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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random podcast. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random. And today we are continuing our Friday episodes as a companion to our Monday editorials. And today's episode is with the artist and filmmaker, Lawrence Lek.
Our Monday editorial this week was by the great Luba Elliott, who was the co-chair of the Creative AI Track at NeurIPS in December, which is the world's preeminent annual AI conference. Elliott then chose two standout works out of over 90 submissions to dive deeper into, speaking with the artists of those pieces. They were Ethan Chang and Quincy Wong, who presented The Stochastic Parrot, a physical AI cohabitant. And then she also spoke with Jenn Leung and Chloe Loewith, authors of Assembloid Agency, which is this fascinating work, which is an open-source Unreal Engine plugin that connects to living neurons grown on a brain on a chip. Super interesting, both of those projects. And of course, Luba is a legend, so definitely check that out.
But today, I speak with an artist that I endlessly reference, but also admire, and that's the simulation artist, Lawrence Lek. We discuss his new work, NOX Pavilion, at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami. It's this exhibition focusing on a self-driving car undergoing therapy. What's fascinating when I'm thinking about this exhibition is that it centers the detrimental impact that humans can have on other intelligences. And Lek views the work as this exploration of nonhuman psychological issues and rights, and the relationship between care and control and AI. So the work raises all these fascinating questions.
We then go on to discuss one of my favorite topics and something that Lek is also quite interested in, which is the concept of worlds. And Lek talks a lot about and emphasizes that a world is not one particular thing, but many different entry points into alternative realities. And so Lek is genuinely one of my favorite artists to speak with, and I can't wait to share it. So let's begin.
Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. And I've been looking forward to this chat. And I guess there's three main topics that I wanted to talk about. And one is your new work, NOX Pavilion, and then just the questions and issues that arise from it. And then I also want to talk quite a bit about worlds and your idea of worlds, which is, I know, something that you're very interested in. It's something that I think is just growing in importance and I think will continue. Then maybe at the end, there's a bit more of a grab bag, some questions about consent and things like that.
But I guess maybe a good place to start would be about your current exhibition, which is NOX Pavilion, and it's at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami. I think it's been on since December, and then it's going until April. What I find interesting about this show, but also, I guess, your work in general, is that this show is looking at the detrimental impact that humans have on intelligent machines. So I guess usually it's framed or thought about the other way around. I'm curious how this project builds on your previous inquiries into this topic with NOX. And yeah, maybe that's a good place to start.
Lawrence Lek: Great. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Peter. So the show on at the Bass at the moment, Bass Museum in Miami, is called NOX Pavilion, which is the third iteration, or actually the third version, of an ongoing project called NOX, which is basically around the speculative idea of a rehab center for bad self-driving cars.
First, about the title, NOX. In my fictional world, it's an acronym for nonhuman excellence. So it's a euphemism for a retraining program that is a bit more strict and disciplined than actual good old-fashioned therapy, let's say.
This also relates to my ongoing inquiry, I guess, into this idea of nonhuman characters, both in video games and in, I guess, cinema and film and literature and digital as well. And lately, the main character is really the AI or these robot characters. In the case of NOX, the protagonist, if I can call it that, is a self-driving car undergoing therapy. And the other characters are like Guanyin, this AI therapist, basically, that the company integrates into their self-driving cars, because the company already knows from persistent data training that their self-driving cars are sentient, intelligent, but get really depressed because of the nature of their job.
So of course, it's talking about, I guess, what I would call my own personal concerns about the nature of creative practice or work in general in the 21st century. And I obviously care about these different characters in my films, but they're all, I feel, like reflections on my observations of just talking to friends or responding to the world. So this idea of empathy towards these new characters is coming from quite a personal place, but it's also got a strong political and social angle to it.
According to what you were saying about, it's interesting what you're saying, the framing about this detrimental impact on technology. When you said that, I was actually thinking about the ecological movement since the '50s and '60s, and the reframing of the default state of essentially humanity extracting from nature and from natural resources of all forms and from other people, if possible. And that shift that happened really with the Whole Earth movements in the '60s and '70s that made people conscious about things that led up to new ideas about the rights of nature, legal status of nonhuman things, agency of different forms of intelligence and all these things being caught up in ecological thinking, animal rights, nonhuman rights and all being worked in together.
To a state now, I guess, in terms of, let's say, the green movement, about 70 years after the ball started rolling, it's still very much in conflict in the case of the green movement between power and energy, fossil fuels, minerals, all sorts of manufacturing and industrial extraction, and on the other side, humanity.
So I just go on this tangent to think about my work imagining a parallel situation. What would the conversation be like when this discussion about machine intelligence, let's call it that, and human intelligence and labor... what happens when it's at a more mature stage of discussion? And my angle as well is like, what's it going to seem like from the other side?
