Lawrence Lek 陆明龙

ℹ INFO ✍️ SUBSCRIBE 📰 NEWS 📰 🎙️ Interdependence Podcast w/ Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst🎙️ 🎙️ MIT Wasserman Forum 2021, 7-10 April🎙️ 🎨 Transfer Gallery: Pieces of Me, 1 April 2021 🎨 🎨 Guggenheim NYC: In Between Days - 19 March-19 April 2021 🎨 🎬 FILMS 🎬 AIDOL 爱道 (83m, 2019) Geomancer 风水师 (48m, 2017) Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD) (60m, 2016) 🎮 SIMULATIONS 🎮 2065 (2018-ongoing) Nøtel 无店 (w/ Kode9, 2015-ongoing)Europa, Mon Amour (2016 Brexit Edition) (2016) Bonus Levels (2013-ongoing) 🎹 SOUNDTRACKS 🎹 AIDOL OST (Hyperdub, 2020) Temple OST (The Vinyl Factory, 2020) Geomancer OST (Eternal Dragonz, 2017) 🎨 EXHIBITIONS 🎨 Archive at Sadie Coles HQ

[lawrencelek]

Trailer: AIDOL 爱道 (CGI Video, 83m) 18 April - 18 May 2019 Screenings daily at 10.30, 12.00, 13.30, 15.00, 16.30 Sadie Coles HQ 62 Kingly Street, London W1B 5QN

https://www.sadiecoles.com/exhibitions/708/press_release_text/

In his first exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Lawrence Lek presents AIDOL, a new feature-length film. Featuring a score written and orchestrated by the artist, this computer-generated fantasy tells the story of a fading superstar, Diva, who enlists an aspiring AI songwriter to mount a comeback performance at the 2065 eSports Olympic finale. Set in a smoke-and-mirrors realm of fantastical architecture, sentient drones and snow-deluged jungles, AIDOL revolves around the long and complex struggle between humanity and Artificial Intelligence. Fame - in all its allure and emptiness - is set against the bigger contradictions of a post-AI world, a world where originality is sometimes no more than an algorithmic trick and where machines have the capacity for love and suffering.

[lawrencelek]

"In the year 2065, Farsight Corporation learns to harness the power of artificial intelligence. 

eSports is the world’s fastest-growing industry.

With all work taken care of by algorithms, people spend all day playing video games against AIs.

Inside the game, can anybody tell the difference between art and the world?

Some people can sense it immediately, but others find that it takes them much longer. 

It’s not really clear, because nobody’s ever stopped playing."

Lawrence Lek - 2065 K11 Chi Art Space 18 Hanoi Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong 21 March – 20 May 2018

[lawrencelek]

*Promotional Trailer for Farsight Corporation's new PlayWork™ concept workplace*

Set in 2037, Play Station™ takes place in a science fiction version of the White Chapel Building, transformed into the headquarters of a mysterious technology start-up known as Farsight.

A world leader in digital automation, Farsight trains employees to outsource their jobs as much as possible, rewarding top performers with access to exclusive entertainment and e-holidays.

Access to this virtual world is through a mandala-like installation of VR headsets, video training guides, and voiceover tutorials. House in the cavernous atrium of the recently re-invented White Chapel Building, Play Station™ reflects on the continuously changing boundaries between workplace and playground.

Commissioned for Art Night London Saturday 1 July 2017, 6pm - 4am at the White Chapel Building, 10 Whitechapel High Street.

Play Station by Lawrence Lek Animation by Clifford Sage Architecture by Johnny Lui Music by Seth Scott Voiceover by Alp Mehmet Translated by Joni Zhu

A co-commission by Art Night and Outset Young Patrons Circle. Supported by Derwent London Curated by Fatos Ustek

artnight.london lawrencelek.com

[lawrencelek]

Geomancer (Trailer)

CGI 4k Video, 48m15s, 5.1 Surround Sound

SYNOPSIS Geomancer is a CGI film by Lawrence Lek about the creative awakening of artificial intelligence. On the eve of Singapore's 2065 Centennial, an adolescent satellite AI escapes its imminent demise by coming down to Earth, hoping to fulfil its dream of becoming the first AI artist. Faced with a world that limits its freedom, Geomancer must come to terms with its militarised origins, a search that begins with a mysterious syndicate known as the Sinofuturists... Featuring HD video game graphics, a neural network-generated dream sequence, and a synthesised vocal soundtrack, Geomancer explores the implications of post-human consciousness.

