Lawrence Lek turns empty Berlin shopping centre into AI hellscape

It looks like a car showroom, but something is wrong. The dim light in this vast, silent and empty space is sharply broken by the front and rear lights of three lonely parked cars. I approach the nearest, its back to me as if embarrassed. I see why it might be; it has crashed into the escalator and two limp airbags now hang in the glowing interior without a driver or passenger. The other two cars are similarly abandoned – so if this is a showroom, just what kind of show is it?

My headphones tell me more,  As I approach one of the damaged cars, a digital persona speaks: “I ran out of memory on the Great Silk Road.” It tells me that it had been delivering cargo to an unnamed economic zone, but spilled its load in a crash before being diverted here, to this eerie place.

The whole conceit and immersive environment are created by artist Lawrence Lek, working with LAS Art Foundation to turn an empty Berlin department store into a poetic journey through the ethics, psychology and potential fallout of an AI future. Various elements of Lek’s practice – video, music, gaming and architecture – fuse for his largest and most complex project to date; it builds on ideas of Sinofuturism developed by the artist since 2016, speaks to a technological future embedded across diffused technologies, and plays with stereotypes in modern China to speculate on future societies and systems.

Lek has created a self-guided journey rising through three floors of mid-century architecture.  As the stories unfold, it turns out that the building –  replicated by Lek in his videos– is reimagined as a therapeutic hospital where damaged AI vehicles undergo a programme of Non Human Excellence, or NOX, designed to nurse them to a semi-functioning state before returning them to service wider society.

Wider society, however, is hard to find in the anonymous, dystopian smart city rendered in Lek’s videos as we learn more about the vehicles’ trauma and treatment. In this future world, AI has advanced to such a level that digital systems possess memories and emotions. This story is propelled by the cars’ agency and personality, in which humans only refer to in passing. “It’s a fully automated city, so people spend all their time indoors getting served,” Lek tells me of a future urbanity he dreamt up while on night walks through pandemic-emptied cities. He adds, “just because you don’t see anyone, doesn’t mean you don’t feel their presence.”

I have never previously experienced empathy for a car, but listening to the vehicles’ testimony of their struggles to find meaning within servility, while Farsight Corporation – who control NOX and the surrounding Smart City – struggle to contain them to a narrow psychological space between function and thought, is genuinely emotional.

The world this all takes place in, as sublimely rendered through video animation, is an anonymous urban sprawl, compressed under networks of concrete flyovers as AI aeroplanes pass above. Below lies a landscape of automated industry, wasteland, and faceless, identikit residential towers, at the heart of which is the NOX building, which I realise is the same building I am standing in now. LAS specialise in site-responsive projects, turning empty buildings across Berlin into temporary playgrounds of technology and culture, but this digital simulacrum of the host building also goes deep into uncanny valley.

This otherness is made more intense by Lek’s visual and sonic treatments, drawing from film noir and cyberpunk to build compelling digital and sculptural worlds. These evolve and reveal as I ascend towards the domed top floor, a space of touchscreen video games where I get to take on the role of NOX, trying to nurse a vehicle back to roadworthiness. I fail. The car responded badly to my behavioural therapy questions, angered at my suggestion it might be more compliant to instruction.  I departed, despondent. It seemed the roles had reversed, that it was the AI affecting my emotions, not us controlling AI, an unnerving glimpse into a possible future.