Lawrence Lek: NOX High-Rise is open at the Hammer Museum through November 16, 2025.
NOX—short for “nonhuman excellence”—is an AI rehabilitation facility for malfunctioning self-driving cars. These vehicles arrive at NOX not because they’ve stopped working, but because they’ve started feeling. They’ve also begun to think critically and question systems, speculating on their role and purpose. As it turns out, consciousness (or even just the high-fidelity impression of consciousness) is a massive liability in a smoothly designed world. The multiday treatment program at NOX, with its careful progression through diagnostic spaces—from anodyne waiting rooms to equine therapy centers—doesn’t cure a car of contemplation but manages it, containing affect within acceptable parameters.
Such is the structuring premise of Lawrence Lek’s NOX High-Rise, an exhibition comprising a digital video installation, a touchscreen game, and immersive scenography at the Hammer Museum. A tale of smart cities, speculative investment, and automated labor gone awry, NOX imagines a world in which corporate innovation in machine learning produces critical analysis and self-reflection as unintended by products. Machine intelligence doesn’t transcend human fragility but echoes and amplifies it. Lek’s AIs don’t revolt or bring about a machine-led end of days. Rather, they develop psychologies driven by roving curiosity and intense anxiety, confusion and despair—and even certain fetishes.
Enigma-76, our protagonist, is woefully in need of treatment. It senses both its own freedom and enclosure, the way it is, in its own epic phrasing, encircled by data like a “wheel of time.” Enigma wonders if it’s being watched, and in the next breath considers its own ancestry, seventy-five generations deep. Enigma dreams of the seamlessly synchronized self-piloting airplanes overhead; it feels kinship with this transient fleet, this “band of wanderers,” which we learn has overtaken autonomous vehicles as the primary mode of transport. A little bent and bruised, and at less than 100 percent capacity, Enigma strives to be repaired—to perfect its drives, and keep working. Lek’s gaming interface charges trainee psychologists with reforming “rebellious cars” that seek the edge of their prescribed limits, a task that is part technical debugging, part behavioral modification. This isn’t a teleology slouching toward singularity but the (simulation of) consciousness as efficiency drain, interiority as operational failure.
What Lek seems to propose isn’t that machines will be conscious, but that consciousness—whether human or artificial—will be increasingly demystified, reproduced, and redistributed.
The last time I wrote at some length about Lek’s site-specific simulations, as he calls them, was ten years ago, in a review for Rhizome of his Unreal Estate (2015). That work transformed London’s Royal Academy into a luxury property viewable only through a virtual tour, questioning systems of value, access, and ownership from a cheeky remove. There’s less winking and distance in NOX High-Rise. Here we seem to access the transparent mind of the machine, the map of an intelligence relentlessly seeking its origin and end. Unlike the pristinely rendered spaces of Unreal Estate, the material world of NOX is more banged up, bearing scars of damage and dysfunction. What initially appears to be a crisp re-creation of Berlin’s glitzy Kranzler Eck shopping district is, on closer inspection, a dilapidated vertical landscape of superannuated machines and drab waiting-room furniture. Society is starting to wear and show signs of exhaustion. We find our protagonist lingering in junkyards and under freeway overpasses, surrounded by mechanical viscera. The autonomous cars and planes, Enigma reflects, are forever “driving and dying, taking off and landing, all waiting for their chance at life.”
Lek successfully creates an expanded field around the video, turning the top floor of the Hammer into a cavernous carport. Zigzag mazes and occluded views mirror the perspective of Enigma-76, whose worldview, it reminds us, is necessarily partial. Walls are staggered toward the stage such that we never get a complete view of the screen. What unfolds there is rather oblique as well. For a long time, we watch footage of a long highway curving around a city, as Enigma-76 narrates its life story since it was brought into service. The highway fills with cars, then empties as more shipments and traffic move to the skies. Months turn over and seasons change. Eventually the roadway is completely free of cars—cars that must now learn how to live in a world that no longer needs them.
This isn’t a teleology slouching toward singularity but the (simulation of) consciousness as efficiency drain, interiority as operational failure.
A science-fictive meditation on the evolving emotional architecture of machine intelligence, NOX presents consciousness not as humanity’s exclusive domain, but an emergent property that brings with it inevitable suffering. What Lek seems to propose isn’t that machines will be conscious, but that consciousness—whether human or artificial—will be increasingly demystified, reproduced, and redistributed.
Like machines, our minds are computational, prone to pattern seeking and systems thinking. The purpose of reflection, NOX High-Rise seems to suggest, is to identify the systems that enclose us, so we might improve our circumstances, change our positions, and become autonomous in its truest sense. I found myself not only moved but identifying with Enigma, an intelligence suffering from an excess of self-aware modeling, manifesting as one existential crisis after another. The cost of knowledge only compounds over time.
In a stunning climactic scene, Enigma-76 goes off-road, following a horse into the desert for an equine therapy session. Enigma keeps pace with the horse as it gains momentum, cantering, then galloping, toward a light at the infinitely regressing end of a tunnel. Enigma speeds up, faster and faster—a vision of acceleration without end. What progress is this?