2025/10/09

Consciousness as Liability: Nora N. Khan Nails the Capitalism Critique in Lawrence Lek’s AI Car Noir

● 09/10/2025
“The multiday treatment program at NOX, with its careful progression through diagnostic spaces, doesn’t cure a car of contemplation but manages it, containing affect within acceptable parameters.”
– Critic Nora N. Khan, on the dilemma of Lawrence Lek’s NOX (2023), a fictional AI rehabilitation facility for malfunctioning self-driving cars on view at LA’s Hammer Museum. “These vehicles arrive at NOX not because they’ve stopped working, but because they’ve started feeling,” Khan writes. “As it turns out, consciousness (or even just the high-fidelity impression of consciousness) is a massive liability in a smoothly designed world.”
LA Review of Architecture
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