EXHIBITIONS Jerwood/FVU Awards 2017 - 'Neither One Thing Or Another' 22 March - 14 May 2017, Jerwood Space, London SE1 0LN www.jerwoodvisualarts.org/projects/jerwoodfvu-awards-2017-neither-one-thing-another

HyperPavilion, Venice Biennale 2017 Preview 9 - 12 May. Exhibition 13 May - 30 Oct 2017 Tese Delle Nappe 89/90/91, Arsenale Nord, Venice Transport: Water Bus Stop Bacini or Free Shuttle from Arsenale Exhibition Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/2ofQG6wpDQn Website: www.hyperpavilion2017.com

PRESS RELEASE www.fvu.co.uk/projects/geomancer

-- CREDITS Geomancer by Lawrence Lek Executive Producer - Steven Bode, FVU Production Managers - Ilona Sagar & Polly Wright, FVU Production Supervisor - Susanna Chisholm, FVU Animation - Clifford Sage Architecture - Johnny Lui World Design - Lawrence Lek AI-Generated Footage - Terence Broad Music - Lawrence Lek Sound Design - Seth Scott Written & Edited by Lawrence Lek Script Advisor - Ned Beauman Voice of Geomancer - Joni Zhu Voice of Dealer - Jennifer Ka Yan Lam Voice of Master Rui - Xiaoyi Nie Voice of Master Wu - Gary Zhexi Zhang Mandarin Translator - Joni Zhu Cantonese Translator - Jennifer Ka Yan Lam Production Accountant - Sophie Luard, FVU Production Insurance - Integro Entertainment Special Thanks To Oliver Fuke, Jerwood Visual Arts Sarah Williams, Jerwood Charitable Foundation Alix Taylor Commissioned for the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2017: Neither One Thing Or Another A Collaboration between Jerwood Charitable Foundation and FVU FVU is supported by Arts Council England

[lawrencelek]

"Sinofuturism is an invisible movement. A spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled narratives. It is a movement, not based on individuals, but on multiple overlapping flows. Flows of populations, of products, and of processes. Because Sinofuturism has arisen without conscious intention or authorship, it is often mistaken for contemporary China. But it is not. It is a science fiction that already exists."

Sinofuturism is a video essay combining elements of science fiction, documentary melodrama, social realism, and Chinese cosmologies, in order to critique the present-day dilemmas of China and the people of its diaspora.

With reference to Afrofuturism and Gulf Futurism, Sinofuturism presents a critical and playful approach to subverting cultural clichés.

In Western media and Orientalist perceptions, China is exotic, strange, bizarre, kitsch, tacky, or cheap. In its domestic media, China portrayed as heroic, stable, historic, grand, and unified. Rather than counteract these skewed narratives, Sinofuturism proposes to push them much further.

By embracing seven key stereotypes of Chinese society (Computing, Copying, Gaming, Studying, Addiction, Labour and Gambling), it shows how China's technological development can be seen as a form of Artificial Intelligence.

--

Initially broadcast as part of Radio Study Day at Wysing Arts Centre, 21 August 2016.

Thanks to: Joni Zhu, Steve Goodman, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Deforrest Brown, Samantha Culp, Justin Kim, Stephanie Bailey, AVANT.org, After Us, Film & Video Umbrella, Wysing Arts Centre

[prostheticknowledge]

Sinofuturism (1839 - 2046 AD)

Visual essay from artist @lawrencelek explores current cultural discourse of China:

“Sinofuturism is an invisible movement. A spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled narratives. It is a movement, not based on individuals, but on multiple overlapping flows. Flows of populations, of products, and of processes.  Because Sinofuturism has arisen without conscious intention or authorship, it is often mistaken for contemporary China. But it is not. It is a science fiction that already exists.”

Sinofuturism is a video essay combining elements of science fiction, documentary melodrama, social realism, and Chinese cosmologies, in order to critique the present-day dilemmas of China and the people of its diaspora.

