Lawrence Lek

This CGI animation follows a self-driving police car in a desolate landscape. In dialogue with a built-in therapist, they contemplate the meaning of freedom and lament their uselessness. As their conversation ensues, it becomes increasingly clear in what kind of world our protagonist is living. Theta is part of Lawrence Lek's Sinofuturist cinematic universe, in which he explores the psychological impact of technology on emerging forms of non-human life.

Heralded by the futuristic computer-generated cityscapes that have become a signature feature of his work, Lawrence Lek’s mini-opus Geomancer is less inclined to map the building blocks of the urban architecture of tomorrow than to try and summon up the spirit of our rapidly dawning age - one whose characteristics, Lek implies, include the growing ascendancy of the cultural phenomenon of Sino-Futurism. As the geopolitical axis tilts further to the East, and as once-dominant economic/technological models are cast into doubt, Lek alights on a longstanding tension between the place of the human and the role of the machine, sharpened by contemporary hopes and anxieties around the rise of East Asia, and by speculations that new forms of artificial intelligence, already outperforming mere mortals in matters of automation and aggregation, will challenge us in more creative skills as well. (fvu.co.uk)

Head from Temple Tube Station, past the burning rubbish bins of a future-wracked London, through a subterranean tunnel, to descend into Diva's Club. Ethereal dance anthems, haunting Vocaloid refrains, and murmurs of the near future soundtrack the simulated experience. An elegy to nocturnal euphoria and to the memories that linger when the lights go on and the dance floor empties.

Head from Temple Tube Station, past the burning rubbish bins of a future-wracked London, through a subterranean tunnel, to descend into Diva's Club. Ethereal dance anthems, haunting Vocaloid refrains, and murmurs of the near future soundtrack the simulated experience. An elegy to nocturnal euphoria and to the memories that linger when the lights go on and the dance floor empties.

Head from Temple Tube Station, past the burning rubbish bins of a future-wracked London, through a subterranean tunnel, to descend into Diva's Club. Ethereal dance anthems, haunting Vocaloid refrains, and murmurs of the near future soundtrack the simulated experience. An elegy to nocturnal euphoria and to the memories that linger when the lights go on and the dance floor empties.

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.

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.

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.

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 the UK cast out of the EU, Dalston in East London has degenerated into a post-apocalyptic utopia. Come and explore this drowned world of the near future: filled with forgotten nightclubs, neon-lit music venues, Election booths, Turkish snooker clubs and luxury penthouses.

Lawrence Lek uses video game software to imagine a future in which the Royal Academy of Arts in London has been sold off as a privately owned luxury estate. This site-specific simulation, created for the Dazed Emerging Artist Award exhibition at the RA, 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. The project forms Chapter 9 of Bonus Levels, a series of critical virtual worlds based on real places. This time, Lek explores the language of high-end property branding and the complex relationship between luxury, desire, and excess.