Lawrence Lek's 2017 FVU-commissioned film Geomancer features as part of the artists' largest UK institutional exhibition to date at Goldsmiths CCA.

Taking its title from a monologue in NOX (2023), "Life Before Automation" positions the viewer in a series of parallel futures where present-day promises and anxieties around technological progress have been absorbed into the texture of everyday life. A new commission for the outdoor entrance to the CCA retraces this speculative history. Spanning three centuries of AI development, this timeline merges real and imagined events, including the rise of Farsight, the dominant tech monopoly in Lek’s world.

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.