What happens when machines develop their own form of autonomous consciousness? This question has long been at the center of sci-fi novels and films until it became the lingering dilemma—and fear—that now accompanies today’s debates on A.I. That question also sits at the center of Lawrence Lek’s layered digital narrative at the Bass Museum of Art, where he is currently staging a series of works from his fictional universe centered on NOX (short for ‘Nonhuman Excellence’), a therapy center for sentient self-driving cars undergoing psychological treatment for problems rooted in their own self-awareness, with mental breakdowns, distractions and malfunctions that interfere with the jobs they were designed to perform. The multidimensional cinematic and game-specific experience the London-based artist presents is marked by a level of conceptual and critical complexity that imposes a different tempo than one might expect amid the brisk chaos of Art Basel Miami Beach. Yet these works were among the most compelling encounters outside the fair, prompting as they did a timely reflection on our contemporary condition across shifting dynamics of labor, automation, agency and intelligence.
Operating within a form of speculative realism, Lek uses the imaginative fluidity of digital simulation to stage an allegory of dissociation and alienation. On view at the Bass is a site-specific multimedia installation and game environment that merges physical multi-floor installations, virtual world-building and locative sound. In two connected galleries, Lek invites viewers to empathize with these artificial entities as they experience and question personhood and culpability within systems of surveillance, rehabilitation and justice—an open flow of consciousness that resonates unsettlingly with our own.
His digital narrative brings together both existing and newly commissioned works drawn from the more expansive Smart City Saga (2021-2024), a series of speculative films and immersive installations in which he explores the psychological and political lives of nonhuman characters in fictional smart cities. “I’m interested in imagining a new point of view—a new kind of subjectivity—belonging to life forms that aren’t human,” Lek explained when Observer spoke with him at the opening. “That’s really the political and conceptual terrain of the work.”
Lek’s medium is a potentially endless form of worldbuilding, an artistic universe that spans cinema, architecture, music and games. “I’m interested in the kinds of narratives that can only unfold through these media, where the stories inside the work also reflect on the wider reality,” he said. He treats animation as a medium of simulation rather than abstraction, shaping a form of speculative realism in which the subject of the work becomes an alternate version of reality. “I’m interested in what Margaret Atwood calls speculative fiction—stories rooted in realities that already exist somewhere in history, then reframed in a contemporary or future context.” Although his work is technologically sophisticated, Lek’s focus is far less on technology itself than on narrative. “Technology is not my subject; it is my lens for speaking about humanity. Every character in my films is a mirror of the human condition.”
The exhibition, “NOX Pavilion,” is built around systems we already know: corporate control, constant evaluation and forms of labor that demand productivity at all costs. Yet even though automation and the fear of artificial intelligence taking our jobs appears central to the discourse, it is not Lek’s primary concern. It is simply the backdrop. “What interests me is the perspective of ‘the other’—in this case, the A.I. or the machine—as a kind of new protagonist. I think of them as a new kind of alienated worker in contemporary society.”
Even though these machines are extremely intelligent, they have almost no agency: they are entirely owned by corporations, operating nonstop, 24/7, with no control over their fate—making the contrast even sharper. That is where the existential drama emerges. “In noir films a century ago, the crisis came from distrusting the state, your elders, or institutions. Now that distrust is redirected toward the algorithm, the corporation, the systems we can’t see but that determine everything,” Lek said. The allegory is clear: the A.I. machines in “NOX Pavilion” reflect how people today relate to their jobs and to their diminished sense of control over their own futures.
In the main video, we follow an A.I.-driven car navigating abandoned streets—a surveillance system in a failed smart city. Here, Lek takes up a contemporary road movie or coming-of-age story. The journey—a metaphor for transformation since antiquity—gets reframed through machine subjects trying to navigate a world they do not control, even as they are built to understand it. In dialogue with Guanyin, their built-in therapist, the A.I. attempts to process its existential guilt as a digital being confronting burnout and trauma, tracing an arc that closely mirrors human behavior under conditions of isolation and hyperproductivity.
“I’ve been thinking about what a coming-of-age story might look like for these new beings. They have their own longings, their own sense of possibility, like the small-town kid urged to stay home and take over the farm,” Lek said. “It’s a narrative I identify with personally, so I began asking what these new life forms would empathize with. That point of view—empathy from a nonhuman perspective—is central to the work.”
