CURA.

Inhabiting a former department store in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district from 27 October 2023 to 14 January 2024, NOX is the first project to combine all strands of Lek’s multidisciplinary practice — sound, installation, game design and video — at an architectural scale. This expansive exhibition invites visitors to explore an anonymous smart city where the fictional AI conglomerate, Farsight Corporation, tests and trains their range of sentient self-driving cars. The commission forms the latest chapter in Lek’s Sinofuturist cinematic universe, which probes the problems and promises of AI in an age of automation. Delving into the advanced integration of AI entities in urban life, NOX prompts reflection on questions of agency, ethics, and empathy between humans and the machines they make.

Conceived as a work of speculative fiction, Lek’s world imagines the psychological consequences of a future populated by smart systems and intelligent nonhumans. In this scenario, NOX, or ‘Nonhuman Excellence’, refers to a corporate psychological program created to treat undesirable behavior in automated vehicles. While some self-driving cars question their designated role in society, others resist their future obsolescence or simply want to drive.

The installation leads visitors through different scenes from this fictional universe, accompanied by an evolving ambient music soundscape and voiceover fragments from the cars and their AI therapy chatbot. Entering the nocturnal cityscape at the site of a crash, a sequence of architectural ‘zones’ provide the structure for Lek’s open world where the cars’ memories, training experiences and relationships with their parent company are explored. NOX culminate with an interactive video game, inviting the public to play the role of Farsight employees tasked with training – and emotionally treating – wayward vehicles. Through simulation exercises, players will be able to explore the limits of the cars’ agency as they play through multiple scenarios, some of which they may have already encountered in their journey through the exhibition.

Through a combination of cinematic storytelling and branching narratives, Lek highlights society’s complex and evolving relationship with nonhuman entities, and the ways in which our fates and fortunes are intertwined.