Frieze Week London 2024
Published by Frieze London, 2024
Threat alert: autonomous vehicle discovers the pleasure of the crash. In Lawrence Lek’s ‘Smart City’ series – cinematic installations including Black Cloud (2021–23), NOX (2023), Empty Rider (2024) and the Artist Award commission at this year’s Frieze London, Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot (2024) – self-driving cars rev up their ‘death drive’, landing in both the high court and on the proverbial therapist’s couch for their transgressions.
In these works, Lek applies narrative conventions from the human world – the road movie, the televized trial, the lawless protagonist and the repressive state – to spotlight the emptiness coursing through the automotive body. Throughout Lek’s work over the last decade, the idea has emerged that emptiness is consciousness itself.
TIME100 Most Influential People in AI 2024
Published by Time Magazine, 2024
For the past 10 years, filmmaker Lawrence Lek has been creating science-fiction landscapes that feature neon temples, drones touring abandoned luxury hotels, and empty urban highways.
The throughline is, there are no visible people. His main characters—and crucially, not the villains—are artificial intelligence entities.
Digital Art: 1960s to Now
Published by Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Thames & Hudson Ltd, London, 2024
Hardcover, 208 Pages
This new, image-led history of global digital art from the 1960s to the present day draws on the V&A’s rich collection while linking the digital art scene to wider art and design histories, and to their social, political, and technological contexts. Decade-by-decade essays by leading authorities explore evolving digital art practices, and a series of interviews and discussions with prominent artists, gallerists, museum curators, and collectors from the world of digital art offer fascinating insights into the subject.
Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method
Published by MITPress, Sonic Faction, 2024
Softcover, 344 Pages
Sonic Friction presents extended lines of thought prompted by two Urbanomic events which explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.
Three recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the "audio essay" as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play….
Urbanscape: Connectivity and Coexistence
Published by Lee Kanghyun, National Asian Culture Center, 2024
Softcover, 202 Pages
We can observe Asian architecture and society through the language of art. This exhibition brings attention to the meaning of shared creation and the power of community. Just like the materials touch, connect, and build upon each other in a building, we, too, live by touching, connecting, and building relationships with one another, embedding metaphorical meaning in “building.”
Ten Thousand Suns:
24th Biennale of Sydney
Published by Biennale of Sydney Ltd 2024
Hardcover, 360 Pages
The 24th Biennale of Sydney, titled Ten Thousand Suns, ignited its transformative power of art across six iconic Sydney locations. This extraordinary exhibition showcased the visionary creations of leading artists from diverse corners of the globe, all within the hallowed halls of Sydney’s most iconic cultural institutions. Best of all, entry to this cultural extravaganza was free, making it an unmissable opportunity for art enthusiasts and curious minds alike.
Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age
Published by Julia Stoschek Foundation & Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH, 2024
Softcover, 176 Pages
WORLDBUILDING examines the relationship between gaming and time-based media art with a journey through various ways in which artists have interacted with video games and made them into an art form. In the words of the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist: “In 2021 2.8 billion people—almost a third of the world’s population—played video games, making a niche pastime into the biggest mass phenomenon of our time.
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Game Society
Published by Kim Sung-hee in association with National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Foundation, Korea, 2023
Hardcover, 280 Pages
Game Society examines how the grammar and aesthetics of video games have influenced contemporary art and visual culture, and permeated our society and daily lives over the five decades since the launch of the first video game. Video games encompass interface design for visual and auditory stimulation, storytelling that spurs the imagination, immersive experiences and social interactions, which makes them the most relevant media form today.
Parallax: Gaming and Affect
Published by University of Leeds, Volume 28 - Issue 2, 2022
Softcover, 255 pages
Tendencies in video game development are not immune to the perception of paradigm shifts or at least modulations in the contemporary mindset. One of these has been a slow but steady return of the subject to critical centre stage, no doubt prompted in part by an increasing sense of multidirectional threat, renewed 'felt ultimacies" and emerging posthumanity's identity crisis from the mid-to-late 1990s onwards.
Liminal Stages: Exploration on Perception, Existence, and Techno-consciousness
Published by Wind H Art Center, 2022
Softcover, 104 Pages
The group exhibition "Liminal Stages: Explorations on Perception, Existence, and Techno-consciousness" stems from the curator’s research in art history, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and neuro arts, delving into their implications in machine learning and new media. The show explores the contemporary human-machine relationship and its existential implications through the interpretations of six international, multi-generational, and cross-disciplinary artists.
Small Gods by Alex Quicho
Published by Zero Books, 2021
Softcover, 152 Pages
“We know this: all gods become killing machines. But if a god stays small, can it create, instead, another reality?” So asks Alex Quicho in Small Gods: Perspectives on the Drone. Through a series of case studies, the London-based writer explores the presence of drone technologies and their attendant ocular, artistic, and sociopolitical implications in works of contemporary art.
Beyond the Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI
Published by Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco in collaboration with Cameron Books, 2020
Softcover, 224 Pages
The contemporary uncanny valley is no longer limited to the image of the humanlike robot or “thinking machine.” It is mapped by the inscrutable calculations of algorithms that are designed to mine and analyze humans’ behavior and project it into tradable futures. It is occupied by our statistical doubles, spread across stacks and reflected back to us in a ceaseless visual montage of hot triggers.
Whitechapel Gallery Documents of Contemporary Art: Science Fiction
Published by Whitechapel Gallery, 2020
Softcover, 214 Pages
Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art. "For this collection, Dan Byrne-Smith brings together his acute aesthetic sense, his extensive knowledge of science fiction, and his engaged utopian hermeneutic to present this compelling array of artists and writers who break open the cage of neoliberal entrapment and engage in a revolutionary response to the dark times that immerse us all."
Sounds of Crisis by Edith Jeřábková
Published by Centre for Contemporary Art, 2020
Softcover, 255 pages
We live in clusters of crises. Whether someone denies it or someone else promotes it, the crisis is our present. The aim of the publication was not to make the crisis a topic. A crisis is a state, and Edith Jeřábková looks at it in the book as an energy, a force that alternately activates and exhausts, motivates and brings anxiety.
British Art Show 9
Published by British Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2021
Softcover, 192 Pages
British Art Show 9 is curated by Irene Aristizábal and Hammad Nasar and is structured around three main themes: healing, care and reparative history; tactics for togetherness; and imagining new futures. The 47 artists in the exhibition look at how we live with and give voice to difference; explore alternative economies; and propose ways of living together that emphasise commonality and collaboration.
Transformer — A Rebirth Of Wonder
Published to to accompany the exhibition at 180 The Strand, London, curated by Jefferson Hack and presented by The Store X and The Vinyl Factory, 2019
Hardcover, 200 Pages
The concrete spaces of The Store X, 180 The Strand have flickered into life with Transformer: a rebirth of wonder. The group show takes visitors to the brutalist landmark on a subterranean journey through a series of staged worlds. Themes such as ritual, identity, magic, and political reality connect the artworks, which consider social transformation and the role of the individual in relation to our collective future.
Lawrence Lek: 2065
Published by Sadie Coles HQ, 2019
Softcover, 38 Pages
Kellenberger–White were commissioned by Lawrence Lek and Sadie Coles HQ gallery to produce a book for the launch of the ‘AI: More than Human’ arts festival at London’s Barbican Centre. It would translate Lek’s film and installation into printed form. The contents of the book are structured in two parts: first, there is a subtitled walk-through of Lek’s futureworld computer game ‘2065’; then the game is revisited in the form of its installation, originally hosted at the K11 Chi Art Space in Hong Kong in spring 2018.
