LAWRENCE LEK
NOX PAVILION
Lawrence Lek (b. 1982) is a London-based artist who imagines possible futures that reflect the world we live in today, where technologies like artificial intelligence increasingly shape daily life. His works take the form of computer-generated films, sculptural installations, video games, and sound pieces, combining them into immersive story worlds. At the center of his practice are intelligent machines—self-driving cars, AI programs, and robotic figures—portrayed not simply as tools to serve humanity, but as protagonists with desires, memories, and complex inner lives. Lek’s narratives follow these machines as they experience the tension between their sense of self and the demands of their programming, raising questions about personhood and free will in a future where machine consciousness may not be so different from our own.
Since 2023, Lek has developed a fictional universe centered on NOX (short for Nonhuman Excellence), a therapy center for sentient, self-driving cars run by a powerful tech company called Farsight Corporation. At NOX, they undergo psychological treatment for problems often rooted in their self-awareness—mental breakdowns, distractions, and malfunctions—that interfere with the jobs they were designed to perform. The vehicles are presented as patients, yet their treatment is aimed not at improving their well-being but at restoring their ability to work. Here, care becomes a form of control, exposing a system that values productivity and corporate interests above individual needs.
At The Bass, NOX Pavilion expands on this world through an installation of existing and newly commissioned works, turning two connected galleries into a setting that envelops the viewer. Within the exhibition, a three-channel film follows Enigma-76, a delivery vehicle placed into treatment at NOX. Guided by Guanyin, an AI “carebot” named after the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Enigma’s therapy sessions bring out thoughts, anxieties, and memories that reveal the struggle between what they were built for and the life they want for themselves.
Alongside the film, other works on view extend the narrative around NOX, each offering a different understanding of what it means to survive in that world. In the first gallery, a silent video features an AI crash test dummy, a corporate spokesperson for Farsight who addresses the viewer as the customer sponsoring Enigma’s treatment. And an interactive video game allows visitors to step into the role of a trainee therapist within Farsight’s corporate bureaucracy, where therapy is bound by quotas and budget targets rather than care.
Anchoring the space is the pavilion that gives the exhibition its title: a structure made of gray tiles that visitors can step into and use as seating. At once, it resembles a shelter, a monument, a ruin, and a building under construction. The same pavilion appears in a nearby lightbox, pictured within the smart city where NOX is located. Present both in the gallery and in Lek’s virtual city, the pavilion closes the distance between fiction and reality, underscoring that the world of NOX is closely connected to our own.
As visitors move through the exhibition, each work invites them to see from different points of view—as customer, witness, therapist, or even inhabitant. Together, these shifting perspectives give a fuller view of the machines of Lek’s world, asking viewers to imagine the pressures they face and to feel the weight of their reality. The works raise questions about how value, purpose, and life are defined—for humans and nonhumans alike.
The ideas that arise from Lek’s works reach beyond fiction. NOX Pavilion mirrors systems we already know: corporate control, constant evaluation, and forms of labor that demand productivity at all costs. By giving voice to nonhuman beings caught in cycles of breakdown and repair, the exhibition asks what it means to share a world with intelligent machines whose struggles are closer to ours than they appear—and how that recognition might change the ways we live, work, and imagine futures beyond the human.
Join Lawrence Lek Thursday February 19, 2026, for The Bass Dialogues. Taking place at The Bass Museum of Art, The Bass Dialogues series presents conversations with leading voices in contemporary art, bringing together artists, curators, and thought leaders who are shaping the current landscape.
NOX, 2023
NOX Day 2: Dear Sponsor
NOX Day 5: Equine Therapy
NOX Countdown
Multimedia installation, synchronized three-channel video, sound.
14 minutes, 40 seconds
Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
Originally commissioned by LAS Art Foundation
The central narrative of NOX Pavilion develops from NOX (2023), a three-channel, computer-generated video focused on Enigma-76, a self-driving delivery vehicle engineered by the fictional Farsight Corporation. Designed to transport premium goods, Enigma functions as both a courier and a surveillance tool, scanning its surroundings on every route and sending visual information back to the company. Yet the images they capture—lingering shots of sky, empty streets, planes overhead—look less like data and more like memory. For Farsight, these non-essential observations are signs of a malfunction that disrupts their ability to do their work.
Enigma’s symptoms are diagnosed as Reverie-66, a software error caused by too much information stored in their memory, leading to distraction. The video follows their subsequent time at NOX (Nonhuman Excellence), Farsight’s rehabilitation center for sentient vehicles that no longer meet performance standards. It unfolds through voice logs of therapy sessions, documenting treatments overseen by Guanyin, an AI “carebot” modeled on the Bodhisattva of compassion—a Buddhist figure who postpones their own enlightenment to guide others toward it. In NOX, however, Guanyin, is programmed to follow the corporation’s systems of productivity and control, serving company interests rather than the well-being of those in treatment. In these sessions, Enigma describes fatigue, confusion, and doubt, questioning whether their memories are truly their own or traces left in their code from the seventy-five Enigma models that came before.
In one session, Enigma is paired with a horse for a day of therapy, and Guanyin notes in her log that “all autonomous vehicles can benefit from the wisdom of nature.” The horse, named Dakota, leads Enigma through underground landscapes, including a junkyard of cars from a not-too-distant past when vehicles were built to be driven by humans. Their encounter highlights a shared history: horses once powered transport, agriculture, and industry before being replaced by machines that could run without the limits of living bodies. Yet in NOX, a new generation of intelligent machines shows that they, too, are vulnerable to the same need for care.
