Lawrence Lek

For the past 10 years, filmmaker Lawrence Lek has been creating science-fiction landscapes that feature neon temples, drones touring abandoned luxury hotels, and empty urban highways.

The throughline is, there are no visible people. His main characters—and crucially, not the villains—are artificial intelligence entities. 

His 2021 film Black Cloud stars a depressed self-driving car that performed its job too well, and finds itself bored and aimless. Meanwhile, his 2017 film Geomancer tells the story of an unfulfilled satellite that returns to earth, longing to become an artist.

These characters deliver poetic, at times morose monologue and dialogue against dreamlike, spacey electronic music.

AI characters, Lek said, can be avatars for outsiders, "or somebody who isn't fully understood yet." He says that treating AI as a threat, in effect, casts it, in human terms, as a fully-fledged adult.  “I actually think it's this adolescent—it's this grumpy teenager who doesn't quite know what they're doing,” Lek says.

As an artist, Lek is an outsider to the AI community, but that perspective allows him to be introspective about the advent of this new technology. Earlier this year, he was awarded the Frieze London 2024 Artist Award. The judges lauded his “essential interrogations into the use of AI and its relationship with the human experience.”

Lek's interest in this storytelling approach was inspired, in part, by growing up in Hong Kong and Singapore, both places that grew and changed rapidly during his childhood.

“It basically didn't seem that science fiction was so much just something that was witnessed in artworks, and in films, and in video games, but it was also something that was part of my everyday life,” Lek says.