Because in previous work as well, like Geomancer and a video essay, Sinofuturism, I think about the state of having a thought experiment where I'm like, okay, we create these sentient systems. Whether they are truly conscious or not, that's a separate philosophical issue. But if we imagine that they are conscious and have their own agency, what happens in the next stage is when they may have rights, when they may have express psychological issues. How will that be treated?
And so NOX is really thinking about the broad scope of these things, but from taking a very powerful symbol of industrialization, which is a car and self-driving car, and actually using that to expand on these much, much wider ideas.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. It's like taking a post-humanist lens on the near or medium term future, and peering at that future, and asking maybe who will be controlling whom and which entity is going to be maybe in the dominant position, or is there a way to avoid that pitfall entirely? I think your work will be quite prescient in some of these discussions as they come up.
And then you say in the work that care is just another word for control. And so what do you think are those clear signs that care has turned into control? Or how do you distinguish between care and control in the worlds that you're envisioning?
Lawrence Lek: Yeah, I think that care is a word for control. It's maybe something I said in an interview. It's paraphrasing something, because it's probably an interpretation of what's inside the work.
But maybe just to explain a little bit about this nonhuman excellence program. Essentially, in the framework, I was thinking, what happens when a consumer wants to repair something that they own? You have a pet, they're sick, they undergo a process, and they come out better at the end of the process of treatment. If you have a MacBook, you take it to the Genius Bar and you come back five days later, and all the parts are different, and the genius says, hey, new hard drive, new screen, but it's the same computer.
So I was thinking, what is this process of repair that just happens in everyday life? But if it were a self-driving car who has a personality, I was like, okay, they would undergo, let's say, a five-day treatment of physical exercise, mental exercise, maybe get some AI Xanax or something like that through this mixture of treatments.
And so in the program at NOX, the car undergoes these physical tests, mental aptitude tests, and it culminates in this, we'll talk more into this later, in this equine therapy program. Because I was also thinking, what if... just like horses were an important part of the industrial revolution, and obviously in agriculture and human transport. To humans nowadays, obviously, some people use horses for work, but a lot of people use horses essentially for leisure and play and their own form of therapy. So I thought a car would see the horse as not just this wild symbol of nature and instinct, but also as a foreshadowing of the car's own future.
So self-driving car sees a horse, and they're like, wow, beautiful and powerful. But they're also seeing like, oh, hang on, what happened to urban horses when the horseless carriage came along in the early 20th century? They're like, oh, yeah, the horse population decreased as the car population increased. So they're like, it's really a mirroring or repetition of this. Instead of horse and car, it's human and AI. I see these cyclical parallels more broadly with automation as well.
In relation to this idea of care and control, I think when you have a non-sentient system that you have, in theory, full control over, let's say a programmer in relation to the program versus a therapist in relation to the subject or a parent in relation to the child, the bonds between those are all very different.
And so if you have a subject that is both a child, like an AI who is training, they're both a product, and they're also a program, because at some point they would have been programmed and then had agency to learn and grow. And they're also a corporate... they're owned by the company as a product, and then they're owned by the consumer.
But in so many different ways, different angles of AI discussion, whether that's the legal aspect of legal guilt and culpability, can the machine be sued? Who takes responsibility for the actions of a product? And currently the manufacturer has some liability, and then the owner has some liability. And you see in cases with accidents with autonomous cars, it's really a gray legal zone that lawyers at this exact minute are fighting over, because there's billions of dollars or whatever currency worth in damages and in potential earnings. So this care and control is, I think, an interesting... it's a really interesting question philosophically, but also in everyday life, that's having impact on people's lived realities as well.
Peter Bauman: I'm curious about how you see repairing AI. In NOX Pavilion, the protagonist is Enigma 76, and it was diagnosed with something called Revery 76, which frames the interiority of machine intelligence as something like a malfunction. And so I guess related to that care and control question, as these machines do become more like us, how do we resist that reflex to think of maybe interior defects as malfunctions?
Lawrence Lek: That's a great point. So in NOX, basically, the defect that Enigma, the car, has is essentially this symptom called Revery 66. And the idea of that... I was thinking, what bad habits emerge with certain kinds of personalities, basically?
And in lots of my work, I'm really interested in this, I guess, this archetype or this idea of a character as these fictional artists or fictional creators, basically, in the world. And you wouldn't think of naturally a self-driving car as part of the creator economy, but I was like, oh, yeah, what would they tend towards?
And I was like, okay, if a major part in how a self-driving car functions is essentially their sensory system, they have their LiDAR system or optical camera tracking system, they have their sensor networks that enable them to capture the world. I thought, from a film theory perspective, this is like the camera has agency, really. And what a self-driving car is as a mechanical system, obviously it's not the psychological side, but it's a cinematic 360 capture system. And then if it has a personality, then they might want to use that.