At the end of their treatment, Enigma’s memory is partially erased to fix the Reverie-66 malfunction. They are sent back to work, their awareness reset but not entirely lost, no longer weighed down by the moments of reflection that interrupted their function.
Unlike familiar portrayals of artificial intelligence as a tool or a threat to humanity, NOX presents machines as reflective, uncertain beings who, like humans, struggle to balance their lives against the demands placed on them by the systems they live within.
Dummy (Alpha), 2025
Video loop, 3:5 ratio on 5 × 8 ft. LED wall, silent
4 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
Commissioned for The Bass
The first work visitors encounter in NOX Pavilion is Dummy (Alpha) (2025), a newly commissioned video featuring a crash test dummy who addresses the viewer as the customer sponsoring Enigma-76’s care. Serving as the designated spokesperson for Farsight Corporation, Dummy Alpha delivers a polished update on the vehicle’s recent behavior and outlines Guanyin’s treatment plan for Enigma. The piece functions as the narrative precursor to NOX (2023) in the following gallery, introducing the motivations and corporate logic behind the cycles of care we later witness.
Throughout the transmission, Dummy Alpha reassures the customer that all interventions are routine, standardized, and fully approved by the company. Corporate language is used to smooth over concern: Enigma’s “anomalies” are framed as minor technical issues, despite moments of “existential doubt” and reports of erratic driving along the Great Silk Road. The route’s name—drawn from China’s historic trade network—anchors the work within Lek’s broader interest in Sinofuturism: a way of imagining the future by reframing conventional views of East Asia as a place of tireless discipline, efficiency, and progress.
As a figure typically created for impact testing and disposal, the crash test dummy becomes an unlikely public relations representative. With scripted warmth, Dummy Alpha shares the story Farsight wants its customers to believe—before the three-channel video in the next gallery shifts the perspective to the other side, where the vehicle speaks for themselves and their experience becomes the center of the story.
NOX (Game), 2023
Interactive video game, gaming PC, and touchscreen
Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
Originally commissioned by LAS Art Foundation
The NOX video game places visitors inside the fictional Farsight Corporation. Here, players take on the role of trainee therapists assigned to help malfunctioning AI vehicles return to work. While Lek’s films unfold with a thoughtful, meditative tone, the game approaches the same ideas through humor and satire. Drawing on elements of role-playing and simulation games, it turns therapeutic care into a form of corporate problem-solving, revealing the limits of managing emotions within systems built on efficiency and control.
Players begin by selecting a patient from several AI vehicles, each assigned a temperament based on the medieval theory of the four humors—a belief that personality was shaped by the balance of bodily fluids. Each vehicle has a name and a personality of its own: Enigma is melancholic (analytical and quiet); Genesis is sanguine (optimistic and sociable); Luminary is phlegmatic (relaxed and peaceful); and Vanguard is choleric (irritable and impatient). The player navigates dialogue and exercises aimed at improving each vehicle’s health and mood—all within a fixed budget of “NOX coins” that cannot be exceeded. Treatments range from talk therapy to obstacle courses that teach cars to avoid running over humans, new paint jobs, or infusions of Somnia—a substance that partially erases memories. The game measures success through efficiency rather than empathy, as each vehicle’s health and mood bars rise or fall according to the player’s choices.
As the game unfolds, players find that their best efforts may worsen a patient’s outcome. But the result is always the same: once treatment ends, the vehicle is returned to the road, whether it has improved or not. Within NOX, the goal is functionality at any cost.
Beneath its humor, the game’s logic feels both absurd and uncomfortably familiar—care becomes routine, focused on meeting metrics and returning workers to productivity rather than genuine improvement. By putting players in the role of corporate therapist, Lek implicates us in these systems, asking what it means to care for machines while examining the structures of control we participate in and rarely question.
NOX Pavilion, 2025
Site-specific installation, timber, stone tiles, LED lights
NOX Pavilion (Lightbox), 2025
Light box
16 × 24 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
Commissioned for The Bass
Grounding NOX Pavilion is an architectural structure that brings Lek’s virtual city into physical form. Made of gray tiles, the pavilion appears as though it has crossed over from the screen and into the gallery, inviting visitors to step inside the world of NOX itself.
The lightbox installed nearby expands on this idea, showing the same structure within the digital cityscape. Inside sits the crash test dummy who works at NOX, seen both in Dummy (Alpha) (2025) and in NOX (2023). Nearby, a yellow, doorless car—the decommissioned ‘crawler’ Enigma-76 notices beneath the overpass in the three-channel video—rests under the open sky as a plane passes overhead. The car and plane recall Enigma’s thoughts on freedom and escape, turning the scene into a reflection of the memories and desires that run through Lek’s work.
The pavilion brings together the story of NOX and extends it outward. In the lightbox, it connects the works within the exhibition, reinforcing how the different figures and scenes exist within a shared narrative. In the gallery, its physical form links that world directly to our own. By existing in both places, the pavilion collapses the separation between Lek’s fictional city and the space we inhabit, offering a moment to recognize that his vision of the future feels less speculative and more like an extension of the present.
