Lawrence Lek's FVU-commissioned film 'Geomancer' (2017) features in the fourth and final installment of the Synthetic Imaginaries exhibition cycle at Matadero Madrid that examines non-human agency and our understanding of intelligence, free will and complex systems, curated by Julia Kaganskiy within the framework of LAB#03 Synthetic Minds by Medialab Slaughterhouse

About the work

Heralded by the futuristic computer-generated cityscapes that have become a signature feature of his work, Lawrence Lek’s mini-opus Geomancer is less inclined to map the building blocks of the urban architecture of tomorrow than to try and summon up the spirit of our rapidly dawning age - one whose characteristics, Lek implies, include the growing ascendancy of the cultural phenomenon of Sino-Futurism. As the geopolitical axis tilts further to the East, and as once-dominant economic/technological models are cast into doubt, Lek alights on a longstanding tension between the place of the human and the role of the machine, sharpened by contemporary hopes and anxieties around the rise of East Asia, and by speculations that new forms of artificial intelligence, already outperforming mere mortals in matters of automation and aggregation, will challenge us in more creative skills as well. 

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Geomancer was commissioned for the Jerwood/FVU Awards: Neither One Thing or Another, a collaboration between Jerwood Arts and FVU. FVU is supported by Arts Council England.