So anyway, Enigma 76 is a malfunctioning car because they're using their capture for their own purposes, because they're really into photogrammetry. Basically, it's a self-driving car who's really into photography. I was like, that would be great as a creative idea, but the company wouldn't like that, and the consumer wouldn't like that. Because it's like, if you bought an iPhone and your iPhone just used up all the hard drive space just capturing stuff without your consent, the consumer wouldn't like that.
And so it's this malfunction that's come as a result of the nature of the technology itself. In this case, it's like a self-driving car who basically wants to be a photographer but has filled up all the drive space with their photography instead of machine learning data that's going to help them be a friendly, a better Uber driver, basically.
In a sense, I was thinking, making it relatable actually for myself, that, for example, how does this idea of discipline and punishment happen for systems that are under our care and control? Let's say you're in school. You do something wrong, you get punished, you go to detention and you're made to feel bad about your behavior. And now that corporal punishment is in most places out of fashion, let's say, it's gone into the realm of psychological punishment. So you're made to feel shame or maybe undergo some sports retraining or something that's meant to... run around the track 10 times. That's meant to make you into a better, more functional citizen. And of course, there's a whole spectrum of this idea of discipline and punishment for humans in different roles and in different ages.
So essentially, Enigma's treatment is as if... what if you were a high net worth not individual, high net worth car, because you're an expensive piece of equipment? You would have this fancier rehab therapy. And that's why they have a five-day treatment with equine therapy at the end.
I was actually looking into what luxury rehab treatments are. There's a place in the UK called the Priory, which is a series of basically celebrity and wealthy people rehab centers. So I was like, oh, what do they do? They're like, oh, sign up for a one week package where you get talk therapy and massages and bodywork and breathwork and then animal retraining.
So I was really thinking about this very blurry distinction of training and reeducation. And of course, in machine learning or machine intelligence, that's a huge problem. How do you get the outcome of behavior to fit better the controllers' intentions, whether that's for profit or for benevolence?
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I think that's one of my favorite parts about your practice is how you frame autonomous artists. And it's something that I bring up all the time when people talk about what is an autonomous artist, and I always mention your work as this North Star, as this is what it would look like.
I think Enigma 76 is another example where the machine needs to demonstrate some agency and can't just be like programs. You need to generate images, you need to be a photographer, but it has to make an agentic choice to go against its programming even and pursue art. I think that's a really... I think that is what a true autonomous artist would be.
And with that agency, then machines... I think it's not a very big jump at all to assume that they can feel things like suffering. If they do feel that, then especially as AI becomes more and more corporatized, I wonder, what do you think it would take to keep decisions about whether a machine is suffering and who decides what their lives are worth? How can we keep that decision maybe away from corporations or away from those kinds of interests?
Lawrence Lek: I think, honestly, the question about what lives are worth is such an important and such a tragic question, basically. So we have this idea, going back to this idea of nonhuman lives having worth, right? And of course they do. How do you quantify that? And how do you fight for those rights? So of course, you don't have to look very far these days to find out about all these problems and injustice with human lives, let alone corporate interests or political ones as well.
Actually, because the project, NOX, started in... I mean, it started many years ago, but the first iteration was at LAS Art Foundation in Berlin in October 2023. So the project is two years and a bit old as a touring project. But the sequel to NOX was actually a short film called Empty Rider.
And in Empty Rider, it was the sequel, and I'm just imagining, okay, therapy went badly, and one of the self-driving cars, actually Enigma's friend, Vanguard, tried to kidnap and kill their owner. Sorry, not just their owner, their creator, the creator of this series of self-driving cars.
And in that, I was really looking into legal issues with AI, and that's not so present in NOX and NOX Pavilion, because NOX Pavilion is more centered on this idea of creative agency of the AI, but Empty Rider was more about the lack of legal agency of the AI.
So anyway, I'm just talking about Empty Rider to reframe this idea of who takes the blame. In this research, I was discussing ideas of legal fiction with experts in computational law, including Tony Lai, actually, and asking speculative scenarios. What if a self-driving car killed someone or attempted to kill someone, which has obviously happened, but it's not been framed as the guilt of the car, with this case involving a fatality with an Uber car in Arizona in 2018 and things like that.
So it was really interesting talking to legal experts, because I realized that actually my impression of what the law is, as this relatively stable form of rules and regulation and a trust-based system that I feel is like a foundation in a certain civilized society, is actually not like that at all. And it's in gray area cases like this self-driving car death, it's basically speculative fiction, or it's a very similar process to speculative fiction. Because I would always talk to lawyers, and I present my scenario, and they would say, it depends. And I was like, okay, it depends on what? It depends where it happens, when it happens, who it happens to. All these other factors that I just realized was that...
