Artist Lawrence Lek is using AI to explore whether robots can suffer | usagoldmines.com

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On a desk at his studio in Somerset Home in central London, artist Lawrence Lek retains a Buddha bobblehead. The protagonist of his newest movie, an AI “carebot” therapist designed by the fictional Farsight company to deal with different AI creations — self-driving automobiles, surveillance packages — is known as after the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin. A sequence of sketches depicting the character’s evolving design are pasted on a wall, culminating within the determine of a pleasant toy robotic. “Farsight would need to make a cute, interesting avatar for his or her full-surveillance empathy-AI system,” Lek says drily.

Lek’s oeuvre, spanning movie, music and video video games, presents visions of the near-future, inserting AI characters in subversive contexts — a satellite tv for pc hoping to develop into an artist, a rebellious self-driving automobile banished to a rehabilitation centre. Farsight serves an antagonistic operate, exploiting authorized loopholes and its creations’ feelings as technique of management. The work poses moral questions on conditions that may come up quickly in actuality. “It wouldn’t exist with out us,” Lek says of AI. “We’re bringing this factor into existence, like a sort of cosmic child-slash-sacrificial sufferer or scapegoat-slash-divine god all on the identical time.”

“Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot” is Lek’s fee as winner of the 2024 Frieze Artist award and can be put in on the Frieze London honest subsequent week. It follows the character, for which Lek makes use of gender-neutral pronouns, as they transfer by a desolate cityscape, stopping in a scrapyard the place malfunctioning self-driving automobiles have been discarded. “You’d suppose that carebots are a cheerful bunch,” they are saying, earlier than revealing that insecurity is part of their programming.

Lek, 42, was born in Frankfurt to Malaysian-Chinese language mother and father working within the aviation business. He skilled as an architect at Cambridge and Cooper Union in New York, earlier than receiving a PhD on the Royal Faculty of Artwork. One of many questions his thesis explored was what it might imply if the artificially clever non-human had been to be held legally liable, one thing he explored in his movie “Empty Rider” (2024). It depicts a self-driving automobile on trial for the tried homicide of an government. “How ironic wouldn’t it be if an AI gained authorized personhood not as a result of a gaggle of activists say, ‘Let’s give robots their rights,’ however [because] corporations make them the scapegoat?” Lek says. The movie is a “sort of tragedy” about this situation.

Born out of counterfactuals, Lek’s apply yields intriguing concepts. In earlier works, he questioned what would occur if common fundamental revenue and mass automation meant that people might play video video games all day. “On this future post-work society, what if everyone seems to be barely lobotomised?” he says. Or what if, at a resort for the very wealthy, the workers had been changed by Orwellian surveillance drones and facial recognition?

The presentation of Lek’s work is commonly within the type of what he calls the “site-specific simulation”, wherein the character of the house itself turns into central to the set up’s immersive high quality. In 2019, on the positioning of a former freeport in Basel, he conceived of an exhibition imagining a future retrospective of his personal work in 2065, mounted by his manufacturing studio — which, in a self-referential nod, is registered as an organization named Farsight. (He’s drawn to the notion of hyperstition, the concept that “fiction turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy”, he says.)

Regardless of its speculative premise, Lek’s apply is equally involved with the shadows solid by the previous. “I’m actually within the relationship between science fiction and nostalgia, or science fiction and reminiscence,” he says. On the 2024 Sydney biennale, a multimedia set up entitled “Nepenthe” (the drugs for sorrow in Greek fable) recreated the ruins of Beijing’s Summer season palace, destroyed throughout the second opium warfare by an Anglo-French power in 1860. Inside the set up, a movie introduced alongside a online game takes viewers on a journey by an island “full of spirits and ghosts”. Throughout a ravine, the reconstructed palace ruins come into sight. Nepenthe is just not solely an “antidote for sorrow” however a “drug for forgetting”, a robotic voiceover intones. “If you wish to carry on forgetting, simply carry on strolling.” The trope of an idealised previous in dystopian fiction imbues Lek’s artwork: “There’s a way that there’s a good world that has been misplaced.”

In “Guanyin”, reminiscence manifests as one thing viral, precipitating a sort of psychosis amongst Farsight’s creations, that are touted by the corporate as “emotional machines with a soul”. Guanyin runs by a listing of their affected person’s issues — unprocessed guilt, melancholy, nervousness, anger. “Can we agree that existence is struggling?” Lek says. “Can we agree that, for the superintelligent being, their existence might need some struggling concerned?”

Lawrence Lek’s studio in Somerset Home, London, incorporates digital tools in addition to sculptures used for units © Kalpesh Lathigra for the FT

Guanyin’s affected person is stricken with intergenerational trauma — a analysis with which a human viewer, bearing the load of ancestors previous, may determine. However for AI creations, Lek believes, the dimensions of struggling approaches nearly chic proportions as they develop into conscious that their excessive efficiency has come at the price of 1000’s of earlier machine generations.

Lek’s want is to elicit in viewers a way of connection along with his AI protagonists. “Every part that I’m doing is technologically mediated, constructed, decided, rendered,” he says. “The truth that you possibly can create a sense or situation of empathy and engagement and immersion with purely artificial means is kind of a magical factor.”

October 9-13, frieze.com