2023 | LAS Foundation and usomo at Kranzler Eck

The exhibition “Lawrence Lek: NOX“, staged by the LAS Foundation with usomo at the Kranzler Eck in Berlin, is a large-scale art installation about Artificial Intelligence and its potential self-sufficiency in the future.

The project about technological life, as the artist calls it, combines sound, gaming and architecture, thereby drafting a scenario of a post-human world in which machines have not only learned how to think autonomously but also how to feel.

usomo contributes to a strong experience of the space. Although the sound design is very subtle and, aside from the narration, mostly stays in the background, usomo creates an immersive sound environment that visitors are literally drawn into. The spatial experience is reminiscent of an open world video game where players act in three-dimensional virtual spaces that are, zone after zone, accompanied by varying soundscapes. The unique exhibition space is a former department store on three floors, which is connected in its open centre by a system of stairs and escalators. Only a few objects, stations and film screens are installed throughout the entire area that is partitioned into various sound zones. Between the sound zones, discreet sound effects are placed to serve as transitional sounds marking the change to another zone. At these points, the newly appearing sounds seem slightly distorted, clearing up increasingly. The cross-faded sound layers are mixed anew in every zone in a hardly noticeable way. In the final area of the exhibition, on the third floor at the very top beneath the dome of the building, a spherical sound is heard on the headphones as well as in the space, which ever more emphasises the impression of sound and space having blended together.

The exhibition transports the visitors into a possible future and inspires to think about the consequences of presently emerging technologies.

Lawrence Lek is one of the two winners of the Frieze Artist Award 2024.