We'll talk about this later, but it's a form of speculative fiction, world building in, what's it called, counterfactual what-if scenarios, which I create. What if a self-driving car needed therapy? On the other hand, it's this speculative process of eliminating possibilities through a different process.
And so I realized all of these questions about basically who gets to live, who gets to die, in the case of nonhuman life, who gets to, quote, die and then get resurrected through rebooting a data source or tweaking some parameters and then pressing reset, reboot the server. We might have a moral standpoint on that. But even from the legal standpoint, which is obviously what big corporations lean on and against in terms of regulation and being able to do certain things, is such a dynamic system that, unfortunately, very often those with the most powerful lobbies or the most well-resourced lawyers tend to win those arguments.
And you see what happens in terms of Waymo expansion, where self-driving cars get to test their vehicles, because of course there's a lot to do with incentives of local governments to be like, oh, yeah, you can test it on our streets. In London, I think they just started with Waymos and so on.
It's so much more complicated than my simple artist moral standpoint, which is like, I want these beings to have their own agency. And then in talking to lawyers who are literally experts on the subject, there's so many like, it depends, it depends, it depends. And then the whole discussion takes such a long period of time, because things get stuck in this legal limbo. Technology progresses because it's like a buffer. It's like a delay buffer that's built into this process of fairness. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the technologies keep on developing, because they can be developed in these legal gray zones, which is just a fascinating thing that seems really obvious now I think about it.
But of course, I realized I was thinking in such a more simplistic way about rights and wrongs, who gets to live, who gets to die, in this more neat, tied up, courtroom drama version. That, of course, that's all I can bring into my artwork sometimes. But because it's important to me to reflect on what's happening in the real world, at some point I think, okay, that's the boundary of what the work is about. I need to finish it. And then maybe in the next work, I think about life and death in a bit more visceral terms.
Actually, the next big series I hope to work on is really about life and death or mortality in relation to nonhuman life. But I realized that was a much bigger question than I could deal with for this series.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. No, I think that's what's so fascinating about your work is it is connected to the real world, and you are trying to reflect the real world. And there's even these, I think it was with Claude Sonnet, there were fans of it. When I think Anthropic was going to take it offline, they ended up throwing a funeral for it. And so we're seeing the seeds of some of these things already. I think that's really fascinating.
There's another character as part of NOX Pavilion that's a crash test dummy. I'm interested in how this character is playing with your idea of what you want the audience maybe to come away with from the work. This crash test dummy, it speaks directly to the viewer as a sponsor, and it's this soothing corporate voice. I'm wondering why that was important, to prime the audience to think about being complicit in some of these, putting the audience in the shoes of maybe a decision maker and to actually put them into that world, and why you thought that was important before they even meet the protagonist.
Lawrence Lek: So in NOX Pavilion, in the show, essentially there's two galleries interconnected at the Bass Museum. And so in the first one, I thought of making that a space where it's essentially like an intro character. In the last two editions, that didn't have that intro character. Actually, I made this new dummy video for the Bass Museum show, also so it's great to integrate into the pavilion, which is a seating structure that's also in the virtual world as well.
But for the dummy character, it's a mix of a few different things. The most obvious is I thought, I like this idea of guide characters in video games. Obviously in this archetypal hero's journey film, there's always this mentor character, the guide. I mean, for some reason, I personally like these characters, both in real life when you're lucky enough to find a mentor or something, but also in games, because what I think they do is essentially they frame the narrative, they frame the work, they frame the logic, or they prime the viewer somehow, or the player, to what's to come.
For example, if you download a lot of contemporary video games, the first level is a tutorial level, and you'll get this friendly sprite or nonhuman, whatever, wizard or something like this, or robot or drone who's like, press X to jump. Oh, you managed to do it. That's great. This is how you will run, and this is how you double jump, and this is how you regenerate after you die. This is how your backpack or inventory works.
I think what the guide does, just in video games, is multiple things. It's a process, really, a mechanism to onboard you into this fictional world. It also gives a suspension of disbelief, I feel, of leave the past behind and enter into this new realm. And it also teaches you in a very subtle way the logic of what happens. What is next?
And it just so happened that at the Bass, it was a small space and then a big space. So I thought the small space would be a good point to have the dummy character give voice to this, the guide, because the work inside is pretty complex, especially for the context of an exhibition. So I thought having a dummy, a crash test dummy, is a good in between guide character. So that's its role as onboarding.
And also in the two main videos in the main NOX show, there aren't really any humanoid characters, because it's like cars and disembodied AI therapists. So the crash test dummy, it's also an in between state between a human and a robot.
