Lawrence Lek, Non-human Perspectives
interview by Angelica Moschin
A multimedia artist, filmmaker, and musician, Lawrence Lek (b. 1982, Frankfurt, based in London) explores virtual reality using computer-generated imagery that he describes as “three-dimensional collages of found objects and situations drawn from observed reality”. In this interview, Lek discusses his work with Angelica Moschin.
ANGELICA MOSCHIN: Can you introduce the subject of your recent exhibition AIDOL at Sadie Coles HQ? Fantastical architecture, sentient drones and snow-deluged jungles. Where do they stem from? Can you tell me how the idea behind them came about?
LAWRENCE LEK:
AIDOL is a featurelength CGI film about Diva, a fading superstar, who enlists the help of an AI songwriter to make a comeback performance at the 2065 eSports Olympics. It’s the sequel to my 2017 film Geomancer, which also explores the hopes and fears around the rise of artificial intelligence and non-human perspectives. This time, I’m focusing on music as a framework to explore how technology affects the nature of art. The film is set in fifty years’ time, when technologies like virtual reality and AI are no longer new phenomena, but have become invisible, embedded in all aspects of cultural production.
In a world where algorithms rather than artists determine “hits”, how does this shift challenge the foundation of creativity? There are two aspects to this. First, there’s the psychological aspect—how does a perpetual demand for innovation affect the mind of a creator? Second, there’s the sociological aspect. I’m interested in how cultural industries creating alternative realities such as cinema, music, literature and video games may act as triggers for geopolitical change. Within this scenario, AI is a descendant of climate change algorithms and sentient drones.
Geomancer (2017) as well as AIDOL explore the aesthetic of post-human consciousness, while also reflecting the impact of the virtual on the politics of human creativity. Let’s start from here: how has your process and relationships to your subjects changed since you first started working in the fields of virtual reality and simulation?
Before Geomancer, my site-specific simulations were about “speculative architecture” seen from unfamiliar perspectives. These games were set in fictitious versions of real places: Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours), for example, imagined the Royal Academy in London being sold to a Chinese billionaire who turns it into his private mansion. The viewpoint was still human, and the narrative dealt with a journey through a familiar yet alien landscape. However, with Geomancer and AIDOL, I started writing narratives from the perspective of the self-conscious artificial intelligence by asking myself what might this world look like to a creature whose consciousness derives not from senses but from data, digital memory, and algorithms.
Watching your video may pose the question: where does failure come into your work? In a recent interview you talk about Sinofuturism (2016) as stemming from a form of failed optimism or, in other words, from the acknowledgement that humanism informed by Western Enlightenment principles is bound to fail as new forms of artificial intelligence arise to supplant human agency. On a more psychological level, it seems to me that much of your work pivots on failure in the sense of vulnerability. For example, when fading superstar Diva tells Al that “[they] both know what it’s like to be cast out, not to be seen or heard for years” or that “anonymity comes at a price”. Perhaps because much of your work overlaps with highly precise 3D animation and game software, it often feels very calculated and finished. However, there is still so much margin for error in that, so much emotional murkiness. Does thinking about failure offer you a benchmark to cling to when navigating through eerie spaces?
Narratives are about navigating the unknown. When I was writing the script for Geomancer, I realized how AI and histories of technology were buried in so many clichés. My response was to make the video essay Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD), which basically shows how AI and Chinese labour
might be seen as dehumanising mirror images of each other. Humanist thought, as intended by the Western Enlightenment, does not account for the accelerated and distributed growth of culture. For AIDOL, I wanted to go back to fundamental ideas about fiction, while also moving away from mainstream media and popular culture. In mythology, we have two archetypical narratives revolving around failure: the fall and the descent. There’s hubris, where pride and ego lead to the downfall. But there’s also katabasis, where the character descends into the underworld in search for a hidden truth. They are vulnerable because his journey entails the risk of failure. But at the same time, their actions grant them some degree of control over the world.
Since I use video game engines, this idea of agency is really important. Whether it’s a film or an open-world game, the journey unfolds in two directions: inwards and downwards.
Every medium has a blind spot that is, the furthest point away from the most obvious aesthetic qualities of technology itself. Computer-generated images are often criticized as being cold and sterile: “Oh, that looks so fake.” People think that the medium has somehow “failed” to reproduce reality. But I’m much more interested in how far you can push artificiality, so that the fake becomes natural. AIDOL and
Geomancer are, in a sense, total fictions. Instead of reproducing reality, they create new worlds where everything, from voices and music to architecture and landscape, are computer-generated.
