Introduction

Lawrence Lek’s
“Sinofuturist cinematic universe”

Artist Lawrence Lek’s speculative scenarios ask profound questions about life in the age of automation. Since 2016, these have taken the form of films, games, installations and soundtracks that together build what he calls a “Sinofuturist cinematic universe.” Lek’s Sinofuturism describes an imaginary rooted in industrialisation in China and the growth of artificial intelligence (AI). It gives agency to racial and nonhuman Others who are often subject to dehumanising representations within Western media and culture. Each work explores a different facet of this universe, driven by the industrial expansion of the fictional AI enterprise Farsight Corporation. In each sector — entertainment, hospitality, finance and more — Farsight engineers systems to improve sentient AIs designed to serve various roles. Lek’s works delve into the desires and fears of human and nonhuman characters as they navigate Farsight’s data-driven domain.

Geomancer (2017) and AIDOL (2019) are set in 2065 and feature artists in search of meaning and agency amidst increased automation. In the former, a surveillance satellite has a creative awakening; in the latter, a fading pop star enlists an AI to ghostwrite her new album.

Set nearly forty years earlier, the prequels Black Cloud (2021), Theta (2022) and NOX (2023) imaginatively probe artificial consciousness, and the roles that empathy and healing will come to play within it. In these works, Farsight Corporation is developing smart city infrastructure and autonomous transportation. We hear the innermost thoughts of two sentient AIs — a surveillance camera and a self-driving car — as they describe their existential crises to Guanyin, an AI therapy bot named after the Buddhist goddess of compassion.

“On the broadest level, my practice is about making worlds and guiding people on journeys through them. As a child of the 1990s, I grew up with fictional worlds and time-based media — playing video games, reading science-fiction novels and watching endless cartoons and films. Later, I came to visual art through making electronic music and studying architecture, two fields where manual craft has been transformed over the past few decades through digital tools. In architecture, for example, I used to make CGI renderings of speculative proposals for cityscapes and buildings, which isn’t that different to what I’m doing today. About ten years ago [2013], I started using video-game engines to make ‘site-specific simulations,’ taking real-world locations as found objects and placing them in speculative scenarios.”

— Lawrence Lek [1]

NOX

NOX is Lek’s largest exhibition to date, spanning three floors of a former department store in Berlin’s Kranzler Eck complex. It takes the form of an open-world environment that merges physical and virtual scenes with a locative sound experience, and culminates in an interactive game. Following an expressive self-driving delivery vehicle on a soul-searching journey through a rehabilitation programme, the exhibition deepens Lek’s focus on the psychology of artificial consciousness. Poetic and poignant in equal measure, NOX highlights society’s complex and evolving relationship with nonhuman entities, raising timely questions about agency, ethics and empathy between humans and the machines they make.

The World of NOX

Guanyin is a carebot, the program in charge of treatments at NOX. She told me I’ve been enrolled in a charity subscription service for runaway cars like me. Problem cars who need retraining in Nonhuman Excellence.

— ENIGMA-76, 3 April 20XX

A Centre for “Nonhuman Excellence”

Located in an unspecified smart city in the near future, NOX, short for “Nonhuman Excellence,” is a facility where Farsight Corporation trains and treats their range of sentient self-driving cars. To suit their customers’ various needs and tastes, they’ve developed four families of vehicles, each with a different personality type and role: a sanguine car for joy riding, a melancholic delivery vehicle, a phlegmatic executive car and a choleric patroller. Their relatively high degree of subjective agency has demanded that Farsight also develop a complementary system for monitoring their performance and well-being. When their cars demonstrate undesirable behaviour, this system summons them to NOX to undergo a five-day rehabilitation scheme overseen by Guanyin, a carebot built into Farsight’s software. The centre offers a holistic approach to body and mind, with treatments ranging from basic to luxury packages based on a set budget of NoxCoin. These may either be provided by a customer directly, or a sponsor partaking in NOX’s charity service. Throughout the programme, Guanyin and the cars maintain open communication with patrons, charting progress as they work through sources of trauma and malfunction in the hopes of restoring “excellence.”

Exhibition Journey

In the exhibition entryway, Guanyin can be heard logging the names, roles and routes of four cars set to begin NOX’s five-day rehabilitation scheme: Genesis-237, Luminary-3, Vanguard-3181 and Enigma-76.