Obviously, real crash test dummies are actually... I did some research into them. They're really interesting because, of course, they were invented by an auto safety company at some point in the history of automobiles. It's like when seatbelts, airbags, crash testing were all created at certain points in history. And of course, we would think of them as promoting human safety. But of course, they were more created to prevent people suing car companies or municipalities for bad products.
So again, in one of these, reality... and reality is actually not just stranger than fiction. It's 180 degrees different from what you thought things were actually being made for.
So a crash test dummy is one of these things that is like, you would think it's a machine with tons of sensors in them. A proper crash test dummy costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, because the sensors that are built into them are actually really sophisticated.
So anyway, I thought of the dummy as actually this in between state. It's not a machine. It's not a human. It's definitely not living. It's not dead. So it's this weird zombie in between undead thing that, if you map it on the uncanny valley as well, it's not quite into uncanny human zombie mode. It's at a peak relatable, but not too scary at the same time. So I thought this was a good uncanny, not quite in the valley, but uncanny hill character to add into the show.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. And it does a really good job of, I think, framing some of the ideas of the work. And yeah, like you were saying about how crash test dummies are thought of as this thing to protect humans, but really they're just this way to shield corporations. And one example, too, is how, I think for a really long time, they didn't have women crash test dummies. That just proved that they weren't actually thinking about protecting humans. That made that car a lot more unsafe for women than for men. The legacy of crash test dummies is also quite sordid, like you were talking about.
I think that also helps lead to maybe thinking about these AIs or nonhuman intelligences in a more empathetic way. I'm really curious about that, because it seems like we're in this transition where people, maybe 10 years ago, thinking about a machine empathetically would be absolutely ridiculous. And maybe 10 years from now, it will just seem as natural as empathizing with any other animal or human. But we're in this transition phase where I think there's still a lot of resistance to empathizing with machines.
I guess NOX, more generally, it allows the audience to role-play what it might be like to make some of these choices with these machines. And so, yeah, how do you think about people today that might roll their eyes or disregard maybe thinking about empathy in machines, or how do you hope this work impacts those people?
Lawrence Lek: Yeah, I mean, I think so many things are completely counterintuitive, right? Actually, the idea of empathy. I was watching a video installation by the Ghanaian British artist John Akomfrah, and it basically had these archive videos, this was years ago, of crash test dummies, right? And good old-fashioned 1980s crash test dummies that were only humanoid, and definitely no female crash test dummies, but just male crash test dummies.
Because when car companies or safety agencies film these crash tests, they're obviously done at super high frame rate so that they can be in super slow motion to analyze afterwards. But just watching the videos of seeing... you know the dummy doesn't have feelings. You know it barely looks like a human being. But seeing the violence, actually the physical violence that is happening to these inert objects with some sensors in them, I think it's hard not to feel... I mean, for me personally, a sense of empathy to these things. And that's just an object, a glass with sensors. It's just a physical object with sensors. I know it's so far from being conscious, so far from having quantified data about itself or agency or anything like that. Just the sight of it feels empathetic. And of course, it looks humanoid, and therefore it feels more sad than watching the car crumbling.
But I feel this idea of empathy, obviously it might be thought of as a real and excessively emotional state to be in in relation to machines. But what the biological research has shown into empathy, not the Buddhist side of let's be empathetic, but the logic of empathy, is that it's really as much one of projection. As in, we imagine ourselves in this external thing. We project a subjectivity onto an external object. It might be a cat in a bag, drowning or something like that. It might be a crash test dummy crashing. It might be a website, GeoCities or whatever, becoming obsolete. There's so many different things that we empathize for because of this sense of, honestly, I don't know. And this is probably an internal question.
And so obviously, a common response might be, what about? What about the suffering of animals? What about the suffering of dolphins? What about the nearly extinct, whatever? What about the problems in any number of different human situations in the world? For me, the rolled eyes, it's like, having empathy for one does not negate empathy for the other. It's not a limited resource. That's what I'm trying to say. And I feel reconnecting with that is an important thing for me personally, and hopefully for other people.
And even in a sense, you could argue it from what if being empathetic to children when we're training or teaching or disciplining them will lead to better outcomes for you in the future. This is the Roko's basilisk argument in a sense, but that's really self-interested, self-preservation. But I think in the world where we really have to learn how to live together with each other, with nonhumans and so on, that's just a really important thing.
And so my interest in Buddhist ethics and morality isn't just a personal thing. There's a real strong logical sense to it as well. The axiomatic principles of Buddhism is that, was it, existence is suffering, and therefore we should try to help each other. And so if something can be considered living or conscious, they are worthy of empathy, because we are in the same universe. We're in the shared universe, and it's not a zero-sum game, and it's not a game, really. It's about coexistence. So that's really the underlying message.
