Ed Atkins | Fear and 3D Avatars
Viewing Ed Atkins at Tate Britain
2025.4.13
My research has always focused on materiality, so I think, for example, the stacking of digitized waste and garbage—if we didn't use digital expression methods but used documentaries, videos, or displayed them in space like Tracey Emin's bed, wouldn't it be more impactful? This feeling made me even more confused. Who am I to critique someone who can have a solo exhibition at Tate? Have I missed something?
Even so, I still lost patience in the second half of the exhibition. Especially when I saw his 3D avatar playing piano, I yawned and hurriedly left the exhibition.
Thanks to the ticket seller at the entrance, I joined Tate Membership because of this exhibition and got the latest version of the magazine. London happened to be drizzling today, which is weather I really like. After working out, I walked to the park, didn't want to work, so I opened this magazine.
The magazine had a dedicated critical article that explained some of Ed Atkins' works in sequence, mentioning his age anxiety as a middle-aged person, and the editor repeatedly emphasized his "emotional predicament." Ed Atkins himself also said his work is "immersed in entangled thoughts about death."
"Who isn't? Young artists often avoid the theme of death because it's beyond their control. They focus on others, current issues, or social reality, but rarely turn their gaze toward themselves. When they reach middle age, artists begin to face the physical and psychological realities of back pain, baldness, menopause, death. These artworks begin to become introspective, full of still-life portraits of matter and flesh. Perhaps because they feel the passage of time."
Even so, I remained confused. The article didn't directly explain why he chose to create works using 3D methods, or which part of this artist attracted curators to believe his work had artistic value and deeper meaning. All I saw were 3D replicas.
Actually, I quickly realized while viewing the exhibition that this viewing experience was distant for me—not the kind of distance I choose to maintain, but distance created by the form itself. I stood in front of the screen, watching a 3D person trying to simulate some kind of human emotion. Its expressions, tears, gestures were all in place, even the pores on the skin were modeled. But the more detailed these were, the more unreal they seemed. They aren't living bodies, nor recorded behaviors—they are executing programs. It's not humans performing emotions, but a set of digital models completing preset actions.
This experience made me feel no real connection between myself and it. Images flowed, sounds played, they kept talking, but nothing was happening by itself. It had no skeleton, no gravity, wouldn't be crushed by its own emotions, wouldn't change direction due to losing control. It just kept looping. It wasn't the image speaking—it was the system operating. That was something colder than death, a simulation lacking soul. The person was present yet never fully there.
So why exactly did he choose this method of expression?
Ed Atkins himself mentioned: "I loathe myself," "I'm very dissatisfied with my body and appearance. I'm often destroyed by an image of self-loathing." The magazine article describes how the figure in his 3D video work "The Worm" looks extremely like him, sometimes like a being born in strange spaces. This digital image is exaggeratedly, even pathologically realistic in detail—every gray hair, every pore clearly visible. The camera sometimes focuses on his hands, one finger looking as soft as rubber. This figure appears to have no skeleton, as if supported by internal void—simple yet heavy like pressing piano keys.
His works are always "simulating," but the more refined they become, the more false and hollow they appear. For example, in the exhibition, a group of ordinary online asset models are programmatically killed, falling into black holes, screaming. They are automated, cyclical, and feel no pain. I can guess that perhaps he's using this distortion to amplify certain things? Fatigue, performativity, or some truth that ultimately cannot be reached. Sadness, death, or his own struggles.
In our traditional understanding, the body is the final pathway to reality: you hurt when you fall, you convulse when you cry, your body deforms when you age. But in Atkins' characters, the body becomes something arbitrarily adjustable. He can peel open heads, tear off mouths, fold himself into screens. This editable body no longer carries pain, only "images." Such existence is no longer human, but an empty shell between emotion and form.
Perhaps the simplest direct answer is—he's just accustomed to creating works using 3D. This is quite likely. From his creative history, he used 3D software, video editing, and sound synthesis very early on. These technologies constitute his creative language; he might be more skilled with 3D software than with cameras, rehearsals, or live shooting.
But from an auto-ethnography researcher's perspective, this habit itself might reflect the emotional predicament he cannot directly face. He needs a shield, an empty shell between emotion and himself to express feelings. The 3D medium itself might be counter-evidence of his failures in facing himself and his repeated attempts. His later turn to painting, writing, making images with sticky notes—is this an effort to try to break free?
In this era, how should we view the artistic nature of 3D technology? As a new form of mimicry, 3D differs from traditional painting's emphasis on technique, brushstrokes, light and shadow, and other personalized reinterpretations—it seems more like precise reproduction. Does the massive deployment of digital assets and standardized production methods quietly deprive us of the possibility to reinterpret the world? Often what you say is not what you want to say, but becomes what you can say. In the 3D digital world, our subjective participation is gradually eliminated, and decision-making power is gradually ceded to preset technological logic. This might be what's truly worth our deep exploration in this art form.