Digital simulation is, for Lek, a tool to create an allegorical realm in which multiple perspectives can coexist. By recasting and reframing elements from past and present models of civilization and blending forms of human and machine intelligence, he shapes this meta-reality and meta-narrative into something that comments on the contemporary condition, or even anticipates what is to come. “I’m interested in speculative fiction as a mirror of reality, where the past haunts the future, and the past reshapes itself through the future.”
His work inhabits a space where past and present, ruin and future, human and nonhuman collide—an in-between terrain enabled by simulation, where viewers are invited to contemplate the hybridities shaping contemporary experience. “I always try to create a space where the fictional, conceptual world of the work meets the physical gallery—a liminal environment suspended between everyday reality and the moment viewers step inside.”
Anchoring the exhibition at the Bass is a pavilion made of gray tiles—part shelter, part monument, part ruin, part construction site. The same pavilion appears in a nearby lightbox in the smart city of NOX, emphasizing the continuity and interchangeability between physical and digital realms. NOX itself is set in a futuristic smart city presented as an abandoned dystopian ruin where civilization has clearly collapsed: “It blends a classical idea of the ruin, with all its associations about what comes after a civilization, with a sci-fi environment. Bringing those together lets me comment on contemporary life through a past-future lens.”
It is within this binary that Lek has developed the notion of Sinofuturism. “China’s evolving relationship to the future is the idea that anchors my universe,” he reflected. “It comes from a lifetime lived in the space between East and West.”
For Lek, Sinofuturism is a form of futurism that exists outside the Western framework and outside Afrofuturism, rooted instead in the experience of East Asian and Chinese diasporic culture. If Italian Futurism once celebrated the machine—speed, cars, tanks—and if Afrofuturism reframed identity through the alien or the robot to circumvent Western humanism, Lek recognized the need for an equivalent framework to understand the complex relationship between technology and the Chinese or East Asian context, where its integration and implementation have often been even more rapidly accelerated, leaving little space for humans to adapt or fully process its impact.
Many of his videos unfold in environments reminiscent of East or Southeast Asia—dense housing blocks, towering skyscrapers, spaces that feel both hypermodern and already abandoned. These settings become ideal stages for examining the promises, illusions and failures embedded in technological “progress.”
In Equine Therapy, one of the A.I. vehicles follows a horse into the wild, confronting a similar tension. Its words, “I’m not made for sand and dust; I’m made for concrete,” are meant to be allegorical, reflecting the condition of many urban dwellers today who were raised entirely in concrete, disconnected from nature and unsure how to return to it, or whether return is even possible. The machines experience the same dislocation. In their world, nature becomes both memory and desire—something perpetually out of reach.
If, in Marxist terms, there are different levels of alienation, Lek’s cars experience several at once. “They’re alienated from their labor because all they do is work. They’re disconnected from any real community because they exist solely to serve their function. And they’re cut off from their own history—they don’t know where they come from or who their ‘ancestors’ are,” he said. That tension between superintelligence and profound disconnection is central. People in 2025 can easily relate: disconnection from work, family and origins, from whatever is meant to constitute a “real” sense of being human. Some dream of quitting their jobs to start a farm; others turn to genealogy to trace lost roots. The car’s attempt to “unalienate” itself follows the same impulse, expressed through its encounter with the horse—an archetypal figure that taps into something primordial.
Lek’s work frequently draws on ancient tropes from the collective subconscious, even when they appear subtly and operate through multiple layers of symbolism at once. Here, the horse is not merely a symbol of power or wilderness, as he clarifies. Historically, it functioned as an essential industrial and military engine. When the car encounters the horse, it glimpses its own evolutionary past. “There’s recognition, but also a tragic undertone: mass-produced automobiles wiped out the urban horse population,” he explained. “A century ago, New York’s streets were full of horses; now only a few remain pulling carriages in Central Park. The horse becomes a mirror—they see their future in it, the arc of becoming obsolete.”
Guided by Guanyin, an A.I. “carebot” named after the Buddhist goddess of compassion, NOX Enigma’s therapy sessions draw out reflections and memories that reveal the tension between what these machines were built to do and the lives they imagine for themselves. Their unease echoes the anxieties shaping human existence today, turning NOX and Lek’s wider smart-city cycle into a history-making epic for the twenty-first century, something akin to a contemporary Iliad or Odyssey, both testament and guide to the ethical questions humanity now faces. As our relationship with machines continues to evolve, and as we learn to interact, empathize, collaborate and even merge with new forms of intelligence, the boundary between human and nonhuman grows ever more blurred.
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