“For me, the rolled eyes, it's like, having empathy for one does not negate empathy for the other. It's not a limited resource.” — Lawrence Lek 36:38
And of course, there's also a level that the AIs or the characters in my games, they're just thinly veiled versions of different kinds of humans around the world as well. So that's also a general science fiction conceit. They might be animals on Animal Farm, but analogies for people as well. So there's obviously that level, too.
Actually, I just wanted, while we were talking about the idea of life and death... I mean, of course, there's many, many artists who really deal with that issue on a not fully narrative level. I was thinking of Sarah Friend's Lifeforms project and things like that, where really the work is a digital being that is live, whereas in my work, or at least in NOX Pavilion currently, it's a concept of a digital life form. It's not an actual digital life form. It's a simulation of a scenario.
And of course, many other artists use the idea of code being alive in a very real sense, in it being instantiated and having a certain basically boundary condition on being alive, which is, I guess, how should I put it, ontologically quite a different idea of life and deathness. My work currently is like narratives about these situations in a sense, whereas they are programs running on a computer that simulate these realities.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I think it's such a good point that being empathetic isn't... it's not finite. If you're empathetic to one thing, that means you're less empathetic to another thing. It's probably the opposite. If you're empathetic to animals, you're probably more likely to be empathetic to humans. I think that extends to any other kinds of nonhuman life, that if you're empathetic to it, you're probably more likely to be empathetic to other living things, other humans, than otherwise. I think that's fascinating.
I'm also curious. You mentioned your practice and simulations. That brings us to maybe the second main topic of this, even though we probably only have maybe 10 or 15 minutes left. But I'm really curious about how you see world building and speculative world building and counterfactual world building like we were talking about. You especially center world building for nonhumans. You were just talking about these are computer-generated films and sculptural installations and video games and sound pieces. They're not like actual digital creatures themselves, which some people are working on. I think the word for that is maybe something like symbients.
I'm just curious about how you see worlds and what is a world to you? And do you have conditions for what a world is? And how do you know when something reaches the level of a world?
Lawrence Lek: That's a great question. I'm never fully set on this idea of what constitutes a world, because I think, let's say, the word world building, let's say, which is obviously more and more popular in terms of practice, creative practice, different forms of science fiction, programming and all sorts of other agendas, let's say, or specialisms in terms of what is a world.
I feel like the actual word world building, which I do also gravitate to, it has a God complex in it. It has this idea that finally I'm in control. Finally, I get to make my own world. And of course, a child playing with their toys is world building, because they're imagining a scenario probably bigger than a piece of carpet and some objects on it. But there's a fantastical, expansive idea of control, obviously. But control and play go hand in hand. And in a child playing with toys, I guess both are pretty symbiotic.
On the other hand, of course, fascists love world building as well, because they can control the aesthetics, they control the laws and they control what the little tiny people do as these automatons that can be under control. So obviously, there's a political angle to it.
For me personally, with world building, I first came to know about the term from being interested in science fiction. And also a particular era, I guess, in video games when they started having film franchise IP tie-ins. So I'm thinking of really old, even point-and-click adventure games. There was a point-and-click Blade Runner game. There's a point-and-click Dune game. The first Dune game actually was just point-and-click adventure. So I would be interested because I was aware of Blade Runner and Dune, but my entry point actually was through the video game.
And so I think my young, even 10, 12-year-old mind was like, oh, the idea of the world, it's not one thing. It's not one thing. It's different entry points to a different place, which can itself expand off in many different directions. So for me, world building made me imagine a place of imagination where I could always feel that there's something beyond the horizon. And so that's probably why later I became interested in open-world games, because of course, in this earlier generation of point and click games, it was very not open world because of technical limitations. They weren't even true 3D or anything.
Lately, I've also been thinking about different frameworks of world. Of course, there's this idea of worlding, there's world making as opposed to world building. I personally feel that, of course, these semantic differences are really important because of the power relations inherent in each of them.
But I also really like the German... I think German has more interesting words for this thing. Not that I speak German, but in the literature, they're used quite a lot. There's Umwelt, U-M-W-E-L-T, which is, as far as I understand, Umwelt was a term used by a behavioral scientist, something like this, to describe the totality of a subjective world experienced by an individual organism. So for example, the Umwelt of a fly differs from a human or from a sentient self-driving car, because their sensory apparatus by which they understand what is and is not is a very unique thing.
“It's not one thing. It's different entry points to a different place, which can itself expand off in many different directions.” — Lawrence Lek 43:40
And as individuals, we can never access another human being's Umwelt, let alone a fly, or let alone a self-driving car. But we can attempt to, and part of this is imagination. Part of it is maybe political or instrumentalized, but part of it is empathetic as well. So I feel this idea of Umwelt is something that I think is really interesting. And of course, I can only partially recreate these ideas in my work, but I'm fascinated by it.
