This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Tate calls the video maker Ed Atkins, who became known for his uncanny computer-generated avatar films in the early 2010s, one of the most influential living British artists.
That the British public would not recognise his work is a glib indictment of the institution’s view of itself. More importantly, however, it is a testament that the machine’s proximity to the human — the key concern of the artist’s work — is intrinsic today.
Atkins’ aesthetics of emotive CGI figures has become one with the world we live in, and it is not obvious which has subsumed which. A major survey of his work at the museum, presented and narrated by the artist as if in the first person, now reveals that the transhumanist optimism of virtualisation that characterised recent decades has hard yet fleshly limits.
The subjects in Atkins’ works either suffer anguish or experience nature’s brutality. The tragic hero of the 2015 Hisser, for example, is a Florida man whose bed was swallowed by a sinkhole and whose body was never recovered.
Atkins represents him as a 3D figure taken from a stock library and shows him in a bedroom perfectly matching the size of a three-screen video projection, arranged in the gallery as though to invite a domino collapse. The nearly photorealistic avatar, modelled by Atkins himself through motion capture, sings of his ordeal, helpless, as he falls.
Atkins allows his audience to keep this extraordinary yet everyday event at arm’s length. “Florida man”, a news reporting formulation for man-bites-alligator stories, cultivates a false impression of the rarity of life-altering experiences.
In another part of the exhibition, Atkins shows Old Food, a 2017 series of animations of medieval peasants’ faces contorted from cold and disease, installed amongst racks of operatic costumes. This relegates the universal human experience of discomfort to outmoded dramatic forms like grand theatre.
The same happens to moments of pleasure. In 2022, Atkins restored and manipulated with AI effects and foley a scene from an obscure 1926 short French film. His version shows a man offering food to a visibly distressed woman sitting on a park bench with a baby in her arms.
Atkins points to the original fragment’s “unaffectedness” which merges “acting and the impossibly real”. He calls his version Voilà la Vérité (This is the Truth) but embellishes it with voice actors sobbing in solace. The work, in his words, is a “sacrilegious” dupe.
Yet this acknowledgement reveals nothing of the source film’s true plot and little of the experience and emotion that inspired it. Atkins’ early work, made before high-end animation tools became affordable, met with a fascination for its technological proficiency. Its austere installation strategies, like the use of single monitors displaying humanoid faces in corners of otherwise empty rooms, created the illusion that the machine represented life.
For curators, such as the Serpentine’s Hans Ulrich Obrist, who championed Atkins, this transhumanist proposition confounded cartesian dualism and was a radical step towards the machinic becoming indistinguishable from the biological.
But life outpaced art outside the museum. Even though critiques like Donna Haraway’s 1985 A Cyborg Manifesto are popular in the art academy, their application to art production has exempted neither Atkins nor his audiences from two conflicting realities.
One is that the technical novelty of the CGI avatar, which Atkins once deployed as an “as if”, distancing reality, has become ubiquitous. For example, ABBA Voyage, a concert performed by the Swedish pop group’s holographic stand-ins is enjoyed by audiences as an experience in its own right.
Phone app-based video AI avatar “companions” are already available and are no less capable of inspiring desire than their blood equivalents. Atkins’ focus on suffering, however, stands out against such commercial applications, even as he positions his suffering subjects in the realm of history or myth.
Mind and flesh themselves are the second limit. Two works near the end of the exhibition concern the artist’s parents. The Worm, made in 2021 during the pandemic, depicts Atkins’ double animated as though in a TV chat show studio, in an unscripted telephone call with his mother.
She shares, perhaps for the first time, memories of her childhood that coloured her understanding of family, love and her relationship with Atkins. The combination of lockdown, telephone, CGI and psychological distance rendered by this work is difficult to watch.
It exposes that a universal, pervasive anxiety has replaced the pain of that conjunctivitis-ridden medieval peasant in Atkins’ earlier work.
In a two-hour 2024 film Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me, Atkins finally dispenses with the digital. He is too late, however, to escape representation.
The work consists of the artist’s late father’s cancer hospice diaries read by the actor Toby Jones in front of a sombre audience of young people. It ends with a performance of a fantastical cure invented by Atkins’ daughter.
Next to the also fantastical CGI performances of anguish modelled elsewhere in the exhibition, these banal notes on the body’s fallibility are arresting. In them, Atkins discovers the “uncanny” of his practice was not a technological artefact but a fundamental feature of living on.
Ed Atkins at Tate Britain continues until 25 August 2025
