Interlude Docs

Doc 098: Lawrence Lek

Lawrence Lek_Interlude Docs

Extracted from the project Bonus Levels (2013-2016). 

Feelings can catch you unawares.
I knew that, but did she?
She always asked
if there was anything that never changed.
 
I promised to write a story for her
based on my observations of reality.
 
I forget how long I’ve been on this train.
I start to feel lonely.
 
Is it fun over there?
It’s fine.
 
Tell me something else.
What do you want to know?
What’s the weather like?
Pretty warm… all year round.
Sometimes you can’t tell what season it is.
I won’t be going… so I’ll just have to imagine it.
 
Do you hear that?
It’s our train… 
Are you awake?
You spoke about the meaning of life,
and of the unselfish nature of art.
Take music for example…
It is less connected to reality than anything…
Or if connected at all, it’s done mechanically, 
not by way of ideas,
just by sheer sound, without any associations.
And yet music, if by some miracle, 
gets through to the heart.
What is it that resonates in us in response to harmony, 
making it the source of the greatest delight, 
which stuns us and brings us together? 
After all, everything has some sense.
Sense and reason.
 
 

Bonus Levels is a project which ran between 2013-2016, a continuously expanding utopian world that unfolded as an ongoing series of software, videos, performances, and installations. Conceived as a virtual novel, each chapter uses simulation as a medium to assemble site-specific collages of objects and places drawn from reality. These critical fictions draw from the language of architecture and cinema to explore altered states of presence and memory that exist in digital space. Each level is rendered visible to the observer through a first-person perspective, a flaneur’s point of view where the desire to explore and the need for individual agency both exist. The accompanying essay on the project and its relation to architecture and video games can be read here.

Lawrence Lek (b. 1982, Frankfurt) explores the physical experience of simulated presence through software, hardware, installations and performance.

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