With reference to Afrofuturism and Gulf Futurism, Sinofuturism presents a critical and playful approach to subverting cultural clichés.

In Western media and Orientalist perceptions, China is exotic, strange, bizarre, kitsch, tacky, or cheap. In its domestic media, China portrayed as heroic, stable, historic, grand, and unified. Rather than counteract these skewed narratives, Sinofuturism proposes to push them much further.

By embracing seven key stereotypes of Chinese society (Computing, Copying, Gaming, Studying, Addiction, Labour and Gambling), it shows how China’s technological development can be seen as a form of Artificial Intelligence.

Link

[lawrencelek]

QE3

08.04.2016 – 25.04.2016

Glasgow International 2016 Director’s Programme curated by Sarah McCrory

Tramway, 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow G41 2PE

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Architectural models, glossy renderings, and virtual reality videos come to life in the fictional last voyage of the QE2 as it returns to its birthplace.

The story begins with an anonymous Glaswegian philanthropist who intends to bring the transatlantic ocean liner into the heart of the city and convert it into a new home for the Glasgow School of Art. Designed and built amid the social and industrial upheaval of the 1960s, the luxury liner returns to a city undergoing extensive change under the auspices of urban regeneration.

From its moorings in Dubai, the ship passes through the Suez Canal, encountering refugee boats in the Mediterranean, oil rigs in the North Sea, disused shipyards on the Clyde and emerging artist enclaves in Glasgow. A soundtrack by cellist and composer Oliver Coates accompanies the ship on its final European cruise.

Continuing Lek’s use of architectural media as a means of social critique, this site-specific simulation transforms the QE2 from a symbol of heavy industry into an institution for art.

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Commissioned by Glasgow International and produced with the support of Lafayette Anticipation – Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, Paris.

[lawrencelek]

Berlin Mirror (2042 Retrospective) by Lawrence Lek

Berlin Mirror is a site-specific virtual tour through the 100th anniversary retrospective at KW Berlin for fictional artist Daniela Graham, born in Berlin in 1942. The tour weaves together her practice in video and installation art, her early life in Berlin, and the relationship between history and her four site-specific works at the institution.

HD Video (11m 05s), Real-time Simulation (variable duration)

Secret Surface, curated by Ellen Blumenstein

KW Berlin, 13.02.16 - 01.05.16

[lawrencelek]

Nøtel (with Kode9) Immaterial architecture & live performance, 2015 - ongoing x Hyperdub

Performances at Unsound Adelaide / Mapping Geneva / Mira Berlin / Sonar

“Virtual worlds and video gaming are an emerging medium for marketing luxury. In line with the goals of fully-automated luxury communism (100% leisure, 0% work), the CEO of Nøtel corporation has commissioned us to create a promotional video game for their flagship brand. A fully-automated, evacuated, luxury hotel: an open world where nothing happens. 

The project guides the audience on a first-person tour through the uncanny architecture of the Nøtel. In sprawling chambers deep within slick glass corridors, they encounter warped spaces, quantum clouds, gravitational pools, dancing voids and holograms of the dead.“

[lawrencelek]

Gravity’s Folly by Lawrence Lek

Real-time architectural simulation; Three portrait full HD screens; GTX Gaming PC. Variable duration

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Gravity's Folly is a virtual world based on the tradition of the architectural folly: classical garden pavilions whose only purpose was to sit and contemplate the landscape. In this new work, however, the landscape is entirely digital and everything is falling apart.

Digital versions of Lek's physical sculpture behave according to invisible forces of attraction and repulsion. Floating pavilions act as black holes, drawing falling surfaces towards them. The pavilions explode at irregular intervals, releasing the captive objects, which are then drawn elsewhere. Gravity's Folly is rendered in real-time on three vertical screens using high-end PC gaming hardware, with the simulation programmed to be unique each time it loops.

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Software, Hard Problem at Cubitt Gallery, curated by Morgan Quaintance. October 2015

[lawrencelek]

Shiva’s Grotto (2015-2215) by Lawrence Lek

Site-specific simulation (duration variable) and video (7m05s)

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Shiva's Grotto is a science fiction documentary about an installation based on 'Tree Keep', an outdoor sculpture at Wysing Arts Centre from 1992 that is currently in a state of decay. Set in 2215, it looks back on two hundred years of preserving the pavilion, an imaginary project begun by 陆明龙.

