Lawrence Lek: NOX Goes Live at 3 Evenings
Lawrence Lek performs NOX (Live), a new reworking of his story about a rehabilitation program for runaway self-driving cars, on the opening night of Somerset House Studios' 3 Evenings in London on October 16.
Lawrence Lek performs NOX (Live) on Friday, October 16, the opening night of 3 Evenings, Somerset House Studios' 3 night programme at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station in east London during Frieze Week. Somerset House describes it as a new live performance reimagining NOX in a focused format, with new sound material developed for the event. He shares the night with Gazelle Twin and with Jenkin van Zyl and Agnieszka Szczotka, while interactive installations by Ayoung Kim, Keiken, Xin Liu and Louis Morlæ run across all three nights.
NOX (2023) is an immersive exhibition built around a fictional program from the AI startup Farsight Corporation that rehabilitates disobedient self-driving cars. Its protagonist, Enigma-76, goes through a 5 day treatment overseen by Guanyin, a carebot, in a smart city lit like film noir, while the audience's movement triggers voice logs that address them as sponsor, customer and trainee. It is the second part of Lek's Smart City trilogy, after Black Cloud (2021) and before Empty Rider (2024).
3 Evenings is a playful reimagining of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, the 1966 event considered a pivotal moment for artists working with new technologies. Lek has been a Somerset House Studios resident since 2018 and won the Frieze London Artist Award in 2024.
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