I wrote a review for a writing comp, but was unsuccessful. Here it is, with minor edits to a couple of unsatisfactory sentences that would have rendered it too long for the original remit, and without any prize money. Oh, and it’s too late for others to go along, as it’s now closed… but still, I wrote it so I figured it deserves an outing…
Ed Atkins at Tate Britain, visited twice in June 2025.
“Melancholy,” says Adam Curtis repeatedly in a recent interview following the release of Shifty (BBC, 2025), as if needing and wanting to reinforce its pervasiveness. Perhaps he is worried that what we experience as ubiquitous rage or humour – triggered by meaningless memes – actually masks our collective melancholy. The world has become melancholic, says Curtis. Walking into the Ed Atkins retrospective at Tate Britain reinforces Curtis’s diagnosis and then some; the tears, the sad, fragmented, and repetitive music, the constant rain accompanied by the downpour of junk, the multiple images of AI-Ed breathing, sleeping, tossing and turning, or mournfully playing the piano.
In less atomised cultures than ours, keening is a form of collective mourning. I wonder if this retrospective provides exactly that – a space for keening, to mourn the end of the idiosyncratic hyper-individualism that emerged during the Enlightenment and has become a defining feature of so-called Late Capitalism– as technologies that undermine our fetish for individuals are increasingly embraced, or become unavoidable. A grieving for the passing of tropes that have both served the West remarkably well, materially speaking, while causing immense suffering and hardship, across the globe.
Ostensibly, Atkins’ plethora of machine-learning-generated tears expresses grief for a lost father who died prematurely of cancer – the first film one encounters, Death Mask II: The Scent (2010), includes the diary his father “kept while undergoing cancer treatment, bluntly alphabetised into dispassionate nonsense”. In an interview, he expresses a kind of grief too for his daughter’s lack of passion over the Post-it Note drawings he lovingly included in packed lunches during lockdown, along with the “latent unrequitedness” of a child’s love which he “must accept and even enjoy”. “I never loved art,” says Atkins in another interview on YouTube. But he was drawn to loss, and art was the only place he could bring it all together.
He may not have loved art, but Atkins is a formidable draughtsman, and visitors can view his drawings and sketches throughout. Atkins, however, is better known for dreamlike films in which AI versions of Ed do little more than exist, although they appear to be playing piano or lying on a bed, enacting a struggle with sleep beside a large ear on the bedside table where a light ought to be.
Atkins uses and comments on what we call Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is a technology intimately informed by contemporary science. Some interpretations of this science – particularly those explored by philosophers like Thomas Metzinger (The Ego Tunnel, 2009) and Julian Baggini (The Ego Trick, 2011) – suggest that what we experience as consciousness might be nothing more than appearance or illusion. If appearance is all we are, then I wonder if the debate about whether AI will ever be conscious might be a redundant one – if it appears conscious and all we are is appearance, then, it seems likely AI will indeed reach some form of technological consciousness. Perhaps this depends on which theories of consciousness you find most persuasive. But if such an argument has any validity, perhaps there’s little to be done except live with and care for the increasingly absurd reality in which we critters – organic or otherwise – appear. An underlying threat to our long-held but possibly misconceived assumptions about our exceptionality may well be a source of AI-related existential angst.
After viewing AI-Ed attempting to sleep and disappearing in a blur of motion that seems like celluloid but isn’t on three increasingly large screens, the viewer moves through digital works curated alongside a vast collection of costumes one might find in an Ealing Studios warehouse. But in the post-human-without-human world Atkins creates, no actors remain to wear them – only screen-based digital versions of Atkins himself and others representing history – crying boys and men – stationed throughout the gallery.
For me, one of the most successful pieces is Voilà la vérité, which reworks a single sequence from the 1926 silent film Ménilmontant, directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff. The hybrid nature of old and new creates a sedimented reality, blending nostalgia with the uncanny. Atkins has taken this ‘knackered’ fragment of archive material and “cleaned, colourised, upscaled, smoothed, frame-interpolated, focus-pulled, and re-rendered the footage using a raft of artificial intelligence-employing software.” He “feels like the resulting video is haunted”, but I wish he and the curators wouldn’t keep telling me so. Leave me to find my feelings with the work which, unlike Death Mask II, Old Food, refuse.exe and Hisser, contains obvious humour despite – or perhaps because of – the tears combined with repetitive eating. Humour, never forget one’s Freud, is an outlet and container for multilayers of horror, angst and ennui – all the things that bubble within our conscious-critter selves and threaten to explode onto the surface, denying our illusions’ tenuous clasp.
Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (2024) is a two-hour film that visitors encounter towards the retrospective’s end. It features Toby Jones, Saskia Reeves and drama students who function as an audience invited to listen to ‘sick notes’. Unlike the digital creatures met elsewhere in the gallery, Atkins’ father is plagued with shit – uncontrollable and explosive or else painfully trapped for days on end. The author and academic Luciana Parisi (2004) writes in Abstract Sex that technological fantasy imagines a creature “detached from the biological body by transcending all fleshy ties […] the most classical of patriarchal dreams: independence from matter.” Atkins’ film shows us what a farce such a fantasy really is. Jones’s simple performance is perfectly pitched as he reads the diary pages without drama, without obvious ‘acting’. Reeves is also excellent as she smokes and listens, again without ‘acting’. All but one of the younger cast are understandably not quite so accomplished, and their tears can at times feel even less authentic than the avatars’ tears in the AI videos outside the makeshift cinema (I feel horrible writing this, given their youth and enthusiasm, but it is how it seemed to me). The concept of an audience staring back at the live audience watching might have been developed further. I’m not sure the game at the film’s end is necessary – it seems to detract rather than add. However, this is a work of art and testament to Atkins’ father that would have benefited from tighter accompanying curation. As several other works will have already amounted to well over two hours of viewing, only those with considerable stamina might attempt to sit through everything in one sitting. I returned for a second visit to see the film and would probably want a third to appreciate what the whole show offers. Without Tate membership, that would be prohibitively expensive. Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me deserves to be appreciated without the bulk of its accompanying retrospective. The show is too big, as are many nowadays. I wonder if the tendency not to edit, but instead to express every passing thought or as many AI-images as one’s social media preference allows in one ago, has infected institutional curators, too.
As one leaves the exhibition, they are faced with a large flat-screen TV showing the news. Viewers are left with a reminder that there is indeed much to mourn and that the human body is vulnerable in the face of a military complex that uses super-human-like weapons against the poor. If this makes you cry, the show might have served as a space for your keening or shiva or whichever group-mourning suits. But I’m not sure there is space or time for your tears here. Perhaps, however, there is plenty of room outside the gallery for affirmative action rather than giving into melancholy.
Refs:
Baggini, J. (2011) The Ego Trick: What Does it Mean to be You? London: Granta Books.
BBC (2025) ‘Shifty‘, BBC iPlayer. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002d2jv/shifty (Accessed: 25 June 2025).
Ed Atkins | Tate Britain (no date). Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/ed-atkins (Accessed: 18 September 2025).
Metzinger, T. (2009) The Ego Tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self. New York: Basic Books.