[PROMPT: Where else—whether in a piece of writing that you find outside of the reading list, or in someone else’s creative practice—can you find evidence of a similar or opposing position?]
I looked to the work of artist Lawrence Lek initially as a point of reference for the utilisation and presentation of ideas through virtual space. His thinking on the use of virtual spaces as tools for institutional critique aligns with and has furthered my own position on the exposition of unseen, pre-designed rules inherent in many commonplace spaces.
Lek’s ongoing iterative series Bonus Levels, a collection of virtual worlds, is described by the artist as “a continuation of architecture through other means” (Lek, 2015). Nine locations across London are reimagined and simulated in digital form; removed from their original locations in an often fantastical manner, they present reconfigurations of reality that seek to expose the underlying ideas, identities and rules that converge within institutional or civic spaces.
Lek’s worlds are ‘simulation essays’, but also games. Deliberate and nuanced aspects of ‘gamification’ employ the medium as a tool for creating alternate perspectives and heightened awareness of familiar spaces. The artist draws on the notion of the ‘bonus level’, a traditional video game concept from which the project takes its name; in these spaces, often isolated from the game’s wider mechanical structure, viewers are exposed to “exceptional scenarios where spatial, temporal, or rule-based conventions no longer apply” (Lek, 2015). Through a removal from and subversion of familiarity, the viewer’s awareness of familiar mechanics is modified.
Lek’s work succeeds in achieving this through a uniquely versatile form of site-specificity that draws on the traits inherent to the artist’s chosen medium. Simulations and modifications of real world locations presented within that location, such as 2015’s Unreal Estate (the Royal Academy is yours), create a kind of multi-layered reality. All at once the viewer inhabits and perceives the space around them — an actual reality — whilst interacting with a digital, distorted replication of that same space — a faux reality removed from itself. In the dissonance between the two realities, a new form of perception is born.
The position found in Lek’s work is particularly appropriate for contemplating actual spaces rendered digitally; his worlds are illusions, detached from themselves, yet explore the psychological aspect of their reality in a way that is at its most lucid in the domain of the virtual. Lek explains:
“Virtual worlds permit the multiplication of cinematic devices to produce infinite fields of cameras, microphones, processes, and interfaces – all of which serve to reinforce the illusion of a self-contained universe” (Lek, 2015).
The notion of the self-contained space provides unique implications with regards to the artist’s position; the experience of moving in each space becomes removed from any one person or their internal understanding of space and time. In an instant, a digital space is activated; movement through the space becomes inseparable from its form. The world itself purely inhabits the viewer’s focus, and that which is unseen in its authentic structure — ideologies, identities, motivations, histories and futures — can be brought to the forefront in a playful way that to some degree transcends the narrative possibilities of material architecture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lek, Lawrence (2015) Bonus Levels
Available at: http://avant.org/project/bonus-levels/ (Accessed 29 May 2021)