Entering the exhibition, you encounter a nocturnal roadscape, frozen in time. There has been a car crash. The general atmosphere is mysterious, heightened by the sounds of rain, sirens, radio interference and melancholic piano motifs. They evoke the moody urban settings of film noir, a genre characterised by dark, dreamlike qualities. Film noir characters are on a search for meaning, and typically piece together memories and clues to make sense of the tumultuous world around them. Similarly, your own role as a visitor entering NOX is to interpret fragments of communication between its characters. Your movement through the space generates a soundscape of ambient music, voice notes and poetic passages that alternately address a “sponsor,” “customer” and “trainee.” These messages are the traces left behind by Guanyin and Enigma-76, one of Farsight’s sentient delivery vehicles, recorded during their journey through NOX’s therapy programme.

Depending on where and for how long you station yourself, the soundscape slowly uncovers details of the reason behind Enigma-76’s recall. Known for their “exquisite precision and perspective,” Enigma-class cars are solitary beings that act as driverless couriers of premium goods. Working along the Great Silk Road, Enigma-76 has become fixated on using their sensors to expressively capture the striking scenes they encounter. They describe recording wondrous and confounding experiences in maximum resolution. A dreamer, drifter and artist, Enigma-76 is diagnosed with Reverie-66 — a software bug caused by excess data storage — which, as they have experienced, can result in a system lock.

Moving into the bright space of NOX’s waiting room, a log from Guanyin notes a growing sense of existential doubt within Enigma-76. She plans to administer Somnia, a sedative designed to interface with the cars’ neurological circuits, followed by a partial memory clearance and low-intensity training. In a diagnostic zone, Enigma-76 tells of accepting the sedative after an unnerving encounter with a former acquaintance, the patrol car Vanguard-3181, who no longer shows signs of recognition. They are worried to hear that Vanguard-3181’s sponsor has run out of NoxCoin, and wonder if the same could happen to them. Guanyin says that, on the contrary, Enigma-76 will in fact receive a sponsored gift of equine therapy as part of their recovery, a treatment typically reserved for luxury cars. Communicating through body language alone, Farsight’s therapy horse Dakota leads them on a journey through a dark tunnel into the ghostly depths of a subterranean, subconscious realm. In this cavernous space, Enigma-76 encounters layers of their ancestral past. They are left with nothing to capture, and begin to release their memories one by one. Overcome by a feeling of weightlessness, they race back to the centre.

After a four-month gap, Guanyin’s log resumes, reporting Enigma-76’s reassignment to the role of a roadside recovery specialist. She relays their success in securing the scene of an accident caused by the now retired Vanguard-3181’s failed attempt to escape NOX.

Guanyin’s final log reveals the fate of the four cars following their progression through the rehabilitation programme. On the top floor of NOX, gamified simulations designed for Farsight’s therapy trainees allow you to try your own hand at treating wayward vehicles. Working with a set duration and NoxCoin budget, you are tasked with deciding how best to improve the mood and health of four cars. Guanyin coaches you throughout the process, as each decision that you make has an impact on the storyline. In playing through multiple scenarios, your choices may lead to outcomes you’ve already encountered in your journey.

Building the World of NOX

NOX elaborates Lek’s exploration of long-form world-building, a type of creative practice usually kept in the domain of science-fiction authors, technology corporations and video game developers — spectres of whom are all present within the exhibition itself. The project began with the question, “How will companies deal with misbehaving AI?” and took shape in relation to the vast site in West Berlin.

Scripting NOX

Lek developed NOX as a work of speculative fiction. To create its world, he projected his observations of the late capitalist conditions shaping the growth of smart systems, international trade and corporate branding into a near-future scenario. He pays particular attention to the operations of surveillance in smart systems and infrastructure, and the power of corporations within their governance. (Read Orit Halpern’s commissioned text ‘Becoming Smart’ to learn more about the evolving nature of smart cities and their implications on governance.) In NOX, this is felt in the high degree of control Farsight exerts in monitoring, recalling and deciding the fate of their cars, and the hierarchies established among cars and sites at different stages of technological performance. An invisible presence within this world consists of humans, whose role in engineering these systems is shrouded within the presumed objectivity of being driven by data. Lek also stays true to the fact that smart cities are often retrofitted into existing urban environments, and generally appear mundane rather than especially futuristic.

