Sky Line, video still. Image courtesy of the artist
Lawrence Lek
Sky Line, Bonus Levels
Lawrence Lek (1982) is an artist working in London who, over the past few years, has frenetically imagined and created a body of new work that expands across computer simulation, performance, sculpture and interactive installations. In this conversation Lawrence discusses Bonus Levels, a growing ‘virtual novel’, and in particular episode VI, Sky Line, which was originally made available to explore at The White Building, London in Oct 2014, and is available here.
Doggerland - Sky Line could be read as both utopian and dystopian. On the one hand, it is post-apocalyptic, as London’s skyline has succumbed to either rising sea levels or a mega-tsunami of the sort. The first person protagonist of the virtual environment appears to be the only survivor, the train is driverless and passenger-less and the art venues unpopulated. On the other hand, Sky Line is in equilibrium; everything continues to operate without the need for intervention. The landscape is familiar to both sci-fi literature and film and adventure-based video games, blurring prehistoric references with architectural icons and artist led spaces of current day. Can you speak both of the utopian/dystopian distinction, if there is one, and how the representation of time might influence this.
Lawrence Lek - Utopia is a paradox. Of course, it’s always an eternal fascination with society – a less religious and more political way of saying ‘Paradise’. Thomas More, who wrote the eponymous book, was both a god-fearing Catholic and a politician, and so was very aware of the physical impossibility of heaven-on-earth. This irony is evident in the wordplay title of the book itself (eu-topia meaning 'good place’ and u-topia meaning 'no-place’). Similarly, Sky Line can be read as both utopian and dystopian, but it’s an artwork – not a political treatise – so I think interpretation should be up to the viewer.
The fact that Sky Line exists on a permanent loop distinguishes it from linear views of time. The day-night cycle lasts for ten minutes – the same amount of time it takes for the train to loop around once. This repetition stands in contrast to linear views of time, one followed by literature, film, adventure-based video games, and Judeo-Christianity. An important premise of Christianity is that we are heading towards the eschaton – the last judgement, the end of time – an apocalypse which is unavoidable and inevitable.
I’m more drawn towards the idea of the eternal return, in which the universe exists through cyclical narratives which are bound to repeat themselves. However, it is shared by Buddhist cosmology, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, and was studied extensively by anthropologist Mircea Eliade. This view of time is less common because it’s less immediately perceptible. In effect, Sky Line uses a train and the weather to create a simulation of cyclical time.
DL - Considering time again, the work is partly responsive to a temporary moment in artistic output and presentation in London, during the Artlicks weekend. However, the galleries and exhibition programmes here are ‘memorialised’, though subverted, and made permanently accessible to users as an environment that is not transitory. Can you comment on how your work might be read as an alternative archive, and contextually underpinned by prevailing modes of visual practice by the people living and working as artists now.
LL - I find it useful to zoom out and think of London as a biologist might look at an ecosystem. If you visualise all of the places where art is being made in the city, and the evolution of this creative map over the past hundred years, it would form an animated pattern similar to the life of a jungle ecosystem. In other words, artists (and their respective galleries) grow up all the time, cluster together in relatively uninhabited locations (often after industry closes), and gradually migrate to other areas. Of course, it’s all driven by the property market and shifts in the economics of art making. It’s all so ephemeral.
Sky Line (and the original skyscraper for Bonus Levels) are snapshots of a small portion of these artist-run spaces. Often, they’ve just moved into their current location, or about to move out, or they don’t know how long they can stay. So by gathering them together in a single (virtual) location, the projects do function as a kind of three-dimensional archive, an immaterial form of memory.
Also, the other artists’ artworks are videos, sound, images, text. These are all put together in the video game environment as a kind of spatial collage. Simulation is, at a fundamental level, a medium that integrates others.
Sky Line - detailed interior of the vacant train that users can catch to circumnavigate the environment. Lawrence Lek, 2014
DL - What is it about artist-led spaces, if anything, that have the ability to transcend the cataclysmic fall of the rest of the city? With the range of activity in London, Sky Line - quite literally - platforms often obscure or lesser known project spaces. Is the work intentionally political, or commenting on urban development, capital or ownership? Do these ideas go through your mind as you’re designing the work? Do you have much correspondence with the gallery coordinators about representation?
LL - There’s an aesthetic dimension to politics and capital that I’m more interested in – the hidden forms of social systems that are embedded within the city. For me, the city is formed through an emergent, cybernetic, relationship between urban development and the forces of creative agency in which 'artists’ are the most obvious archetypes.
Again, I’d like to use the ecosystem analogy. In the rainforest, violent thunderstorms often make the tallest trees collapse. This results in fertile ground for new life to inhabit, and it’s the most adaptable, mobile, and opportunistic creatures that settle there first – this group is known as the 'colonising species’. In the city, artists are the colonising species – a group of independent people who can relocate, often opportunistically, to parts of the city that become available. Of course, what shifts in the property market this creates is debatable.
