Ed Atkins and the Weight of the Unreal
On the eve of his Tate Britain survey, Ed Atkins reflects on avatars, affect and why writing remains at the core of his practice
On the eve of his Tate Britain survey, Ed Atkins reflects on avatars, affect and why writing remains at the core of his practice
Hans Ulrich Obrist I want to start from the very beginning: how did you come to art?
Ed Atkins I suppose there was a certain inevitability because of my parents: my mother was an art teacher and my father was a graphic designer by trade. Both artists, really. Latterly, it’s a matter of contemporary art’s capaciousness; it’s the only place that tolerates all the things I didn’t want to choose between: writing, acting, music, cinema. In art, you can have a plural practice without having to specialize in a particular direction.
I wanted to be a painter until maybe 2009, when I discovered video editing in the last term of my master’s degree at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. I took to video editing like a duck to water. Videos are another way to contain a raft of things; they’re holistic. But editing, as a sensation, was faintly miraculous.
HUO Do you remember the day you discovered video editing?
EA I can’t remember the exact context, but I’d just got a laptop with iMovie. I’d recklessly promised to make a video for something, and I started dragging in clips of things I’d ripped from DVDs, and then started scissoring them up, overlaying sounds, recomposing things and just generally getting excited and feeling this love for editing. Not that I was particularly good at it, but it did feel natural. In the end, I’m probably predominantly an editor, always suturing stuff together, seeking new combinations.
I’ve always been into structure more than anything else. Certainly as it relates to writing, but also to music, to film, all of it. I find palpable structure very moving, confessional – much more so than plot or character. I found a way to speak to that through videos that confessed their constitution and their artifice. There’s something vulnerable and gracious in the structural. Something in there that, to me, performs sentimentally. Perhaps it was the tool itself, the software, that catalyzed this understanding. It’s a bit like finding a pen that allows you to write more wonderfully than any other. Technology can enable access to a different version of yourself. I remember showing a video at my MA show and people being conspicuously drawn to it. It felt, at the time, like a new space was opening up for me.
HUO I wanted to ask you about your first major UK survey at Tate Britain, which opens with an artwork from around the time we first met: Death Mask II [2010]. Is that piece listed as number one in your catalogue raisonné or are there other, earlier works?
EA I would probably choose that. Death Mask II is its own thing. Unsolicited, born of being out in the world and making. I’m revisiting the work for the show at Tate. I’m changing the resolution, the aspect ratio. I’m remastering according to some logic of technological supersession.
Editing, as a sensation, was faintly miraculous.
HUO When we first met, you had just completed Death Mask I [2010] – a script for a biopic of Madame Tussaud, a figure who has always fascinated you. She represented something deeply tied to reality but also to gruesome death. In Death Mask II, you again worked with the biopic format, this time focusing on Alfred Wallace, the British naturalist.
EA Death Mask I was a fictional biopic of Madame Tussaud; I didn’t do any research, it was all desirous, conspicuously unfilmable. There was a lot of pushing for an excess of sensation, of something I kept calling cadaverousness: the qualities of a corpse. This translated into the video Death Mask II: The Scent [2010], which I wanted to figuratively stink of rotting flesh and to conjure some of the sentiment and the emotional space of an encounter with death. Maurice Blanchot’s text ‘The Instant of My Death’ [1994] was very important to me. It addresses both the physical reality of a dead body – the blunt materiality, the excessive weight, the sensational apprehension – and the immaterial experience – the memorial, the ephemeral, the ghostly gone. I wanted to make videos that moved hard between these two poles: corporeal experience and a somewhat intangible, sentimental sense of loss. Death Mask II was the first – somewhat silly, somewhat funny, but biographically connected to my own experiences with loss and death. For better or worse, it’s still part of the process for me, this fantastical experience of death.
HUO At a certain moment, you started to bring in computer-generated animation and characters, which you’ve described in previous interviews as readymades. When did this idea enter your work?
EA The earlier videos quite deliberately looked like they were made from stock imagery. I shot the world to make my own stock. I wasn’t really interested in the specificity of a subject. I only wanted the essence of the filmed subject. I tried filming faces, wanting stock faces, but they always collapsed this aspiration to hold on to the structure of artifice. A real face is just too specific, all-encompassing. This is why my early films feature the backs of heads, teasing the hem of a reveal that would eventually come through CG.
During a residency at Wysing Arts Centre near Cambridge in 2012, while struggling to figure out what to make for an upcoming solo show at Chisenhale Gallery in London, I had something of an epiphany. I’d brought this proprietary motion-tracking camera with me, an Xbox Kinect and some software from a startup called Faceshift, who had just begun to do this early, prosumer facial capture stuff, employing the depth camera on the Kinect. I remember getting it hooked up, sitting there, looking at myself performing via this demo model surrogate in real time.
The cycle of being expelled from the work, then pulled back in, is the ambivalent goal.
I sort of fell in love; a perverse, narcissistic kind of clinch between me and not-me. It was a relief. And it meant that I could use faces in my work because these CG faces were so obviously, constitutionally fake and lifeless – so visibly artificial. I didn’t have to abandon the sensation of pursuing structure and the specifics of the medium: I could suspend everything inside a computer-generated inversion, a negative space that allowed performance.
Nowadays, you can find a 3D CG version of pretty much anything in the world and add it to your digital shopping basket. Anything is reproducible. In that sense, making videos like this has become no more of a conspicuously ‘found’ situation than casting actors, selecting locations or choosing the right props and costumes. It’s a process of discovery and construction through reality.
HUO I’ve always been interested in artists whose practices encompass both literature and visual arts – Leonora Carrington, for instance. Even in your early works, text was always a fundamental element. You’re about to publish a new book with Fitzcarraldo – your third after A Primer for Cadavers [2016] and Old Food [2019]. Can you talk a little bit about how everything always starts with writing?
