CHERRYBOY

CHERRRYBOy Magazine — Lawrence Lek

Lawrence Lek is a multidisciplinary artist who pushes our understanding of practices, and to what extent these can be merged. His projects combine simulation art, architecture, video-game and music production to create parallel realities - often with socio-political undertones.

Five years deep into Hyperdub representation, his recent releases include AIDOL, a continuation of his Sinofuturist cinematic universe theory - taking seven stereotypes of Chinese society to create a conspiracy theory about how China’s technological rise is an emergent form of Artificial Intelligence.

Lek and Phoebe spoke back in 2020..

Phoebe: How were you first introduced to Hyperdub, what was it about the label that appealed to you? Can the practice of world-building help us better understand our physical reality or is it pure escapism?

Lawrence: The first Hyperdub releases I heard were from Ikonika and Burial - if I remember correctly, I was in a furniture workshop making an architecture installation when a friend put on some tracks late at night. The music became a soundtrack to this really material kind of world-making. Even though I was making a physical installation, I felt like I was somehow part of a larger environment, a video game soundscape. Now, even though I’m mostly making virtual worlds and CGI films and installations, music still acts as a bridge, or like glue, between physical and imaginary realities.

Phoebe: How does your experience in the functionality of architecture sit within your work, in contrast to the freedom and infinite possibility of 3D/virtual spaces?

Lawrence: Architecture generally creates spaces by making enclosures and boundaries, whereas game landscapes operate more through the idea of the infinite horizon. Of course, virtual worlds provide more of an illusion of infinite space than we can get with physical reality – we don’t have the same physical challenges or territorial boundaries when floating across a flat plane. I try to explore architecture as a kind of ideological metaphor, as a product of a particular worldview. Sometimes it’s an ironic view of architecture as a form of property development like for example the Nøtel project with Kode9 is a fully automated luxury hotel, or how in Unreal Estate, the Royal Academy in London has been sold off as a private mansion. At other times, I’m interested in virtual architecture as a container for digital utopianism. One simple idea of this utopian potential of virtual space is my ongoing video game ‘2065’ which brings together the multiple sites where it’s been exhibited into a single virtual world, which the player can teleport between. There are multiple political and anti-colonial issues buried within the design of the world, but I try to leave that for the player to discover.

Phoebe: How do you think the pandemic has changed people’s views on simulated spaces? Do you think we will continue to see investments into virtual setups for club night alternatives?

Lawrence: Clubs and music venues are really intense, immersive environments. Of course screen-based and simulated spaces, in general, can only offer up a fraction of that experience. But I think that even though they lose a lot in full-body immersion, simulated spaces have the possibility of distributing a ‘space’ to wider audiences. That’s great because it enables access to more people, but at the same time, there’s the possibility that everything gets diluted into mediocre non-places. But many people will still want to have the mind-body experience of live music spaces. It’s not like everybody’s going to stay at home every weekend, projecting augmented reality clubs onto their sofa. Even before the pandemic, one of the paradoxes of the growth of streaming music is that live music started being more popular. So I think that sound and music have the capacity to create personal experiences and social gatherings no matter what kind of space they are presented in.

Phoebe: Do you plan to make work responding to the impact of the past 18 months?

Lawrence: A lot of my projects before 2020 already had quite a strong pandemic vibe - full of apocalyptic, depopulated and existential environments and architectures. So my response is probably going to be slightly different, I’ll be focusing on characters and experiences of nonhuman bodies and other people, their emotional effects and psychological landscapes.

@lawrencelek
Album artwork by Optigram

Central Saint Martins
The man obsessed by the shape of a heart

Album Artwork
The visual backbone of Hyperdub

Cultural Theory
KODE9's sci-fi vision of sound

Music Werldscape
Get lost in Lawrence Lek’s simulation

Universal Emotions
Old friends and director duo, find beauty in what breaks

Join the werld.

CHERRYBOy WORLD