So all of this complex socio-economics is definitely in my mind when I’m working on the projects. I just feel it must be integrated into a poetic experience rather than an explicitly political one. After long discussions with all of the artists, organisers, and curators who ran the galleries, talking about the energy and love that goes into their projects, it seemed that space created for art is incredibly significant. Seen as a whole, their shared endeavour is a real collective work of art.
Participating galleries / project spaces in Sky Line. Image courtesy of the artist
DL - Solitary experience of place heightens the desire of the voyeur, to travel via the train line whilst staring (or positioning the screen) out the window, observing the speculative environment as you move through it. Can you discuss the shift from designing Bonus Levels I (A Collective Tower), which was a single tower block composed of participating artist-led spaces in the 2013 iteration of Art Licks, to a roaming environment - what this does both as a comment on travelling around the city and experiencing the work first-hand during the festival, but also as a user experience interacting with the work on display.
LL - Flaneur, voyeur, wanderer, drifter, walker… I’m fascinated by all of these ordinary but potentially profound experiences of the city and of the landscape. How to make the banal sublime? It’s just a question of attention.
I’m glad you described the experience of Sky Line and Bonus Levels as a ‘user experience’… I read that Foucault said he wanted users instead of readers, that the ideas embedded within his writings would be tools for them to use and to apply in their social, artistic, or political lives. So maybe the projects are a way for people to use their attention aesthetically, a private experience of urban space that might eventually bleed into the political – even if that’s only in the form of daydreaming.
The shift from the tower block to the train line relates to a shift in the observer’s perception of property relations. The experience of the tower is vertical: in science-fiction dystopian visions of the city, the wealthy live in airy penthouses while the works are crowded into the dark shadows at street level. The unrelenting demand for high-density housing in London means that it is gradually turning into exactly this kind of – literally – stratified society. The Barbican Towers were built decades ago but the Shard now leads the way in premium apartments for the elite. Bonus Levels (A Collective Tower) was made as a reflection on this: what if artist-run projects had their own skyscraper? If the economically marginalised spaces had luxury architecture as a platform? By stacking twenty-one galleries from across London on top of each other, the tower symbolises the contrasting property relations between the DIY and deluxe sectors of the city.
Sky Line is a circular train line that exists a thousand feet above the Thames. Unlike the verticality of the Tower, the train reveals the horizontal property relations of the city. Skyscrapers look like wealth, but property is fundamentally about land, about the flat territories and boundaries of each individual plot, farm, acre, block, address, square, postcode. This system of ownership is feudal, and modern-day london is just an evolution of the medieval lord-landlord-serf-tenant system. London, being a horizontal city, has always been divided by the prevailing winds since the industrial revolution (blowing east, the wealthy escape the smog by moving west). It just passes through more estate agents now. By elevating the entire Sky Line above the city, it places a public infrastructure above landlords, bureaucrats, agents, ticket inspectors. A very London kind of Utopia.
Bonus Levels - Chapter 1: Art Licks Weekend 2013 - Walkthrough from Lawrence Lek on Vimeo.
DL – Sky Line for The White Building was realised as an installation, consisting of a central pavilion-type feature common to your practice, and modified X-box controllers to interact with the projected screens. Can you give a short insight to your thoughts on the references to gaming culture and hacking existing technology, and why you choose to set a ‘zone’ to experience your work within.
LL - The Pavilion exists as both physical gaming zone and as a teleporter within the virtual world itself. By being instantly recognisable, it acts as a portal between real life and in the simulated world. Virtual worlds have a nearly infinite range of cameras, microphones, colours, processes, interfaces, and samples – all of which create the illusion of a self-contained universe. However, the viewer is disembodied: they are not 'there.’ The Pavilion grounds the player. By having a visual symbol that exists in both realms, it also signifies that the world is somehow different, not generic, not prefabricated, intentional.
Having a site-specific installation also acts as a shared environment. Often, people visit with others; while one person plays, the other watches them explore, occassionally giving them directions along the way. It’s like a very primitive kind of tribal relationship: searching together for a place to stop.
Sky Line at The White Building, 2014
DL – Can we expect another version during Art Licks 2015, and if so, how many more years do you predict it will take till audiences no longer have to traverse the city but rather rely on your work to see what’s going on?
LL - I’m really trying to develop a discourse around simulation sculpture, thinking a lot about how to work with a festival like Art Licks, or for online and gallery contexts. The question remains – how can I materialise a utopian experience through a site-specific simulation?
Simulations are only another form of presence, with its unique form of materiality. Of course it will never exceed the physical world, but it can offer augmented forms of memory, of affect and of distribution. That’s probably the utopian aspect I’m most interested in now: using simulations as a way to distribute space.
So, after going from the vertical skyscraper to the horizontal landscape, I’ve found myself increasingly interested in the microcosm: the room, the space, the pavilion, the site-specific installation. Rather than going for scale, I may start crafting an extremely slow, extremely detailed, incredibly immersive space.
Tarkovsky called his filmmaking process 'sculpting in time’ and I think that’s a good way to talk about virtual worlds – sculpting through simulation. How do you shape different effects? Fire? Rain? Architecture? A world in a grain of sand?
In conversation with Tom Prater