Ed Atkins

Given that he could literally make anything, Ed’s works are often weirdly constrained. They stay within typical conventions learned from cinema and television. His characters often appear in close-up, within nondescript spaces that bring to mind the infinite blankness of a 1990s ‘Charlie Rose’ talk show set. Floating in non-space, they recite monologues written by Ed that he performs into face-capture technology.

Beyond the obviously bizarre and grotesque, much of the strangeness lies in the minutiae of the delivery, facial expression and language. The attempts and inevitable failures to portray emotion. The limits of representation.

It might not be Ed, but he’s in there somewhere, donning his CGI surrogates like theatre costumes.

It was late December 2024 when I first visited his studio in the meatpacking district of Copenhagen. He had been there for six months, but when I arrived he was yet to change the buzzer on the gate, which still carried the name Javier.

Ed is on the upper floor of a small two-storey building standing alone in the courtyard of an apartment block. As I walked across the courtyard he emerged on a metal walkway and waved me in. His studio was immediately recognisable as the softly cluttered space of someone who works mostly on a computer but needs a good amount of room to think: a large pile of books on a small table, lots of archive boxes. A record player. A vampire mask.

He was wearing a battered old jumper and had a small blue scarf tied around his neck. In his early press photos, Ed looks like a promising young classical musician, with dark floppy hair, rosy cheeks and a black woollen coat, his stare fixed intensely in the middle distance. He has undergone a steady grungification since then. Now he looks like my friend Niall, which is to say that he keeps his hair cropped short, wears two hoop earrings and has a rounded face, a high forehead, large heavy-lidded eyes and a delicately pointed nose. His hair is speckled black and white, and his warm English accent is sonorous and broadcast-appropriate.

He made a pot of coffee and produced some pastries, which we shared. It was late morning, but the winter light already felt like it was winding down for the day. A candle placed in an old wine bottle flickered on the table.

In April 2025 Ed will open a survey show at Tate Britain in London – his first at a major British institution for over a decade. It will be a career-spanning exhibition, but he prefers the term “survey” to “retrospective” due to the memorialising effect of the latter. “I mean, it’s already a museum, which has this sort of museological fussiness,” he said. He is also allergic to Britishness (“of course”) but seemed excited about the prospect of arranging what will be his largest show in the UK to date.

Its origins date back to 2019, but planning was derailed due to Covid. Whereas the pandemic saw many institutional shows postponed indefinitely, Ed’s survey has survived a change of curator, managed to cling on to a pot of funding and is now happening.

“I have been lucky enough to be given these kinds of shows very early in my career,” he said. “It was good, but it was really way too early. It was basically ‘Here’s all the videos I made.’ Now there’s a real opportunity for choice and expansion. I’m actually not showing most of my videos, which is nice. It’s an opportunity to reintroduce myself a bit, to whoever comes.”

Ed admires polymaths and seems keen to keep his hands involved in new things. A year ago he wrote a libretto for an opera. He has published several works of literature and a play. The show will feature some CGI classics; however he is also giving attention to works that might have otherwise been overlooked, like his pre-CGI videos, and to some of the many objects and materials that feature in the immersive spaces of his exhibitions: drawings, tapestries, rails and rails of opera costumes, cryptic etchings. He has been making hundreds of works on Post-it notes, based on sketches he creates for his children, and large, hyper-detailed drawings of his own head, sometimes transposed onto the body of a spider.

He still makes CGI works, and two of his most recent, ‘The worm’ and ‘Pianowork 2’, are among his most impressive. Both works first appeared in exhibitions in New York between 2021 and 2024, and both feature the use of sophisticated motion-capture technology.

In ‘The worm’, a slick-looking man with wire-framed glasses and neat hair sits in front of a studio-like backdrop; on a table are a glass of whisky and a cigarette slowly burning in an ashtray. The man has Ed’s voice and is talking to Ed’s mum on the phone about her childhood. It is intimate, but the disconnect between their voices and the shiny avatar sitting in the chair raises the possibility of voyeurism and deceit.

To make the work, Ed sat in a hotel room in Berlin wearing a Lycra suit covered with motion-capture sensors and a rig strapped to his head, a GoPro camera scanning his every facial expression, while a team of operators kept watch from a neighbouring room. In ‘Pianowork 2’ he used full-body motion capture once again, this time to record himself playing the minimal modernist piece ‘Klavierstück 2’ by Swiss composer Jürg Frey.

In 2009, the year Ed graduated from his MA in fine art at the Slade, his father received a cancer diagnosis and passed away in a matter of months. “Just six months,” Ed said. “It was a very late diagnosis and a very savage thing.” In past interviews he has said that much of his work, particularly early on, came out of the sudden loss.