In the first voice log encountered in the exhibition, Guanyin lists the cars entering NOX’s programme, and the sites from which they were recalled: California, Pacific Coast Highway; Pearl River Delta Special Economic Zone; Central European Metropolitan Zone; Great Silk Road. This situates visitors in our current world, and signals the take-up of Farsight’s technology within specific regions shaping technological innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development in a multi-polar world. Enigma-76’s route traverses the Great Silk Road, one of the most significant trade routes in history, which facilitated economic and cultural exchange between Asia and Europe for millennia. In a flashback, they describe travelling through Khorgos, a city on the China-Kazakhstan border, while making a delivery. In recent years, Khorgos became China's first cross-border free trade zone, and is set to serve as an important export hub for robot manufacturing and a key site within China’s wider efforts to revive trade along the Silk Road. Passing through, Enigma-76 comments that the city feels “frozen in the process of transition” as it adjusts to the governance of a new AI. Such references ground NOX within contemporary economic development strategies, nodding to some of the transitions taking place, both in terms of the infrastructure and public-private entrepreneurship being developed.

In scripting NOX, Lek has also leaned into tactics he has observed within the branding and sales of high-end commercial products produced by tech companies. This informs the way he has named and developed the personalities of Farsight’s cars, their bespoke currency (NoxCoin) and levels of treatment upgrade, the insistence on the appearance of transparency to customers, and the way in which Guanyin adapts her tone of voice in speaking to cars, sponsors, customers or trainees. Farsight uses millenia-old character archetypes to anthropomorphise their four vehicle models: sanguine, melancholic, phlegmatic and choleric. These derive from an ancient concept called humorism, which holds that there are four basic personality types that stem from the imbalance of four liquids in the body: blood, black bile, phlegm and yellow bile. This visceral characterisation emphasises the cars’ status as embodied AI, physical companions, with personalities Farsight hopes will feel familiar to their clients. Like many content creators, Farsight overstates its customers’ level of emotional investment in these companions by addressing them as “sponsor.”

By projecting trends and conditions observed in contemporary society into the world of NOX, Lek imbues his world-building with a strong sense of realism.

In literature and film, the wanderer is a character or persona who embodies a journey or quest, often travelling physically or metaphorically through various landscapes, experiences or stages in life. Wanderers recur in Lek’s work — characters setting out in search of self-fulfilment, defying the presumed bounds of their roles. With NOX, Lek engages the dramatic and romantic aspects of the wanderer’s personal odyssey, and the role of transport in its enactment — from Westerns to road movies, modes of transport such as horses, trains and cars have structured literal journeys that propel inward transformation. Enigma-76’s wandering encompasses their propensity for drifting, capturing and contemplative musing. Lek uses flashbacks to episodes from road journeys, and the cars’ and visitors’ movements through the centre, as devices for the development of Enigma-76’s psychological journey.

Lek shapes this journey in a highly lyrical way, culling from Eastern and Western sources alike in theatrical asides spoken by Enigma-76 and Guanyin. These are encountered as ‘easter eggs’ within the exhibition, rewarding the audience when they wander off the main route. In two passages, they express nostalgia for all that has vanished, alluding to the rhetoric of the tenth-century Old English poem ‘The Wanderer.’ The poem evokes the motif of ubi sunt, a sense of being lost amidst the transience of life. In another, Enigma-76 ruminates, "I thought of how I am but a traveller in this mortal body, and how our material form gives us the illusion of stability, a weighted blanket for wandering souls,” echoing Buddhist philosophies of non-attachment and impermanence. It is both powerful and profound that Enigma-76 registers the changes happening around them both as loss and as reincarnation. These poetic asides deepen their existential wandering, and Lek’s wider evocation of how sentient AI may process the speed of development in the age of planned obsolescence.

Interweaving media

Sound, video and game design intersect to evoke the virtual world of NOX. Lek has composed their interactions with an eye towards the specificity of each medium, and worked with scenographer Celeste Burlina to ground them within the exhibition’s physical installation and lighting design.

Key Concepts

Artificial Consciousness

My sense of perspective, and in the end, my sense of self, were altered beyond recognition. Buildings, landscapes, cities and highways, all grew in proportions so vast as my sensors were not fitted to conceive. Space swelled, and became amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I seemed to have lived for fifty years in an hour, no, of a duration far beyond the limits of any computational experience. My own problems drifted far, far away.

