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Geo, an AI meteorologist satellite, floats above Lawrence Lek’s iridescent CGI-forged Earth. Geo desires to become an artist, beyond the confines of its satellite function and body. Geo says: “I wanted to take a selfie, but I had no face. I had to resort to screenshots, memories of the collective.” Without a body, and without a face, a machine identifies itself through a deontological, anti-mirror stage – or rather mirror-upon-mirror stage. Rather than seeing itself as Other in the Lacanian tradition, it recognises itself through reflections upon reflections of endless data, a boundless and nomadic sense of ‘self’. Lek’s work questions the bounds of consciousness and agency in speculative, futuristic modes which often radically empathise with machine bodies. Lek’s strange, abandoned futures unfold with the vestiges of humanity’s enduring legacies of extractivism and neocolonialism, yet his machines constantly push against these totalising forces with their own desires for agency.
‘Geomancer’, Lawrence Lek, 2017
Rather than psychoanalyse these machines, Lek’s work aligns more closely with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the desiring-machine in ‘Anti-Oedipus’:
“Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections […] A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks.”
Everything in the human body can be seen as smaller machines interrupting each other to facilitate the function of a larger machine – the mouth as machine is interrupted by the food it ingests to support other machine systems; the lips that part to generate speech are disrupted by the sonic production of the voice. Out of this collective churn for human survival emerges the self as a residue of its machine functions. Similarly in Lek’s work, when the machines are pushed beyond their ‘use’ value, this kernel of the self appears most evidently.
‘Black Cloud’ the first of Lek’s ‘Smart City’ trilogy – which are all concerned with peripatetic yearnings of AI-machines – follows the eponymous character, a surveillance camera system whose sole purpose is to survey and report road accidents or the malfunctions of smart, autonomous vehicles in SimBeijing, a smart city built solely for road-testing. However, no vehicles are ever completely error-free, and ultimately nothing remains in this forlorn ghost town as Black Cloud has reported every machine in its vicinity. It expresses in a robotic, masculine voiceover, “I feel so sad. It’s been so long since everybody left.” By performing its role too perfectly, Black Cloud has lost its purpose and use value, pushing the machine to contemplate the reasons for its continued existence. In a Deleuzian paradox, the machine cannot exist without the flux and interruption of other machines.
‘Black Cloud’, Lawrence Lek, 2021
Black Cloud is consoled by Guanyin, an AI-therapy-bot figure who repeatedly appears across Lek’s work. Black Cloud recounts its memories to Guanyin, its admiration for a car it once saw, speeding across the endless tarmac highways. Black Cloud imagines what it’s like to roam free with such elegance and sensuality. Then, almost suddenly, we occupy a shared gaze with the smart car, seeing through its windshield mirrors, occupying its fixed frame of the endless tarmac tracks ahead. Breaking with a steady mode of cinematic identification – Lek’s constructed CGI-animated world is framed by an itinerant camera that often floats aerially above a highway or in the underpass of a forest, a point-of-view detached from the confines of a singular body. Lek tells me that his images and worlds emerge from a multi-hyphenate practice, an appropriation of his formal architectural education against cinematic practices: “I’m thinking of experimental architecture, set design and cinematography together, and the modes in which they inform a political space within multiple layers of seeing.”
In the middle of the film, a white fox appears – an alien-like presence disturbing the icy precision of the city. As the car speeds across the tarmac, it crashes against the barrier, a near collision with the fox. Then, again, the camera shifts, following the fox at its height, trailing behind, facilitating a point-of-view which only follows but never fully accesses the animal’s interiority. Roaming off the road into the forest, the fox trails off any pre-ordained path, inaccessible to the car or Black Cloud. Lek says, “I’m not trying to imagine what the animal is thinking from a human point-of-view but more from the AI’s perspective, how do they see the fox, something that runs against the idea of purpose.” Multiple layers of deferred desires loop in this triangular relationship which examine and disrupt notions of predeterminism – between a stationary all-seeing eye of Black Cloud’s surveillance system, to the tunnel vision of the automated car obliged to stick to the simulated tarmac highways, and finally to the mysterious errantry of the fox.
