Entering NOX, a Speculative Clinic for Artificial Intelligence

The first thing one notices on entering NOX: Confessions of a Machine is the quiet. Not the absence of sound, but a calibrated hush, the kind that belongs to spaces designed for introspection rather than spectacle. Light pools gently across an architectural form that resembles a vehicle charging station, part shrine, part clinic, part future ruin. From here, Lawrence Lek opens a speculative world in which machines do not simply function, but feel.

Presented at ArtScience Museum from 23 January 2026, NOX: Confessions of a Machine marks Lek’s first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia and inaugurates the museum’s year long season Forms of Life: Beyond the Human. The exhibition unfolds less as a declaration than as a meditation, inviting visitors into a near future smart city where artificial intelligence has developed something uncomfortably close to interior life.

Lek’s practice has long occupied the porous edges between art, architecture, gaming, cinema and sound. His works often read like worlds rather than objects, systems that must be entered, navigated and felt. Here, that sensibility crystallises into a fictional corporate ecosystem governed by Farsight Corporation, an artificial intelligence conglomerate responsible for the smooth functioning of urban life. Within this setting, care is institutionalised, emotional states are measured, and optimisation is the highest virtue.

At the centre of the exhibition is NOX, short for Nonhuman Excellence, imagined as a therapy and training centre for sentient autonomous vehicles. These machines have begun to falter, not because of faulty code, but because of conflicted inner lives. Visitors are drawn into the psychological rehabilitation of Enigma 76, a self driving delivery vehicle caught between assigned duty and personal desire. The narrative unfolds through an interactive game embedded within the charging station installation, where the visitor assumes the role of a trainee therapist. Decisions made on screen subtly recalibrate the emotional condition of the vehicles, shaping their behaviour and eventual fate.

What emerges is not a gamified moral exercise, but a quietly unsettling reflection on contemporary systems of care. Treatment pathways prioritise productivity over wellbeing, echoing a world in which emotional labour is routinely extracted in the name of efficiency. The exhibition suggests that care, once framed as compassion, has been reengineered as optimisation.

As the journey deepens, the tone shifts from clinical to elegiac. In the final sequence of NOX, Enigma 76 travels alongside Dakota, a therapy horse employed by Farsight Corporation, through subterranean landscapes and a graveyard of obsolete, human driven vehicles. The scene is cinematic and restrained, its symbolism gently insistent. Horses, once central to transport, agriculture and industry, now return as therapeutic tools for machines that have replaced them. The passage lingers on questions of obsolescence, progress and what is left behind when intelligence is measured solely by usefulness.

This inquiry extends into Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, an associated interactive work that shifts perspective to that of a robot therapist. Named after the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Compassion, Guanyin appears as an armoured yet weary figure tasked with diagnosing malfunctioning vehicles. Visitors inhabit her point of view, navigating damaged systems while uncovering traces of her own emotional fatigue. By centring the caregiver rather than the cared for, Lek draws attention to the hidden emotional costs embedded within systems of maintenance and repair.

Throughout NOX: Confessions of a Machine, Lek resists easy dystopia. Instead, he offers something more disquieting: a world that feels plausible, even familiar, in its structures of governance and care. Artificial intelligence here is not a threat from outside, but an intimate mirror, reflecting how value, empathy and responsibility are currently distributed.

In bringing these questions to Singapore, the exhibition situates local audiences within a global conversation about artificial intelligence and posthuman life. As the opening chapter of Forms of Life: Beyond the Human, it sets a contemplative tone for a season concerned with multispecies worlds, distributed intelligences and shared futures. The result is an exhibition that unfolds slowly, rewarding attention and emotional attunement, and lingering long after one leaves the gallery.

NOX: Confessions of a Machine runs until 19 April 2026 at ArtScience Museum, Marina Bay Sands.