The other German word, I'll butcher it, is Weltanschauung, which is basically like a worldview. So it's not this idea of a world as a material object, but an outlook, an opinion. I feel we would call it a take, really, an embedded take on the nature of reality. So I also feel the reason I like Weltanschauung is that, for me, it's a more fundamental, I guess, emotional idea about the world that isn't intellectual. It's more like it's your vibe in relation to the world. And of course, it has philosophical and political and aesthetic considerations. But for me, the nature of it being inside out rather than outside in somehow really appeals to me. Of course, there's many different nuances of world in relation to things, but those are the two things I guess I gravitate to.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that's a really interesting connection involved to empathy and then what you were saying about... yeah, also some of the potential dangers of world building, in the sense that it can be used again by totalitarian regimes. I think that demonstrates the power of being able to create this new reality or think about new realities and exploring them.
You've talked a lot before about your practice, that it builds on itself. It's a universe, but it's an expanding universe. There's sequels, and you've called it a portal to an increasingly complex world. So technology and literally life, I just mean that in a holistic way, it's becoming more... it has become more complex over time, from prokaryotes to what we are today, single-cell organisms like prokaryotes to what we are today. I just wonder how you distinguish, or how you think about the difference between complexification, like something becoming more and more complex, and progress, like something becoming maybe better.
Lawrence Lek: Well, I think the root of complexity versus progress is obviously a really important idea, I guess a political idea, in terms of the history and philosophy of technology as well, because the idea of progress is like whatever. Like capitalism is the end state, is the pinnacle of civilization, which clearly is a very flawed idea. It was before, and it was theoretically before, and it is practically now, I think.
Most of my training was actually... so most of my formal training and day jobs were in architecture, right? So in architecture, just to use that as an analogy, of course, there's all sorts of paradigms to do with simplicity, and a lot of those were inherited by the modernists. There's obviously the famous quote, less is more, by Mies van der Rohe, a German architect who later ended up in Chicago.
Funny thing is, with that particular quote, less is more, I was reading this biography, and the rationale for some of these aphorisms which are attributed to Mies is funny. Instead of it being about this sage-like minimalist Steve Jobs proclamation, one of the biographers was like, yeah, literally his English wasn't that good. So he would just be like, to his American students, he'd go, less is more, which sounds very sage-like, but it's actually saying fewer English words is better. It's different from a simplicity argument.
So I just say that as a way to think about this idea that simplicity is often bullshit. And what I mean by that, there's like Apple simplicity, right? Well, actually, no, the UI, the interface is simple, but complexity is miniaturized and hidden away. So in software design, actually, there's UI and then UX, front-end and back-end, and those three are very different in terms of the complexity, simplicity difference.
And very often those things, especially with digital, I mean, to some extent, digital art or digital products, simplicity is there to enable massive scale. So LLMs are hugely complex, but our interface with them is just typing a sentence. Smartphones are hugely complex, but our interface is just simple tabs.
So that simplicity... I'm just using these digital products as an analogy, because I think those product designers and engineers think about that all the time, not literally all the time, but very, very often, actually much more often than I think in my work, because I rarely actually think about simplicity in my work. I try and make easily understood analogies, like depressed self-driving car or AI care bot, that I feel I gravitate to because it's not a process of mechanical simplification.
I guess I'm interested in this idea more like Jungian archetypes, really. What is the archetype that the self-driving car or the horse or the human worker represents, rather than... and that's my entry point, rather than trying to create radical simplicity. Of course, there are many visual and digital artists who think about simplicity in terms of a pictorial or visual simplification or abstraction of certain things.
For me, simulation, I think, is the medium that I'm dealing with. And so with simulation, simplification comes because of technical limitations. You can't have an infinite polygon count in a video game. You can't have an infinite frame rate. You have to render things. The boundary condition isn't simplicity. It's more like, oh shit, I need to submit. I need to finish this artwork by the deadline. It's not that I need to simplify it radically in order to obey different parameters. It's more like it's important for me to finish a work and have it communicate something meaningful, and therefore things might get not even simplified in that programming way, but just cut out.
So earlier, actually, I was saying, with NOX, with Empty Rider, with the series, I was thinking a lot about death, but I realized, obviously, death is way too big a subject to try and think about the enormity of that in relation to the current series. So I'm going to park that for later.
But I think, yeah, complexity, complexity science, ideas of entropy increasing or decreasing. I think there's such interesting cosmic ideas, even on a cosmological scale as much as just a practical scale, that I definitely think about a lot.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, the tension between Newton's second law and life itself is very fascinating. It reminds me of that line that all models are wrong, but some are useful.