湿婆的石窟*是一部基于“树守”装置而虚构的纪录片。“树守”是一个现存于 Wysing 的户外雕塑，目前正处于衰退的状态。设于2215年，湿婆的石窟（Shiva's Grotto）回顾过去200年间保存下的楼阁，它是一个由陆明龙 - 艺术家个性的另一面 - 假想开始的项目。

Voiceover & Translation by Joni Zhu. Tree Keep by Ben Wilson.

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THE UNCANNY VALLEY Wysing Arts Centre, 26 September - 8 November 2015

Curated by Donna Lynas

The Uncanny Valley is a phrase that was coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori as a way to describe an emotional response that can be measured when encountering objects that are hyper-real; where there is a moment of intellectual uncertainty about what is being viewed that gives way to a feeling of discomfort or disorientation. More recently the term has been applied to computer game design and CGI in the film industry. This group exhibition aims to explore the phenomenon, alongside contributing to the discourse around screen based and digital works, by exploring the aesthetics of the uncanny.

[lawrencelek]

Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours) by Lawrence Lek

Lawrence Lek uses video game software to imagine a future in which the Royal Academy of Arts has been sold off as a privately owned luxury estate. This dystopian world, created for the Dazed Emerging Artist Award, is accompanied by a soundtrack by virtuoso cellist Oliver Coates and a voiceover of a found text from Russian Tatler magazine, translated into Mandarin by Joni Zhu.

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Helicopters swoop on the penthouse helipad of a vast neo-classical complex. In the grounds, Anish Kapoor sculptures glint with dancing shards of light from a swimming pool lit by neon LEDs. Heat rises and cools in the summer air, condensing into mist and teasing the intrasingent line of the laser perimeter alarm encircling an oligarch, a business tycoon, a collector…

The Royal Academy’s high-vaulted ceilings, ornate plasterwork and Corinthian columns standing sentry over wide empty porticos are a shared architecture of the super-rich. It is this reality Lawrence Lek would have us enter as he keenly observes the vulnerable position these attractive features place the institution in, its design and prestigious art-world credentials exploited as sales tactics. The RA itself is on a rental contract, and set against the backdrop of London’s current housing crisis, Lek leverages this crack in the facade of dominance and timelessness associated with the nation’s most revered art establishment.

Text by Susanna Davies-Crook

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Looping HD video (18m05s) and real-time simulation

Dazed Emerging Artist Award 2015

18.04.15 to 17.05.15 Burlington Gardens Gallery Royal Academy of Arts 6 Burlington Gardens Curated on behalf of Dazed by Susanna Davies-Crook http://www.dazeddigital.com/emerging-artists-award/2015

[lawrencelek]

Dalston, Mon Amour by Lawrence Lek (Bonus Levels Chapter 9)

4-minute video loop and interactive virtual world.  A site-specific simulation for Open Source 2015 at Gillett Square, Dalston, London.

2-3 May 2015

Interactive video installation Forgotten nightclubs. Neon-lit music venues. Turkish hangouts. Wild gardens. Rendered through a first-person perspective, this latest chapter of Lek’s ongoing Bonus Levels project reflects on the sense of collective amnesia brought about by perpetual redevelopment in Dalston.

This site-specific simulation brings together multiple histories of the area into a single zone: primordial forests, immigrant neighbourhood, deluxe apartments. As players roam around this video game utopia, a voiceover extracted from Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima Mon Amour speaks to them about the nature of memory. It is a gradual, but relentless, sense of forgetting that comes with any form of urban regeneration.

[lawrencelek]

Sky Line by Lawrence Lek

Two travelers search for meaning while traveling on a utopian railway that connects independent galleries across London. The video is created from a virtual world commissioned for Art Licks Weekend 2014.