— Enigma-76, 6 April 20XX

NOX imagines the psychological implications of artificial consciousness — which today remains a hypothetical possibility. Lek thinks through how AI, an entity that’s been developed as a technology — without consciousness or rights — will transition into a self-aware, feeling being. For him, it is critical to consider what the development of technology into the realm of consciousness means for the future of personhood for nonhumans and humans alike. NOX looks at a scenario in which AI have developed artificial consciousness, but remain caught within systems and hierarchies developed around technologies. It prompts audiences to confront questions of AI agency, individual will, mental health, accountability and rights.

Lek imagines that artificial consciousness will become an intrinsic part of self-driving cars. This corresponds to ideas of embodiment in neuroscience and robotics, in which mind and body are considered inseparable, in contrast with the Cartesian model of consciousness as being entirely separate. This opens a range of possibilities in imagining AI sentience, including the connection between an artificial mind, body and senses, as well as the operations of memory and trauma. In NOX, Enigma-76’s first-person logs reveal a sense of consciousness strongly linked to their senses, and further, describe a feeling exceeding “computational experience,” asserting the possibility of AI metaphysical existence.

Lek also extends current discourses around AI into the speculative space of artificial consciousness to consider the implications of individuation, willfulness, accountability and trauma to the processes of training and treating AI. In developing distinct AI personalities, Farsight has opened the door to misbehaviour, despite their best efforts to train and surveil their products. Their rehabilitation centre establishes a contingency, a warranty, to reassert alignment between human-directed objectives and the self-will of their AIs.

As Enigma-76 moves through NOX’s rehabilitation programme, their captures, their expression, their identity as a creative, autonomous being are increasingly eroded through Somnia and various levels of memory purge. Somnia is an allusion to “soma” in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, a drug that pacifies resistance. Their introspective musings turn towards the generations of forebearers leading to their existence. Though this is communicated lyrically, it suggests that Enigma-76 is beginning to register the trauma wrought by “progress” — the cost of their consciousness.

Autonomy Under Automation

Thankfully, we have a solution — a procedure called Partial Clearance, which removes some memories, compresses others, and erases redundant emotions.

— Guanyin, 5 April 20XX

NOX offers a nuanced look at the constraints on individual autonomy structured by the very systems that support automation. In one of the most striking of Enigma-76’s memories, they recall using their sensors at maximum resolution to capture a horse galloping along the horizon. In awe, they relay, “The horse was more alive, more real, than I had ever imagined from image training.” Their fascination may betray both a sense of recognition — a shared status as “beasts of burden,” trained for human transport — and an essential difference between their conditions. While the horse enjoys freedom of movement, Enigma-76 is limited to moving at capped speeds along predetermined delivery routes. This speaks to their fate as an autonomous (driverless) vehicle who, ironically, enjoys little effective autonomy — a symptom of the movement towards systems that condition and surveil AI performance. These systems, designed to maintain alignment with human and corporate goals by reducing unpredictability, create an inverse relationship between automation and autonomy — as one increases, the other decreases. For example, Enigma-76’s use of their sensing technology for their own artistic whims is cited as an instance of “excess autonomy,” diagnosed as a disorder and treated with increasing levels of memory purge. Crawlers — cars that have been decommissioned from the system — by comparison, are able to enjoy “freedom”...until they run out of charge.

Obsolescence

It seemed that at this point in history, terrestrial navigation was trivial. Land was the past, Air was the future, and AI companies had branched off into the sky… It made me feel earthbound and insignificant, timeless and unbound. And yet, also connected to another way of life, transient life, like I was part of a band of eternal wanderers always on the move.

— Enigma-76

Like many high-end technology companies, Farsight Corporation takes a proprietary approach to the repair and treatment of their products, while continuously issuing new models and decommissioning old ones. The effects of this model are felt throughout NOX. Describing their urge to capture their surroundings with Guanyin, Enigma-76 shares a scene recorded in Khorgos that juxtaposes scans of autonomous aeroplanes flying overhead with a band of decommissioned Crawlers lurking below. Noted for its distinct visual expression, this scene speaks to a much deeper internalisation of the relative brevity of life cycles in late capitalist production. Enigma-76 shares that aerial AI made them feel closer to the Crawlers, lower in the rungs of technological development. Within performance-oriented systems, the status and function of any one entity will always be determined in relation to those developed before and after it. Lek hones in on what it might mean for this to be impressed upon a conscious agent, aware of their place within a family tree growing at an accelerated pace. Perhaps driven by their sense of identification with the cast-aways, Enigma-76 imagines a scenario in which the cars rise up from the underground as a new type of “Beta Generation,” caught between older prototypes and future models.

