Empty Rider

Director: Lawrence Lek

Year: 2022

Set within the fictional smart city of SimBeijing, the CGI animation follows a self-driving car as they discuss their troubles with their built-in therapy program called Guanyin. The video is made within the custom-made virtual world of SimBeijing: an intelligent replica of the Chinese capital built to test self-driving cars. In this fictional scenario, the smart city has turned into a ghost town. Accompanied by CGI drive-through renders of SimBeijing, the narrator of this video is the eponymous ‘Theta’, a self-driving police car who patrols the streets of an uninhabited cityscape. Over the course of their dialogue with Guanyin, Theta reveals the darker reasons behind why the city has been abandoned...<br /> Continuing Lawrence Lek’s ongoing ‘Sinofuturist’ cinematic universe, in which he explores the psychological impact of technology on emerging forms of nonhuman life. <br /> Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2023 - Ammodo Tiger Short Competition

Director: Lawrence Lek

Year: 2019

The story of Diva – a fading superstar preparing for a comeback performance at the 2065 'eSports Olympics' – and Geo, an AI with artistic yearnings. Set in a smoke-and-mirrors realm of fantastical architecture, sentient drones and snow-deluged jungles, AIDOL revolves around the long and complex struggle between humanity and Artificial Intelligence. <br /> Fame – in all its allure and emptiness – is set against the bigger contradictions of a post-AI world, a world where originality is sometimes no more than an algorithmic trick and where machines have the capacity for love and suffering. Contemporary anxieties and fixations – the rise of AI, the formulaic dictates of celebrity, the hegemony of technological giants – are refracted through a quixotic prism. AIDOL is accompanied by a score composed and orchestrated by the artist.

Director: Lawrence Lek

Year: 2017

An AI awakens above Singapore on the eve of the city-state’s centennial celebrations in 2065. Mindful of the apparent relegation of AI to subservient roles in society, it determines that, from all the possible choices available to it, by far the best thing to be is an artist. Already a prodigy with numbers, it seeks to feed the other side of its savant-like brain, gorging on the products of cultural history with a geeky frenzy that occasionally undermines its aspiration to the lofty coolness of a lotus-eating aesthete. <br /> Part philosophical reflection on where ‘genius’ resides, part playful inventory of how science fiction has dealt with these eternal human/automaton themes, this piece offers provocative stimulation for both the eye and the mind.