2023-11-25 13:15:58
The black limousine glides silently through a deserted city landscape. Half-finished skyscrapers rise into the sky as silent beacons, crisscrossed by multi-story highways. Everything here is digital: Lawrence Lek’s “speculative fiction,” in which self-driving cars plagued by doubts and other dysfunctions play the main role, allows you to immerse yourself in the virtual worlds of gaming, film, music and architecture that the artist designed before he became an artist.
That’s exactly what his film installations want to convey: With their highly technical AI aesthetics, they appear smart, hyperaesthetic and… corporate, i.e. made by and for companies. Voice-overs and ambient music transport viewers to an urban universe controlled by intelligent machines. It’s about automation and surveillance, psychology and technology, perfection and failure. All of this looks like the art of tomorrow, created by an artist who a friend certified as an artist – for lack of other definitions of his computer-animated fantasy narratives. Lek was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1982, grew up in Singapore and Japan, among other places, and studied architecture in Cambridge, London and New York. He lives on the go.
Dream atmosphere in Berlin: Lawrence Lek’s “NOX”
Those: © Lawrence Lek/ Photo: Andrea Rossetti
Lek’s largest exhibition to date is currently taking place in a very analogue location in Berlin, the former Café Kranzler on Kurfürstendamm. At the end of the 1990s, a sporting goods store moved into the once prominent, charmingly domed 1950s building on the corner of the Zoo train station. The dreary building, which has escalators running through the middle, has now been cleared out by the LAS Art Foundation, which, as one of the most interesting private art initiatives in Berlin, has already used an old thermal power plant and the hall at Berghain with immersive future art.
Lek’s exhibition is called “NOX”, which refers to the “night” as a dark dream atmosphere and to the “non-human excellence” of the rehabilitation program, which is intended to get the wayward cars back on track. Film noir meets science fiction: You walk through the film-installation scenes of the show over three floors with headsets whose audio tracks react to the recorded areas via a sensor.
The course begins on the ground floor, where ghostly black limousines are parked in front of a large screen, surrounded by guardrails, which are then dismantled into their individual parts. First you follow the example in the film through the city, into the scrapyard and behind a galloping horse, listening to the vehicle’s questions about its own meaning. One floor up you can listen to the therapy bot from the all-seeing Farsight Corporation: It diagnoses the malady vehicle as having a certain level of hypersensitivity, from which a treatment plan is to be generated.
The narrative of the machine: Lawrence Lek repeatedly refers to classics of dystopian science fiction
What: Lawrence Lek
After all, autonomous cars are the main players in the smart city, in which there is no room for sensitivities such as fear of decay, defectiveness and unpopularity or for consideration of one’s own social role. Gazing at car headlights that have been cut out and thus strangely disembodied, you end up standing at the top of the rotunda next to a row of touch screens. Here you can now slip into the role of a Farsight employee and select different treatment methods for the car – as long as the whole thing works, because the technology is always a sobering reality check at such interactive exhibitions.
At the same time, dysfunctionality is the common thread of the show: the story of the Blade Runner on the hunt for life-hungry replicants, the narrative of the machine that suddenly develops bizarre peculiarities like Stanley Kubrick’s computer HAL, is as old as Frankenstein’s monster, which suddenly has feelings has – and so Lek, according to the accompanying text, is about “the ability to act, ethics and empathy in the coexistence between humans and machines”.
Now the question arises, why does a car of all things have to serve as a symbol of human doubts and the future as a computer-controlled high-tech cosmos? Maybe because, as a means of transportation and body enlargement, it represents progress par excellence – as a device that combines nostalgia and utopia and somehow fits in with the old world from which existential questions spill over.
Lek’s fictional Smart City, into which he also rendered the Kranzler Eck as the Farsight Corporation’s workshop quarters, is located on the “Great Silk Road”, which fits Lek’s idea and neologism of “Sinofuturism”: already in his interactive Sci -Fi video installation from 2017 was about AI and China as a new geopolitical mass media power.
World without people: At Lek, the car becomes an automated actor
What: Lawrence Lek
Farsight is a start-up in the automation industry that recruits employees with a question that sounds like it comes from Silicon Valley: “Who needs a work life balance, when it’s so much fun?” Lek transforms the fear of this Work replaced by robots into a fully automated gaming paradise where work has become leisure. Even with NOX, China is less of a threat, but rather represents an example of a world controlled by computers in which surveillance, automation and gamification have replaced humans. Instead, the machines now have human characteristics, so that they appear familiar and likeable. The fact that they could possibly be disposed of like the scrappy, albeit still stylish, limousines on the ground floor actually creates empathy in an absurd way. That also seems to be part of the game – controlling emotions is, after all, the main task of the Farsight Corporation.
Nevertheless: The coldness that lies behind all of this, visually and conceptually, cannot be shaken off. The business-trained smarts with which Lek moves through his sci-fi scenarios, which are sometimes ironic, sometimes melancholic, but always embrace the future, send shivers down your spine. Although he is represented by Sadie Coles HQ in London – and has been moving through the institutions for a good seven years, from the Julia Stoschek Foundation to the Ruhr Urban Arts to the Museion in Bolzano: You can feel that Lek doesn’t come from art, he does does not know the new historical context in depth. Even if that may not be a quality per se, this distance is exactly what art always needs in order to move forward and develop new languages - even if they quickly become obsolete in the world of games and artificial intelligence are.
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