London’s 2012 Olympic Park in Stratford is the epitome of contemporary masterplanning: the choreographed regeneration of a post-industrial area into an economically thriving zone centred on creative industries. The park itself contains iconic structures commissioned for the games: the Olympic Stadium, Velodrome and Anish Kapoor’s Orbit tower for the multinational steel conglomerate ArcelorMittal.  Delirious New Wick explores the disjunction between the masterplan and the adjacent area of Hackney Wick, a place with an unusually high density of artist-run colonies. Teleporter Pavilions beam the player into inaccessible areas - up into the voids of Anish Kapoor’s tower and into the Velodrome flying over the town below. Here, the player can take a critic’s role, assessing the government-endorsed regeneration strategies as they witness conflicts between the area’s past and future.

Delirious New Wick

Continental Drift (OST) is the original soundtrack for a simulated transatlantic flight from New York to London. Bringing together dislocated pop, arpeggiated guitars, and ambient material recorded in many different locations over the past five years, the album continues Lek's explorations into the meditative experience of movement.  The entire album is presented as a single-shot music video, with kaleidoscopic visuals seen from the window seat of a Boeing 777. This work is Lek's first album since 2011's Screengazers LP, and is the first of several upcoming releases through his Bonus Levels project.

Continental Drift (OST)

Shiva’s Dreaming is a virtual world exploring the creation and destruction of simulated architecture. Players roam around a digital replica of The Crystal Palace at Sydenham on the night of 30 November 1936, just as the building is slowly being consumed by fire.  As players explore the smoke-filled scene, their movements trigger explosions that transform the crystalline architecture into cascades of glass shards, falling apart in slow motion - only to regenerate itself afterwards.  By utilising the typical perceptual skills of a computer gamer into project oneself into a game’s landscape and interact with its rules, Shiva’s Dreaming positions the viewer at a precarious threshold between real and simulated physical encounters with architecture and its materials.  With reference in his title to the third Hindu god Shiva, whose role it is to destroy the universe in order to re-create it, the work sets in motion a series of infinite cycles.

Shiva's Dreaming

Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours) uses video game software to imagine a future in which the Royal Academy of Arts in London has been sold to a Chinese billionaire as a luxury private mansion. A first-person perspective tour through their new abode is accompanied by a voiceover – translated from the high-society Tatler magazine into Mandarin – about how to hire and fire an 'army of household staff'.
 Drawing from the language of high-definition property marketing videos, the project presents a critical look at the capital's current housing crisis. The Royal Academy is itself on a rental contract from the government, and this fact shows the precarious status of even the nation's oldest and most revered art establishment. This is an uncannily familiar virtual world where a major cultural institution has been appropriated into commercial real estate.
 The work forms Chapter 9 of Lawrence Lek’s Bonus Levels project, a series of utopian/dystopian virtual worlds based on real places.