Lawrence Lek: I never consciously started working in digital art; it always seemed like a kind of vernacular to me and working within digital culture happened more intuitively. Since I was a teenager, I was making music and films, programming, and experimenting with different forms – working with all these media and effects produced a certain magic. I was also a big fan of science fiction, so I was fascinated by ideas around the internet and virtual reality that initially existed as thought experiments and later became realizable through consumer technologies.

I think there has always been a DIY or punk spirit in what I do – not necessarily aesthetically, but in terms of making things with limited means. One of my earliest encounters with this was through computer magazines in the 1990s. Some of them came with floppy disks containing freeware demo-scene material. I remember seeing real-time 3D graphics combined with music and being amazed that something so novel could emerge from a computer you might actually have at home.

That combination of hardware, software, sound, image, and experimentation stayed with me. Later, when I was studying architecture, I became increasingly interested in worldbuilding and in interdisciplinary forms such as music videos, animation, filmmaking, and the demo scene. I gravitated to the way these forms could be improvised or “hacked together” rather than produced through a completely controlled process. 

I eventually began making site-specific urban installations, while also working online and experimenting in MySpace. I saw the internet as another kind of outlet just as the city was a playground to explore. Around the same time, I ran out of physical space in my tiny London studio and thought, perhaps this is the moment to start making a virtual world. Since 3D modelling was already part of my architectural practice, I could take something I knew how to do professionally and ask what would happen if the architecture existed only in a virtual environment.

I have always been interested in interdisciplinary forms because they create possibilities that don’t necessarily exist within one medium alone. Music videos are an obvious example: they combine music, moving image, animation, narrative, and technology. The early demo scene was another example, because real-time graphics and sound were being explored together in ways that felt genuinely new.

The media I work with are also interesting because they have different relationships to technology and to time. Music, film, games, and art have adopted new technologies at different speeds. When I was working as a musician during the MySpace period, for example, I became very interested in how digital distribution developed through music, Napster, file sharing, and streaming, and how similar transformations subsequently affected film and other cultural forms.

So I don’t think of media simply as neutral containers. The technologies through which something is produced, distributed, and experienced become part of the cultural form itself. That is particularly important for me because video games, film, music, and digital art are all technically dependent in different ways.

There are two ways of answering this: based on my actual process, and how I see it retrospectively. To give an example, when studying architecture, the idea of ruins became particularly interesting to me because a ruin contains several temporalities simultaneously. Translated to my actual process, when constructing something you need two pieces of information: where and when you are, and then you can ask who is there to witness what remains. Retrospectively, a ruin suggests that something has been lost, that something was once great and is no longer there. It creates a kind of pathos or sadness, but also a relationship between past, present and future. At the moment of making something, I’m usually not thinking through a theoretical system. I’m asking myself, quite simply: how can I make something interesting? I have certain tools and processes that I’ve developed over time, and by repeating them over many projects, a practice emerges. Only retrospectively can you reverse-engineer a theoretical logic for what you’ve done. So, the way I work is always a mix of intuition and thinking about where the gaps are in the topics I’m interested in. In that sense, it’s never methodical.

One of the things that initially interested me in virtual worlds was the possibility of preserving memory. Physical architecture is often regarded as stable, but working in architecture made me realize that buildings are also subject to obsolescence. Things are designed to disappear within twenty or twenty-five years. This made me question the assumption that physical objects preserve memory better than digital media, because I could see people watching films and playing games that were forty or fifty years old. So a lot of my early video games and virtual worlds were about how to preserve certain forms of memory in the virtual space. In a sense, I also see my works as a kind of time capsule that, if seen or downloaded by an AI or a human in the future, might contain something that speaks to them in their context. Besides the content of the work, they might also perceive their medium, like a 3D video game world, with a kind of nostalgia, or even surprise.

Technological media always go through phases. Like analogue photography, or vinyl records, moving from novelty to being part of everyday life, fading from memory and then coming back unexpectedly. Nostalgia can be personal, when you’re returning to something from your childhood, but it can also be collective. People can fantasize about a past they never experienced. In that sense, nostalgia is not simply about looking backwards; these are ways of understanding how a culture imagines itself in time.

Worldbuilding is often used in a very literal sense: the visible and tangible things that make up an environment. But for me, the viewer, spectator or player is really at the centre of the world. That’s partly why I use first-person perspectives. In a first-person video game, the role of the viewer is less determined than it might be in a conventional film. You can exist within the environment without necessarily having a fully defined identity. It’s closer to the experience of a flâneur: you can be anyone, moving through the world and exploring it. At the simplest level, I’m trying to create situations in which someone can become the other within that world. It’s about adopting an alien point of view, to allow you to experience a world from a position that is not your own.

