think it’s such a complex issue because there’s creativity as an ideal, then there’s creative industries as a labour force, and those two things are very closely aligned but slightly separate. I think in terms of a threat, I suppose to use that word, I think it poses more of a threat to labour, and rights, affecting outsourcing and minimum wage and things like that. I feel like I wouldn’t phrase it as a threat to creativity as such. I think it’s a challenge for our creative process somehow.

KN: How do you want your work to influence your audience’s attitude to AI?
LL: What I hope is that people will come on a journey with me. My team and I have done our best to craft a journey that is as open-ended and as experientially rich as possible. With the idea of this rehabilitation centre with compassion at its core, we want to create a feeling that these other future forms of life will be as worthy of concern as anything that exists now. As a society, we have this kind of schizophrenic attitude towards AI. It’s amazing or it’s terrible. The real paradox is that all these hopes and fears around AI that relate to it being a threat or a saviour are all from us. Whatever we channel into the field will determine the outcome. It goes back to this hyperstitional idea. I’m trying to create a world where AI is both of these things. That’s what I hope the work is about, it’s beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

All images in this feature NOX, 2023, courtesy of the artist and commissioned by LAS Art Foundation.
Interview originally published inside The HERO Winter Annual 2023.