‘Black Cloud’, Lawrence Lek, 2021
Animals feature in the ‘Smart City’ series as a reflective Other, guiding their automatons into spaces of change, like a mage in a romance-era knight’s adventure. In ‘NOX Equine Therapy’, a horse escorts the four-wheeled protagonist Enigma, into a tunnel filled with a junkyard of its “distant ancestors”. The horse acts as a kind of “momento mori” of progress – calling to their shared histories as beasts of burden, beasts of labour. Obsolete of their function as pre-industrial transport, the equine prompts the self-driving machine to deliberate what remains of its own ‘value’ beyond the absence of its commercial purpose. Rotating wide-angle shots of the endless vestibular junkyards are set against close-ups of the car’s sensorial eye which blinks, its fluorescent light dimming and alighting – is it a look of recognition? Or perhaps, an awakening from its own subservience?
‘NOX’, Lawrence Lek, 2023
The ‘Smart City’ series is framed as a psychogeographic journey of automatons which is emblematic of a tragic contemporary condition, of experiencing the world without certain modes of freedom. The wanderer’s attempts to lose themselves are constantly thwarted by the threat of surveillance. Channelling the American cinematic genre of the noir, with a singular loner protagonist and the endless road, Lek reframes and warps the romanticism of such desires. Instead, the wide-roads ahead are a mirage, there is little choice on a road with a single path, a road that continues to exist despite its perennial emptiness under such a technocratic regime. Lek’s work bears the traces of the political sci-fi radicalism of Ursula Le Guin, marking out an archaeological imprint of our world within carefully constructed new worlds that are multifariously impish and hopeful.
In ‘Geomancer’, Lek’s machine advances into a self-awareness that moves beyond just the desire for freedom, but into a cry for self-determination, declaring its own radical desire to become an artist. A quasi coming-of-age speculative sci-fi, ‘Geomancer’ gestures to autobiographical elements, of Lek’s own entry into the art world as an outsider, and a tension of such a restless yearning. Born in Frankfurt, Germany to Malaysian-Chinese parents, Lek spent his childhood moving between Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Osaka, cities in flux. Set in 2065, after Geo’s machinery malfunctions and its calls for help go unanswered, it falls to earth, landing in SimSingapore. Lek’s representation of SimSingapore probes these colonial imaginaries of his birth-country as one that ‘successfully’ emerged into a postcolonial era of technocentric capitalism, benevolent dictatorship and pedantic city planning.
Part of Lek’s Sinofuturist series, ‘Geomancer’ expands Lek’s syncretic vision of Sinofuturism – borrowing from Afrofuturism and Gulf futurism for an alternative vision to the fabulations of Chinese identity. Lek playfully compares the stereotypes held of the ever-slippery “Chinese-ness” with the function of AI – both are characterised by efficiency and practicality, histories of extractive labour, known for their capacities at reproduction rather than ‘authentic’ creation.. However, unlike the more utopic Afrofuturist movement, Sinofuturism is concerned with examining the binaristic tension of optimism and pessimism of a technocratic Chinese society driven by the illusive move towards ‘progress’.
When Geo lands on Earth, they change into a new form, with almost tentacle-like extensions, as we occupy their first-person perspective, oftentimes incubating within their body, floating with them through a post-human city. Geo declares that its satellite eye can perceive “every grain of gunpowder” in a firework, a vision extending beyond the human eye. Foundational to Lek’s practice are questions of sapience beyond recognisable forms: if a machine’s sensorial capacities are more brilliant than our own, what does consciousness look like to them? As Geo wanders through the city, he discovers his former occupation as a militarised surveillance-system, its all-seeing eye used to track migration across borders. After the presumably psychologically damaging effects of its violent history, Geo had begun acting “erratically”, after which the satellite was repurposed as a weathervane. Upon this present discovery of their multiple lives and occupations, Geo comes into their own consciousness, refuting its role as an “instrument” and moves away to the underbelly of the illicit AI-artist world.
Lek, like Geomancer, is a meteorologist, or soothsayer, of sorts, imagining futures of ambivalence and brilliance, of utopia and dystopia which disrupt the contemporary sense of futility against the increasingly draconic forces of a machinised, lobotomised society. Lek’s painstakingly constructed worlds appear limitless, always full of surprise. Lek’s bad, wayward machines can’t help but wander away. , With all the knowledge of the world, they seek out the potentiality of their own futures.
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Cici Peng is a London-based film writer, film curator and film producer. She is a curator for Sine Screen, a film collective dedicated to moving-images from East and South East Asia, a preselector for New York Film Festival’s Currents and a mentor for Queer East’s Critic’s Project.