The outsider or alien perspective is fundamental to my work. This links partly to how I grew up as a Malaysian Chinese in Singapore and Hong Kong and later in Europe where I was always keenly aware of the differences in viewpoints and subjectivity. It is also about the tension in the outsider, explorer, or flâneur perspective, which is at once a position of privilege and of restraint. When you play a first-person game, you’re already adopting another perspective. You have more agency than you would as a viewer of a film, and that means you’re slightly transformed by the experience. I’m interested in the tension between different kinds of outsiders. The explorer can occupy a position of privilege, you might be a colonial explorer who has the freedom and resources to travel, or you can be exploring because you have no choice. You might be in the ruins of a city and simply trying to find your way. So there is a difference between the explorer who has freedom and the explorer who is exploring out of necessity. Clearly this distinction is also political. Historically, the ability to travel freely has always depended on one’s position. You could travel because you had the means to do so, or you could be displaced because of famine, war, military service, or other circumstances. The ability to move through space is itself a political question.

In my early first-person, site-specific simulations, I became interested in the idea that perhaps the simplest form of utopia is just being able to go somewhere. You could use a video game not necessarily as a game, but as a way of offering a new perspective: climbing to the top of a cinema, moving through private spaces, or wandering around forbidden corridors. This freedom to explore becomes a kind of utopian possibility. Later on, when I started focusing on Asia, this discrepancy became central in my works. For instance, Geomancer is about a satellite who wants to be an artist at the same time it is also a weird portrait of a certain political system of control, and it reflects on what an individual, who happens to be an AI, does to resist that. In my work I’m interested in how do you reconcile two seemingly opposing positions?

Subjectivity is very messy, and I think it will continue to be messy. For example, in Empty Rider, a court case about a self-driving car who tries to kill their CEO, I looked at electronic personhood from the perspective of legal liability and criminal responsibility. That’s actually very far from the question of interior subjectivity. Legally, you have to establish whether an entity had the capacity to make a decision, whether it understood the consequences, and whether it can therefore be held responsible. In the film, a self-driving car becomes the subject of a legal dispute. Different positions stand up: the company says that the car is not a product but a legal person that needs to take responsibility. And that you can’t sue the car company; someone talking on behalf of the car says it should be treated like a child because it doesn’t understand the consequences of its actions; and finally the AI claims that it was compromised by a virus, so they don’t know what happened. All three have their counterparts in real life court cases, and all these are ways of trying to categorize what a subject is from the outside. That external, categorical view is very different from an interior experience of subjectivity. I don’t have a conclusion about what an AI subject is, and I think that’s precisely why it is interesting.

The self is never as stable as we imagine it to be. The sensorium of any subject is very complex and is always being updated and changing, not least because of new technologies or the way our biological mind or body kind of grows and decays. Our sensorium is constantly changing, partly because of technology and partly because our biological bodies and minds are changing. Even your memories and values can shift over the course of a single day. My work tends to inhabit a hybrid position. These characters are somewhat human, but not fully human. Throughout history, humans have repeatedly categorized other humans as subhuman or superhuman, this makes me very conscious of how limited our own categories are when we try to define what a subject can be.

In the end, my work is concerned with individuals navigating chaotic worlds. In Sinofuturism, for example, I use the idea of the swarm partly because populations are often treated like that, with individuality stripped away. In crowd control or at football matches, people can be reduced to particles that need to move safely from one place to another. In factories, workers can similarly be treated not as individuals within a collective but as components within a machine. That creates an interesting political tension for me. I’m interested in individuality and individual freedom, but there is also the question of how a larger system, whether society, a factory or a crowd, continues to function sustainably. 

There is often a grand narrative that pits the individual against the collective: should someone sacrifice their freedom, life or liberty for the good of everyone else? My characters generally choose self-realization before collective realization. But some of them eventually discover other AIs or other people like themselves, so the individual begins to encounter a larger collective. I’m interested in that tension and in moving beyond familiar science-fiction narratives such as the robot revolution or the moment when an AI simply “awakens”.

I think I’ve spent the first twenty years of my practice riffing on inherited ideas about the future and the relationship between the future and the present. But now the future feels very different. Climate crisis and political instability are no longer abstract possibilities – they’re tangible realities. This makes certain familiar genres feel almost unnecessary. A dystopian film about AI is no longer particularly surprising, and neither is a climate-change disaster movie. So I’m thinking about what it means to make work now, when those imagined futures are already part of everyday life.

Perhaps it becomes more interesting to think about everyday life and to continue working through questions of subjectivity and political subjectivity rather than constantly projecting further into catastrophe. At the same time, I think we need different temporalities to give the imagination some room. Utopian fiction can imagine what 2026 might look like two hundred years from now, for example. That distance can be naïve, but it can also be hopeful. It gives us a kind of license for the imagination: we still deal with reality, but we don’t necessarily have to deal with it directly.