The new film, titled ‘Nurses Come and Go, but None for Me’, sees Jones reading excerpts from a diary Ed’s father kept while in hospital as a room full of drama students watches on. This scene is followed by Jones and Reeves acting out a fantasy medical role-playing game that Ed likes to play with his daughter.

“He let us read it while he was writing it,” Ed said of the diary. “The writing is kind of beautiful. I think I can say that with a bit of detachment, not just because it’s my dad. There’s a place of writing in the face of dying and confession. It is very miserable. It’s very funny. It’s very moving.”

At just over two hours long, the film is at times harrowing, at times hilarious and at times intensely boring in a way that feels intentional. Several of the actors in the audience slip out of character and start yawning, before catching themselves and regaining their earnest focus.

Each sheet of printed paper that Jones flips through represents a gradual passing of time and a body slowly breaking down. The entries oscillate between hopefulness and wallowing self-pity; between intense fear and pain, and moments of comfort. They continue and continue, until suddenly they don’t. About an hour and a half in, Jones reads an entry in which Ed’s father describes the smell of his wife’s hair as she leans over to kiss him good night. Then silence, a final sheet of paper placed gently on a table, a pair of reading glasses folded up. I found myself waiting in expectation for lines that never arrived, before immediately welling up.

Ed says he loathes nostalgia, but he also readily admits that he is a romantic, and he often seems to toy with a sense of sentimentality and emotion in his work. A recurring reference is the 1994 Melvyn Bragg television interview with the screenwriter Dennis Potter, recorded just months before Potter died of pancreatic cancer. Ed first watched it around the time his own father was in hospital and has become attached to it both for how genuinely moving and unfiltered it is and for how it functions as an act of highly mediated showmanship and myth-making. “It is incredibly beautiful; you can feel the truth of it, and yet you can also see the gaps in it, the artificiality of it,” he said. “It’s also a form of performance and someone attempting to author their own death or render it into an artwork. It’s something I still don’t really know how to talk about yet.”

‘The worm’, ‘Pianowork 2’ and ‘Nurses’ form a loose triptych, less in their subject matter and more in their underlying execution, which he frames as an almost perverse misuse of technology: being given access to incredibly high-spec motion-capture technology and deciding to use it to call his mum, for instance, or getting the funds together to make a feature-length film, securing the services of two national-treasure-status actors and then making them read a diary from start to finish and act out a child’s game in faithful detail.

A lot of what Ed does is about trying to capture seemingly raw or unfiltered material in what he calls “direct transcriptions” and seeing how the emotions translate, or don’t, when rendered in a new medium. “It’s a kind of inheritance from the found object, taking something and sort of perversely elevating it,” he said. “It’s not trying to crown some trash, it’s trying to seek out some of the real grounds of love and meaning in life.”

These recent pieces mark a shift in Ed’s work that sees him bringing more of himself into his art. Previously, while Ed ventriloquised his animated subjects, there was a sense that he was revelling in the distance. They were generic virtual meat puppets purchased ready-made from an online marketplace. They spoke surreal texts and expressed vague but relatable emotions. Even as recently as 2021, his work was framed as being fundamentally about distance. “These avatars are not ‘characters.’ They have no names, no back-stories, no motivations. (If you go in for that sort of thing I suggest you stick with Netflix.)” read an article in ‘The New York Times’.

A lot was read into the absence of the artist, and then gradually he began appearing – or sort of appearing. These newer works are much more explicitly biographical, in turn creating new nuances. One easy criticism of Ed’s earlier videos is that although they tap into fundamentally human emotions and concerns, their intentional distance could make them come across as too anchored in the kind of navel-gazing melancholy that is often endemic to disaffected white Western males.

By moving from general to more explicitly personal experience, his newer work has become more autobiographical and somehow also more universal and moving. On bringing his mum and dad into his work, he said, “In a way this is the crux of the matter: is it just that it means something to me because I love them? But then that is exactly why it’s also publicly interesting: because of the general fact that most of us experience something like this.”

In the case of ‘Pianowork 2’, it is the insertion of Ed’s likeness into the piece that raises yet further questions and levels of weirdness. The depiction of him playing piano is almost disconcertingly detailed, the individual hairs on his head too expertly rendered, his teeth shiny white. “Those aren’t my real teeth,” he said. His body is a digital composite, too, taken from a generic male figure. (“It was too muscly at first. They had to sort of soften and demuscularise me.”) The sound has also been tampered with so that certain incidental noises, like his feet shifting on the pedals or his breathing, are unnaturally loud.

