On Gaming and Virtual Media: Erika Balsom, Jamie Sutcliffe and Lawrence Lek in conversation

To mark the closing of Lawrence Lek’s exhibition Life Before Automation, join Erika Balsom and Jamie Sutcliffe in a conversation with Lawrence Lek about the intersection of cinematic conventions, video games, and virtual media in his work.

Life Before Automation is the largest exhibition of Lek’s work to date and brings together multiple projects that span different spaces, genres, and modes of spectatorship. Viewed within the timeline of the exhibition, interconnections between works are made visible, as are developments in Lek’s aesthetic and narrative strategies across a decade of practice.

The exhibition will be available to view from 6pm, the event will commence at 7pm.

Biographies:

Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. He is the editor of the books Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, published by The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press (2021), and Weeb Theory (2023) published by Banner Repeater, and the author of Let Me Work!, an experiment in comics criticism forthcoming from Breakdown Press. His essays, reviews, and interviews have been published internationally by Art Monthly, Art Review, e-flux Criticism, Frieze, The White Review, Rhizome, The Quietus, and Bricks From The Kiln amongst others. He is Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts, London, and teaches critical theory across the Design and Illustration pathways at the University of Northampton. In his own work, Sutcliffe explores artistic encounters with science fictive fabulation, the politics of gaming, animation and its multiple entanglements with developments in the life sciences, haunted media, and the persistence of myth.

Erika Balsom is a reader in film and media studies at King’s College London. She is the author of four books, including After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017, Columbia University Press) and TEN SKIES (Fireflies Press, 2021). Her writing has appeared in venues such as Cahiers du cinéma, e-flux, Grey Room, New Left Review, and Screen, she written catalogue essays on artists including Aria Dean, Ed Atkins, Amar Kanwar, and Jeff Wall. With Hila Peleg, she is the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (MIT Press, 2016) and Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2022) and the co-curator of “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image,” which originated at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2022 before traveling to the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2023), and Kunsternes Hus, Oslo (2026). Her research has been supported by organisations including the Mellon Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ford Foundation, Fogo Island Arts, and the British School in Rome.