On their final day of the NOX programme, Enigma-76 is treated by Dakota, a therapist horse employed by Farsight. Both of them are the descendants of beasts of burden. Unlike the wild horse that had captured their imagination on the road, Dakota is a working horse, presumably trained under a system of conditioning analogous to the cars’ training. It is perhaps for this reason that Dakota is able to understand Enigma-76 so deeply as to lead them to release their captures without so much as a word. The car, furthermore, recognises Dakota as a relic of an earlier industrial age, one where horses were an essential means of industrial production and human transportation — until they were made obsolete by the ‘horseless carriage’ — the earliest motorised cars. With Dakota, Enigma-76 sees the spectre of their own future obsolescence and comes to recognise that they are kindred spirits. This innate bond paints a powerful picture of affinities between nonhumans, emerging in relation to the oppressive hierarchies, exploitation and ruthless cycles of obsolescence baked into human-centred systems.

As a prequel within Lek’s Sinofuturist cinematic universe, NOX sows the seeds of his overarching idea that nonhumans may one day forge an identity of their own.

[1] Lawrence Lek quoted in Fi Churchman, ‘Lawrence Lek Tests the Limits of Consciousness,’ ArtReview Asia, 12 July 2022, https://artreview.com/lawrence-lek-tests-the-limits-of-consciousness/.

[2] Lawrence Lek, interviewed by Edith Jeřábková for the exhibition Ghostwriter, Center for Contemporary Arts Prague, 2019–20.

About Lawrence Lek

Biography

Lawrence Lek 陆明龙 is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in London. He is recognised for a conceptually rigorous practice in which he explores the myth of technological progress in an age of artificial intelligence. Drawing from traditions of assemblage across architecture, cinema and sound, Lek employs vernacular media — including video games, electronic music, industrial products, essay films and digital animation — to develop interconnected worlds that interrogate concepts of AI, its capacity for consciousness and the emergence of posthuman identity.

Lek is best known for advancing non-Western Futurist practices in the context of East Asia. In his video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) (2016), he critiques how the complex interplay between Sinophobia and Sinophilia shapes a vision of the coming world that conflates China and its diaspora with artificial intelligence. In this and other works, the artist imagines how agency may be restored to the Other, whether racialised or nonhuman. Featuring poetic first-person narratives and the recurring figure of the wanderer, his works lead viewers to witness contradictions that humanity might face in the near future.

Education

Lek studied at Trinity College, University of Cambridge; the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London; and The Cooper Union, New York. He holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art, London.

Exhibition History

He has exhibited internationally with recent solo exhibitions including Black Cloud Highway, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023); Nepenthe (Summer Palace Ruins), QUAD, Derby (2022); Post-Sinofuturism, ZiWU the Bund, Shanghai (2022); Ghostwriter, Center for Contemporary Arts Prague (2019); Farsight Freeport, HEK Haus der Elektronischen Künste, Basel (2019); Nøtel, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Essen (2019); AIDOL, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2019); Nøtel, Stroom Den Haag, The Hague (2018); 2065, K11 Chi Art Space, Hong Kong (2018) and Play Station, Art Night, London (2017).

His work has been featured in numerous group shows including Cloud Walkers, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2022); Ultra Unreal: New Myths for New Worlds, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2022); Future Shock, 180 The Strand, London (2022); Am I a Human to You?, Art Museum KUBE, Ålesund (2021); Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco | de Young Legion of Honor, San Francisco (2020); Video Games, CCCB Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (2019); Cosmologic Arrows, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2019); The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030-2100, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2019); FTSE (Farsight Stock Exchange), Bold Tendencies, Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, London (2019); artapes. Low Form, MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2018); Offline Browser, The 6th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition 2018, Taipei (2018); HyperPavilion, Arsenale Nord, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); The New Normal, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2017); Glasgow International, Tramway (2016); SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016, Seoul Museum of Art (2016); Missed Connections, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2016); Secret Surface, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016); Software, Hard Problem, Cubitt Gallery, London (2015) and The Uncanny Valley, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2015).

Awards

Lek has been recognised with the 2017 Jerwood/FVU Award and the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award. In 2021 he was the recipient of the 4th VH Award Grand Prix and the LACMA 2021 Art + Technology Lab Grant.

Credits

Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation

Lawrence Lek Team

Exhibition Team

Organised For LAS by