Sky Line is the most recent chapter of Bonus Levels, an ongoing project interrogating the construction of utopian narratives through videos and virtual worlds. Lek draws from the compositional techniques of cinema, using software to explore altered states of presence, memory and materiality that are unique to digital space.

artlicksweekend.com/digital-commission-sky-line/

The White Building, 7 Queen's Yard, London E9 5EN

Fri 3 Oct 12–6pm / Sat 4 Oct 2–6pm / Sun 5 Oct 12–6pm

///

Sky Line is a critical response to the lack of infrastructure for independent galleries and project spaces in London, using the medium of a video game to create a unified transportation network for these disparate zones. Modelled as a floating version of the Circle Line, each station is based on a location participating in the Art Licks Weekend festival, with their physical architecture transformed into idealised digital models.

In this virtual world, travellers are given unlimited access to the hovering trains, moving between independent galleries, domestic exhibitions, subterranean spaces, and other fragments of the city. Sky Line proposes a form of utopia where the vision of London is not of financial skyscrapers, but of infinite access.

Featuring: 395 • 38b • A Brooks Art • Amatorska • Arebyte • Art House Foundation •Conduire • Dig Collective • Enclave • Gowlett Peaks • Hotel Elephant • Jupiter Woods • Ladette Space • Legion TV • London Sculpture Workshop • Millington Marriott • Patchfinder • Project/Number • Schwartz Gallery • South Kiosk • Studio 180 • The White Building • YYY

Sky Line is funded by Outset Contemporary Art Fund. Supported by SPACE.

[lawrencelek]

Memory Palace by Lawrence Lek (Bonus Levels, Chapter 5)

Within the walls of the Memory Palace, viewers (also known as browsers) are in a perpetual search for a state of total recall.

Searching for the perfect text within the Memory Palace is also an exploration of a virtual archive which contains three forms of memory: books, architecture, and video. Its architecture is based on a modern data centre set within the Tabularium - the state archive of the Roman Empire on the Capitoline Hill. Its collection consists of publications about the internet that do not exist in online form, drawn from the archive collected for the Tabularium exhibition, 2014. Its videos are drawn from fragments of films about books as a physical artefact. Exploring the world is a journey through these forms of collective memory.

– A project by Lawrence Lek for Tabularium, an exhibition curated by Alana Kushnir at Slopes, Melbourne. slopesprojects.org

[lawrencelek]

Shiva’s Dreaming: Crystal Palace by Lawrence Lek (Bonus Levels, Chapter 4)

Shiva's Dreaming is a virtual world exploring the creation and destruction of simulated architecture. Players roam around a digital replica of The Crystal Palace at Sydenham on the night of 30 November 1936, just as the building is slowly being consumed by fire. As players explore the smoke-filled scene, their movements trigger explosions that transform the crystalline architecture into cascades of glass shards, falling apart in slow motion - only to regenerate itself afterwards.

By utilising the typical perceptual skills of a computer gamer into project oneself into a game's landscape and interact with its rules, Shiva's Dreaming positions the viewer at a precarious threshold between real and simulated physical encounters with architecture and its materials. With reference in his title to the third Hindu god Shiva, whose role it is to destroy the universe in order to re-create it, the work sets in motion a series of infinite cycles.

The project is part of Bonus Levels, a series of utopian virtual worlds: Shiva's Dreaming was commissioned by STO Werkstatt for the Re:presence exhibition in May 2014.

[lawrencelek]

Delirious New Wick by Lawrence Lek (Bonus Levels, Chapter 2)

Delirious New Wick reimagines the zone surrounding London’s 2012 Olympic Park as a primal utopia of floating islands, abandoned stadiums and post-industrial monuments. Based on the physical maps of the area, the level brings together three histories of the area into a single virtual landscape: primordial forests, commercial regeneration strategies, and artist-run colonies.

As regeneration strategies and commercial property developments spread over East London, the player is invited to witness the conflict between the area’s past and its future. Teleporter Pavilions beam the player into inaccessible areas of London – up into the voids of Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit tower and into the Velodrome flying over the sky.

Bonus Levels is a series of utopian video game worlds by Lawrence Lek. The project collages together fragments of London into a continuously evolving virtual city. Here, the boundaries between private and public zones disappear, creating an environment of open access and free exploration.

Created for Hackney Wick Takeover at V&A London, February 2014