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.

With the UK cast out of the EU, Dalston has degenerated into post-apocalyptic delirium. This is a drowned world of the near future, filled with the ruins of metropolitan life: forgotten nightclubs, DIY art installations, neon-lit music venues, Election booths, Turkish snooker clubs and luxury penthouses. Building upon Lek's original project for Open Source 2015, this site-specific simulation brings together multiple histories of the area into a single zone. As the player roams around, fragments of European voices appear: samples from Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Lars Von Trier's Europa speak to them about the nature of dislocation. It is a gradual, but relentless, meeting of past, present, and future that comes with any form of geopolitical transformation.

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.

Sky Line is a virtual world presented as an interactive simulation and as a looping video. Modelled on London Underground’s Circle Line, the work is set on a railway that connects twenty independent art galleries located within inaccessible areas across the capital. The physical pavilion where the videos are viewed from is also present in the interactive videos, where it acts as a shortcut onto the trains.

Collective Tower celebrates the independent spirit of the galleries and artist-run spaces of Art Licks Weekend by bringing them together in a collective skyscraper. Unable to afford rising real estate rates, emerging galleries and artists occupy the fringes of the city. Bonus Levels is an ideal tower where these places are brought together. Each floor in the tower is dedicated to a gallery participating in the festival, and the structure and curatorial concept of their physical space is reflected in its virtual double. From white cubes to dark performance spaces and psychogeographic maps, the game invites each player to explore an alternate reality.

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.

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.

Within the walls of the Memory Palace, viewers (also known as browsers) are in a perpetual search for a state of total recall. Searching for the perfect text within the Memory Palace is also an exploration of a virtual archive which contains three forms of memory: books, architecture, and video. Its architecture is based on a modern data centre set within the Tabularium - the state archive of the Roman Empire on the Capitoline Hill. Its collection consists of publications about the internet that do not exist in online form, drawn from the archive collected for the Tabularium exhibition, 2014. Its videos are drawn from fragments of films about books as a physical artefact. Exploring the world is a journey through these forms of collective memory.