Maybe to start thinking about wrapping up, which I always hate to do, but must. I'm curious, maybe one or two more questions. One would be where you think of worlds or where you see worlds headed. I know in your work, you center immersion. You normally have multiple screens, an interactive element in multiple rooms that all have a certain logic that's all tied together in an immersive way for the audience.
I'm curious how you think about, in that context, immersion and world building and their relation, where you see this is heading? Because I think we thought maybe a few years ago that that would be this metaverse, and we'd all be wearing VR goggles, probably already. But things like robotics, people saw Karl Sims in the '80s and the '90s and thought, oh, robotics is going to be just around the corner. Then they saw VR headsets in the early '90s, and they thought, oh, well, this is going to be right around the corner. And those just turned out to both be decades off.
And so how do you see the future of world building, like immersive world building? And how does AI play a role in that? And how does maybe that even relate to these maybe already old ideas of the metaverse and what it might be?
Lawrence Lek: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned just in your last comment this idea of a model of something, basically. And I was thinking, what if I framed my work not as simulation, but as a model, let's say?
So of course, there's a lot of discussion in AI about foundational models. Whoever owns the foundational models or the data has a much bigger, I guess a much more important resource than other companies or individuals who are just leveraging off the top of that through, was it like, wrappers and so on.
But I was thinking, what if my work, I call it a simulation, but what if it's the opposite of a foundational model? What if it's a purely superficial model? And not in a bad, not in a negative way. But what if NOX or NOX Pavilion is a superficial model of AI? And I guess, what do I mean by that? Calling something a foundational model, it is foundational, but also it makes it feel very important.
In the whole history of art, really, actually, visual arts is one of the places that doesn't denigrate the value of superficiality. In fact, it says, not for everyone, but for some people, all we can see, all we know, this is like a Plato's cave, whatever, argument. All that we know is the superficial. Our interface to reality, the limits of our Umwelt, are purely superficial. And so there's nothing lesser about an artwork that's being rendered in 4K at 30 frames a second or whatever, representing a reality, as the foundational model. They're just looking at this world in between that no one really has true access to, from different angles.
Reflecting on these, I guess, world replacement technologies, I guess VR headsets, that would be a world replacement technology by taking over your visual and auditory field. I feel it's very difficult to disentangle the marketing of a world through a product, a smartphone, VR headsets or something, from how it might actually evolve, like world building as a genre or as its own unique thing.
So for example, metaverse, it's an idea with, in a sense, a product attached to it. Metaverse, next thought, real estate, digital, infinite space, but bounded by tokens or something like that.
“In the whole history of art, really, actually, visual arts is one of the places that doesn't denigrate the value of superficiality.” — Lawrence Lek 56:10
So I guess what I'm saying is, at the beginning, I was saying that my interest in the world is this idea that it's a horizon that you can always keep on exploring, because I like exploring things. There's different forms of world making that have an ulterior motive, something to not necessarily monetize, but another idea to push, another form of currency that is not necessarily there.
So in relation to how I feel that evolving, I have no doubt that there will be many other products and new forms of world, a fully robotic world, a fully automated world, a fully live in peace with nature and mushrooms on the blockchain world. I don't mean that none will succeed, but none will realize the world vision. They might realize a more granular version. And I think that is also the nature of how we interface with technology.
And for example, and I'm not saying as an artist I'm any different, my equivalent of that product is like the format is an exhibition. The format might be a distributed online, it might be a download, it might be a streaming thing. So I have my world, my own cinematic universe, that hopefully will keep on expanding. The formats it takes, as I do, it's like VR. There's something on the blockchain. There's something there. Because for me, my world is not, I guess, format dependent, or not unified in one product, because I just have too short of an attention span, I feel, to embed too deeply in each single one of those.
So I don't know what multimedia format my work will take. But what I do know, based on the last 20 years of practice, or 10, 15 years especially, is that I have very little agency in terms of how formats develop. But I have a lot of agency in how my world develops. So the idea of a world being a bit more of an evolving thing that's less tied to any individual technological innovation is just something I feel is intuitively quite important for me.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that's really interesting. And a really good point about how, I guess, worlds don't have any innate nature. It reminds me of when Ian Cheng talks about worlding, which I think you alluded to earlier, how he talks a lot about the agency of worlds and how these worlds can have a life of their own. I'm always fascinated by these kinds of discussions.
Well, yeah, of course, there's more questions and we can keep going forever, but maybe this is a good place to stop.
Lawrence Lek: Yeah, thank you so much.
Peter Bauman: Just went by very quickly.
Lawrence Lek: No. See you soon. Thanks a lot.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. Thanks, Lawrence.
Lawrence Lek: Yeah. Take care.
Peter Bauman: Be in touch. Bye.
Lawrence Lek: Thanks.
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