I feel that your characters all share a similar vocabulary made of repetitions, sudden leaps of verbosity and suspense that displace them from all certainties and lure them into a space of dispersion and dispassion—as theorized by Sade— where alienation is taken to its furthest extremes. In the middle of Geomancer, for instance, the AI asks, “Do I really belong here?” Likewise, AIDOL is repeatedly punctuated by moments of questionings such as “Where do you come from?” that draw on concepts of loss, distance, separation and alienation. AI is isolated from the outer world, potentially unfettered yet caught in a virtual limbo where love and suffering are nothing but algorithmic tricks. What are your thoughts on this?
I love the line from the last episode of Season 3 of Twin Peaks, where Agent Cooper asks: “When is this?” He doesn’t ask where he is, because he knows the street he’s standing in. He doesn’t ask who he is because after spending the whole season with a split personality, he suddenly remembers his identity. In my early works, the main question was “Where is this?” My first site-specific works responded to how digital communication distorts our sense of space. This wandering mentality comes naturally in open-world games. You, the player, are free to explore the world because you are no longer constrained by the limits of the cinematic view.
In Geomancer, the surveillance satellite AI is not in control. Similarly, in AIDOL, Diva is alienated from her self-image (she has to be fully-cloaked at all times to maintain anonymity), alienated from her social world (her fame is fading), and alienated from her time (she reminisces about her past glory, and can’t stop watching her old music videos). Both characters exist within a world where they no longer belong. It’s only by fully embracing their alienation—reaching the nadir of their descent—that they are finally free to move past it.
In a moment when much of contemporary art revolves around the dichotomy between human and inhuman, familiar and alien, real and virtual, how do you manage to avert trite narratives of humanity menaced by machines and futuristic technologies? The meeting between Diva and the AI artist appears somewhat emblematic and cryptic. Should we regard it as a sort of “redemption” point where paranoid and narcissistic computer-generated lives are finally propelled out of them
selves, bursting forth…? There has often been a lack of human presence in your work, yet we have a meaningful encounter here, one that tries to achieve a form of “twoness”. What does this stand for?
The meeting between Diva and Geomancer isn’t so much a point of “redemption” as a synthesis of the desire for creative originality (i.e. freedom) and the need to conform to expectations (i.e. survival). I chose to focus on music because I wanted to challenge the notion of authorship. From a sociological point of view, music can be seen as a symbiotic creation between composer and audience. For example, when a well-known artist produces a new work, his or her fans demand both familiarity and novelty. Too different, and you alienate some. Too similar, and you bore others. In AIDOL, Diva is concerned about losing her fans and asks Geomancer to “help her plagiarise herself” and generate a new piece of music that absorbs all her previous work.
Aspects of contemporary South-East Asia are omnipresent in your work. I know you are interested in subverting cultural clichés rooted in Western media and Orientalist perceptions. Do you tackle these narratives by pushing them even further? How do you blend fears of the specter of artificial intelligence with clichés about the specter of China?
When I collaborated on The Nøtel (an audio-visual project about a fully-automated luxury hotel) with Steve Goodman, I learnt about another type of fiction known as a hyperstitional narrative, in which reality and fiction are no longer differentiated. It’s like science fiction, except that fiction is used as a tool for change rather than an escapist form of entertainment. Hyperstitions— extreme superstitions—use self-fulfilling prophecies as a framework where imaginary events have an actual impact on the future. Within this scenario, art is intended as a way to create the right conditions for ideas and ideologies to spread in a viral manner. For example, I use Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD) in a hyperstitional manner in my last two films, AIDOL and Geomancer. Since they are set in 2065, I assume that AIs have already downloaded and processed all of humanity’s representations of AI, from Alan Turing’s computer science studies to negative portrayals of killer robots in Terminator. But they have also watched Sinofuturism: the AIs in AIDOL and Geomancer have already appropriated my own work, and in doing so, they’ve found a new path towards self-determination. These rogue AIs even call themselves the Sinofuturists. Sinofuturism can be seen as a timed-release manifesto, a theory made today but designed to be activated tomorrow.
Your use of 3D modelling software and video game animation might be intended as either a could-be rejoinder to some sort of cultural defacement or a somewhat quixotic and optimistic deployment of the possibilities contained within them. In AIDOL, a question is deliberately left opened: “machine learning only resulted in the rule of the generic. Is this the true legacy of artificial intelligence?” What is your stance? Are you worried about this ever-diminishing gap between reality and the virtual?
This gap between reality and virtual is always changing. We think it’s diminishing, but it’s not. Today, you might perceive a black-and-white analogue photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson or Andre Kertesz as somehow authentic, but at the time they were seen as shocking. Nobody had seen the city like that before. Today, of course, we’re accustomed to the visual language of photography. Technologically innovative ways of producing images are always criticized as being inferior to the old ways of working. But I like to think that new ways of producing images can lead to a brand new kind of experience. Unpredictable yet composed journeys, alien yet familiar worlds.