Ever wondered what it would be like for automated, smart cars when it misbehaves? You can now get an idea of how that works when you step into a speculative world of sentient machines at ArtScience Museum in acclaimed multimedia artist Lawrence Lek’s NOX: Confessions of a Machine.
Opening on 23 January 2026, the exhibition marks Lawrence’s first solo show in Southeast Asia and also launches the ArtScience Museum’s 2026 season, Forms of Life: Beyond the Human.
Having worked across genre-bending projects that span architecture, gaming, video, music and fiction, Lawrence has gained international recognition for interrogating the emotional capacity of artificial intelligence and the emergence of posthuman identity. This familiarity and knowledge of his art also led him to become the 2024 Frieze London Artist Award recipient.
In NOX: Confessions of a Machine, you are transported to an unspecified smart city in the near future, where the inner workings of fictional artificial intelligence conglomerate, Farsight Corporation, come to life through two interconnected works, NOX and Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot.
Through architectural environments, video, sound and interactive gameplay, the exhibition takes you through different stage systems of care, assessment and rehabilitation, in a therapy and training centre for sentient autonomous vehicles whose inner lives have begun to interfere with their performance.
Here, you’ll follow the psychological rehabilitation programme of Enigma-76, a self-driving delivery vehicle that is struggling between its assigned duty and personal desire.
At the heart of NOX, you’ll find a vehicle charging station that features a touchscreen game which positions you as a trainee therapist tasked with returning malfunctioning vehicles to operational readiness. This is where you can make decisions about treatment pathways to directly shape the emotional state and outcomes of the vehicles under your care.
Almost acting like a roleplaying game, each choice you make carries consequences while questioning the idea of agency, responsibility and control within automated systems.
In addition to this, you’ll also get a chance to view Enigma-76’s final therapy session where it is accompanied by a therapy horse that takes it through subterranean landscapes and a forgotten graveyard of human-driven vehicles; evoking a poignant relation between the past and present modes of transport, recalling how horses had once played a significant role in transport, agriculture and industry before they were replaced by machines.
As an extension of NOX, you will get to encounter Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot too, where you can play as Guanyin, to navigate malfunctioning machines and uncover fragments of her own emotional strain and fatigue.
By focusing on the inner life of this robot caregiver, the work helps to extend the exhibition’s inquiry into empathy and the often-overlooked emotional labour that are embedded within systems of care in real life; encouraging us to explore how listening, empathy and care might shape relationships with intelligent systems.
As you progress through, the exhibition will reveal a system where care is framed less as a form of well-being and more as a means of optimisation, an apt analogy that echoes real-world systems where efficiency, productivity and corporate interest often take precedence over emotional care.
