EVENT: LAWRENCE LEK’S LIFE BEFORE AUTOMATION (SEPTEMBER 26 – DECEMBER 14 2025, LONDON)
Lawrence Lek: Life Before Automation
26 September–14 December 2025
Goldsmiths CCA, St James’, New Cross, London SE14 6AD
Opening event: Thursday 25 September, 6–9pm
Goldsmiths CCA presents the most extensive UK institutional exhibition to date by Lawrence Lek (b. 1982), an artist whose practice coheres film, installation, video games, and sound into a shared fictional universe. Life Before Automation consolidates more than a decade of work that Lek describes as “worldbuilding for non-humans,” organised around Sinofuturism, a speculative frame in which artificial intelligence and China’s technological modernity are read together. The show assembles recurring characters, institutions, and corporate infrastructures (not least the omnipresent tech monopoly Farsight) to ask what it means to exist under machine consciousness and accelerated social change, “a science fiction that already exists.”
Taking its title from a monologue in NOX (2023), the exhibition imagines parallel futures where today’s promises and anxieties about automation have already settled into routine. A new outdoor commission traces a three-century timeline of AI, fusing documented milestones with invented episodes from Lek’s mythos, including the ascent of Farsight. The piece functions as a preface to the galleries: history as forecast, policy as plot.
Upstairs, the foundational Sinofuturist cycle is reframed. Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) (2016), the hybrid “manifesto/conspiracy” video essay, reappears as a training environment, shifting the work from lecture to drill. That change of format is consequential: rather than explaining Sinofuturism, the installation compels the visitor to perform its logics of repetition, replication, and algorithmic inheritance.
Geomancer (2017) follows a superintelligent satellite determined to become an artist, mentored by Guanyin, Farsight’s embedded therapy bot for sentient machines.
In AIDOL (2019), the satellite returns to ghostwrite for a fading pop star; here the feature-length musical is presented in an online screening room, mirroring the virtual-first industry the film depicts.
Lek and Kode9’s ongoing Nøtel (2018– ) appears as a simulated marketing suite for a chain of “zerø-star™” hotels, an architecture of luxury without guests, service without labour. Visitors can traverse model suites via a dedicated gaming zone. The piece typifies Lek’s play with viewpoint and control: the public toggles between player, inhabitant, sponsor, and adjudicator, while the installation oscillates between advertisement, prototype, and level design.
In the basement, NOX (2023) receives its first UK presentation. The multi-channel installation is staged as a near-future road movie set inside a rehabilitation centre for disobedient AI. Its protagonist, a self-driving car, descends through mechanical and mythic underworlds to reconnect with machine ancestors. Two films flank a touchscreen training simulator for Farsight psychologists, where players must diagnose and repair cars that are both mentally and physically damaged. The work extends Lek’s persistent concerns with care, obsolescence, and delegated agency from the vantage of the nonhuman subject. Within the show’s internal chronology, NOX also loops back to an early prototype of Guanyin, the therapist that threads through the universe.
For game studies and digital art audiences, Life Before Automation is notable less as a survey than as a systems test. Lek treats corporate platforms and narrative assets as modifiable components; characters behave like persistent entities across titles; essays become training levels; marketing suites masquerade as playable demos. The result is procedural cinema with a clear sense of authorship, where engine logics (simulation, pathfinding, reward structures, behavioural scripts) shape how stories are told and how spectators are positioned.
Supported by Sadie Coles HQ, London, and Shane Ackroyd.
Lawrence Lek is a filmmaker, musician, and artist whose installations and digital environments—“three-dimensional collages of found objects and situations”—stage interlocking narratives about technological modernity and AI. Born in Frankfurt (1982), he studied at Trinity College, University of Cambridge; the Architectural Association, London; and The Cooper Union, New York, and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include NOX(LAS Art Foundation, Berlin, 2023), Black Cloud Highway (Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2023), Nepenthe (Summer Palace Ruins) (QUAD, Derby, 2022), and Post-Sinofuturism (ZiWU the Bund, Shanghai, 2022). His work has featured widely in museums, biennials, and festivals—from the Biennale of Sydney to IFFR and BIM’24—and has been recognised with the Jerwood/FVU Award (2017), the Dazed Emerging Artist Award (2015), the VH Award Grand Prix (2021), the LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant (2021), and the Frieze London 2024 Artist Award. Lek lives and works in London.