EA That’s true. I don’t do sketchbooks. I draw a lot, but those drawings are their own sovereign things. Writing is the preparation; I think through language. I often have a phrase or some literary device I want to explore. Then, through the engine of that generating process, ideas will come. But the wellspring of any desire I have around this stuff is writing. There was a long period when the writing and the videos would feed back into one another, but it’s a little more discrete now – even if all the imagery still starts with words.
In the end, a book stands as one of the most precious things I can possibly do: my greatest pleasure is having the time to sit and write. My latest publication, Flower [2025], is a book of confessions, albeit hobbled and strange and written in a deliberately poor style. It’s really the legend at the bottom of a map – only basically inscrutable. I think it’s a key to the rest of my work, my relationship to voice, style and structure. It’s also maybe a little monograph. Some of my thoughts on art are in there, some of my means.
HUO In Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s beautiful book about the theorist Sylvia Wynter, Dub: Finding Ceremony [2020], she writes that it’s not about being inspired by Wynter, but about working with her. So, my next question is: Who are the writers you’re working with – past, present and future?
EA That’s such a nice reframing. In a very literal sense, because I work with him often, the poet Steven Zultanski. We met as recent arrivals in Denmark before the pandemic. It’s rare, I think, to find someone that you feel so close to, creatively – close enough to collaborate with in a very real way. Together, we wrote and directed a new film, Nurses Come and Go, but None for Me [2025]. His poetry – the tone, the way he writes, how he pulls from recordings and interviews, his feel for a radical kind of realism – has been a constant source of inspiration.
HUO A big presence in the show at Tate will be a series of drawings on Post-it notes you made for your daughter, 200 of which were published by Koenig in Drawings for Children [2021]. After we first met, we began having breakfast together regularly and I often brought Post-its with me that you would write or doodle on.
One unforgettable moment: we were at a restaurant and, after ordering toast and butter, you wrote a poem, made an incredible drawing on a Post-it, placed it on the toast, and I took a photo. Before I realized what was happening, you ate the whole thing – the drawing included. I’ve always loved that story. Can you talk about the role of these drawings in your work?
EA Well, they came about through the COVID-19 lockdowns. Here in Denmark, kindergartens reopened quickly, so my daughter was back in her routines but I had very little to do with my days. Like a lot of artists, my way to maintain a practice was to shrink everything down. I would do these drawings over breakfast and pop them in her lunchbox. Strange, careless, devotional drawings. The process became an increasingly important routine for me. Post-it notes shriek provisionality, and they afforded freedom.
I’m excited to include a few hundred of these drawings in a room in the Tate survey. It’ll be a relative sanctuary away from the more pummelling video installations. My daughter is not so interested in them now, but I still make them because of the things that come out of them. Life accumulates.
HUO When we worked together on your show at the Serpentine Gallery in 2014, you presented your video Ribbons [2014]. Sound became a main protagonist in that show, with synchronized projections throughout the gallery. Will it hold the same importance in the Tate show?
EA It’s been increasingly important for me to not isolate my installations, but allow them to seep outwards. I want to lead people through the show, and sound and music play a crucial role in that. Critical faculties shift when it comes to music. There’s something excessively legible about music’s sentimental cueing as accompaniment to imagery, something obviously open to manipulation, which is a large part of what I’m doing.
Sound possesses and animates, like magic.
When dealing with something weightless, like a digital video or a CG animation, sound adds weight. Watching a CG video without sound is like watching a wispy nothing. But, as soon as you start doing Foley – adding fake, spruced-up sound effects – suddenly you’re fleshing this thing out into something that feels substantial. Sound possesses and animates. It’s magic like that.
HUO At your last show at Gladstone Gallery in New York, the standout video was Pianowork 2 [2023], in which your avatar performs a composition by Jürg Frey. The press release mentions failure – how, paradoxically, the more hyper-realistic the work becomes, the more it reveals its own artificiality. You once mentioned in conversation that digitization inherently results in a loss of physicality, a loss that must be inversely compensated. The uncertain corporeality of hyperrealism is tied to that loss. Perhaps the piano serves as a useful metaphor for exploring this tension more broadly?
EA This work was the first time I had myself scanned and digitized, so the model is me – as much as something like that can be me. It’s a version of me inhabited by me, performing. This doubling raises the fascinating question of what is deemed worth putting through this kind of process. In a way, the more diminished the situation or experience, the more exciting it is to me. Because it’s always the things we don’t consider significant about the way we move or the way we function that are most life-like, I think. It’s realism by quotidian action – life as an unintentional thing that’s occurring more or less unobserved. The piano performance at the heart of the work was done in basically one take. I’d not really practiced. I didn’t want to be particularly good at it; I wanted hesitancy, difficulty, because the nature of the piece – ‘Klavierstück 2’ [2001] – is that it’s really very simple but it asks you to engage with your playing in a way that is very difficult to internalize. It asks you to play the same fourth 468 times in the middle of the piece, for example. The time signature shifts very slightly between bars.
I was trying to inhabit this somewhat algorithmic construction – this script – while, at least in my case, inadvertently confessing my inability to do so. Then there’s the technology layered on top of that – performance capture, animation – all striving sufficiently to replicate me. It’s certainly true that the more you push this tech to its limits, the more it discloses its failures, and this disclosure is empathetic. In visual effects, failure happens when the illusion breaks. But, for me, the cycle of being expelled from the work, then pulled back in, then expelled again, is the ambivalent goal.
This article first appeared in frieze issue 250
‘Ed Atkins’ is on view at Tate Britain, London from 2 April until 25 August
Main image: Ed Atkins, The worm (detail), 2021, film still. Courtesy: the artist and Cabinet, London
