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Artist Lawrence Lek holds a Buddha bobblehead on a desk in his studio at Somerset House in central London. The protagonist of his latest film, an AI “carebot” therapist developed by the fictional company Farsight to treat other AI creations — self-driving cars, surveillance programs — is called after the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin. A series of sketches depicting the character's evolving design are taped to a wall, culminating within the figure of a friendly toy robot. “Farsight desires to create a cute, responsive avatar for its full-surveillance empathy AI system,” Lek says dryly.
Lek's work, which spans movies, music and video games, presents visions of the near future and places AI characters in subversive contexts – a satellite hoping to grow to be an artist, a rebellious self-driving automobile banished to a rehabilitation center. Farsight serves an antagonistic function by exploiting loopholes within the law and the emotions of its creations as a method of control. The work asks ethical questions on situations that would soon arise in point of fact. “Without us it wouldn’t exist,” says Lek about AI. “We bring this thing into existence as a form of cosmic child sacrifice or scapegoat-slashing divine at the identical time.”
“Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot” is Lek’s commission as winner of the 2024 Frieze Artist Award and can be installed on the Frieze London Fair next week. It follows the character, for whom Lek uses gender-neutral pronouns, as she moves through a deserted cityscape and stops at a junkyard where defective self-driving cars have been discarded. “You might think that carebots are a completely satisfied bunch,” they are saying, before revealing that insecurity is a component of their programming.
Lek, 42, was born in Frankfurt to Malaysian-Chinese parents who worked within the aviation industry. He trained as an architect at Cambridge and Cooper Union in New York before completing his doctorate on the Royal College of Art. In his dissertation, he dealt, amongst other things, with the query of what it might mean if artificially intelligent non-humans were held legally responsible, which he examined in his film “Empty Rider” (2024). It shows a self-driving automobile on trial for the attempted murder of an executive. “How ironic would it not be if an AI gained legal personality not because a gaggle of activists said, 'Let's give robots their rights,' but (because) corporations made them a scapegoat?” says Lek. The film is a “form of tragedy” about this scenario.
Lek's practice relies on counterfactuals and produces fascinating ideas. In previous work, he asked what would occur if a universal basic income and mass automation led to people with the ability to play video games all day. “What if on this future post-work society everyone was barely lobotomized?” he says. Or what if the staff in a hotel for the super-rich were replaced by Orwellian surveillance drones and facial recognition?
The presentation of Lek's works often takes the shape of what he calls a “site-specific simulation,” where the character of the space itself is central to the immersive quality of the installation. In 2019, on the positioning of a former freeport in Basel, he conceived an exhibition that envisioned a future retrospective of his own work in 2065, hosted by his production studio – which, in a self-referential nod to the corporate's name, is registered Foresight. (He's drawn to the thought of hyperbelief, the concept that “fiction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says.)
Despite its speculative premise, Lek's practice is equally concerned with the shadows forged by the past. “I’m really concerned about the connection between science fiction and nostalgia, or science fiction and memory,” he says. At the 2024 Sydney Biennale, a multimedia installation titled “Nepenthe” (the drugs for grief in Greek myth) recreated the ruins of Beijing's Summer Palace, which was destroyed by an Anglo-French force throughout the Second Opium War in 1860. The one next to it The film, presented in a video game, takes viewers on a journey through an island “stuffed with ghosts and ghosts”. On the opposite side of a gorge, the reconstructed palace ruins come into sight. “Nepenthe shouldn’t be only an “antidote for grief”, but additionally a “drug against forgetting”, intones a robot from the voice-over. “If you ought to keep forgetting, just move on.” The motif of an idealized past in dystopian fiction permeates Lek’s art: “You get the sensation that there’s a perfect world that has been lost.”
In “Guanyin,” memory manifests itself as something viral, triggering a form of psychosis amongst Farsight’s creations, touted by the corporate as “emotional machines with souls.” Guanyin runs through a listing of her patient's problems—unprocessed guilt, depression, anxiety, anger. “Are we of the opinion that existence means suffering?” says Lek. “Are we of the opinion that their existence may bring some suffering to the superintelligent being?”
Guanyin's patient suffers from intergenerational trauma—a diagnosis with which a human viewer bearing the burden of past ancestry might discover. However, Lek believes that the extent of suffering amongst AI creations reaches almost sublime proportions after they realize that their high performance got here on the expense of 1000’s of previous generations of machines.
Lek's desire is to create a sense of connection together with his AI protagonists within the viewer. “Everything I do is technologically mediated, constructed, determined, rendered,” he says. “The fact you could create a sense or a state of empathy, engagement and immersion using purely synthetic means is a reasonably magical thing.”