This excessive, often misleading fidelity questions the accuracy of digitally rendered media and creates something unsettling and alluring in the work. Is this Ed we are seeing, or is it something else? We see him grimacing in pain as he plays, but how literally should we read that as being faithful to the events it is supposedly portraying? The point of the technology is that it prompts questions and uncertainties that wouldn’t otherwise be there. “Otherwise I would have just filmed myself talking to my mum or playing the piano,” Ed explained, plainly.

They lived in a small semi-detached house in a close, which he described as filled with stuff. “They were very interesting collectors, but it was always junk. Like a rusty spring covered in dirt.” Ed’s father once enlisted his help to drag the burnt carcass of a motocross bike that had been dumped in a nearby woods and place it on the hearth of their fireplace. It stayed there for a few years, slowly rusting, surrounded by sheep skulls and things they had found in the street. Their home made the family an outlier within the local community. Occasionally neighbours or school friends would come over and stare in polite bemusement at the things on the walls.

Ed took part in a local amateur dramatics society. He played the recorder “for way too long” and still owns a bass, a tenor and a sopranino. Of all the culture at home, it was perhaps cinema that had pride of place. He and his older brother, Harry, would spend entire afternoons imagining films they would one day make. Their dad would encourage them to record obscure late-night TV movies on the VCR, which they would watch together with him over breakfast the following day.

Family favourites included the absurd, disturbing animations of the avant-garde Czech animator Jan Švankmajer. Ed was particularly drawn to his use of sound. “It was immediately too much. Everything has a weird reverb on it. Things that shouldn’t make sounds make terrible sounds,” he said. “The hyperrealism, the excessiveness of it – turning certain things up on purpose or inserting sounds that don’t really match with what you are seeing.” He carries much of this into his own work, whether through the often disconcerting use of his own voice or the insertion of strange parps, squelches, dings and whooshes that don’t seem to tally with what you are seeing but influence (he often uses the term “italicise”) your experience of it nonetheless.

It was in this home environment that Ed also developed, or inherited, his distinctive sense of humour. “I think my mum has a very grotesque sense of humour,” he said. “There’s a lot of bodily shame and strangeness. The grotesquery of eating. A lot of gutter, a lot of toilet. The interruption, kind of uncontrolled, of a body that is misbehaving.”

Perhaps inevitably, Ed decided to go to art school when it was time for university. He moved to London, first enrolling at Central Saint Martins, and then at the Slade for his MA. Despite his childhood interest in film and his subsequent career in it, he initially wanted to be a painter. “I have this theory that most people who end up at art school end up there because they are quite good at drawing,” he said. “And then you unplug that and start allowing in all the things you are actually interested in.”

Towards the end of his studies he began working for the American Swiss artist Christian Marclay, joining a team of finders dedicated to sourcing film clips for Marclay’s now legendary ‘The Clock’, a video work that lasts for exactly 24 hours and features found movie footage for each minute of the day.

Ed worked for Marclay for a little under two years. He would visit film libraries and DVD clubs in London to rent movies, which he would then rip and scrub through, looking for anything showing a clock or alluding to the time. He would clip up any appropriate sections, add a short description, and log them in a collective Google spreadsheet.

“There was a list of everything that had been watched, and by that point whatever smart thing you thought of had probably already been watched,” he said. “So I ended up going through a lot of Eastern European, Russian cinema looking for things, because all the obvious places had already gone.”

Ed was part of a team of about four hunters. He hadn’t met any of the others until he attended a Christmas party. Over drinks he asked one of them how many films a week he’d been watching. “He was, like, ‘Maybe six.’ I was like, ‘Oh, fuck you!’ I’d been watching maybe close to 50 a week or something stupid like that.”

I wondered whether – aside from the promise of getting paid to bingewatch movies – Ed was naturally drawn to Marclay’s practice. Both artists are interested in editing as a process and in subtly manipulating their source material, often toying with and exposing the underlying processes and mechanics. Ed will insert intentional glitches into his works: empty bars that look like they once contained subtitles, a smudged-lens effect, or what looks like a struggle to find the correct focus, despite the fact that there was never even a camera to begin with, just a bunch of pixels.

But when I broached this with Ed, he insisted that it was less of a learning-from-the-master, Karate Kid-type situation and more of a straightforward research and production role. “Just you on your own on a laptop ripping shit and occasionally delivering a hard drive to one of his actual assistants. It was not very creative, and it sort of ruined watching films for a bit. All I was doing was looking for clocks,” he said. Marclay largely avoids talking about ‘The Clock’ now, and a message relayed by the White Cube gallery said he was unable to comment.

In between all the film watching, Ed still found time to make his own work. He had progressed from his stock-footage experiments and was shooting his own material using HD cameras. “Just wandering around with a camera, filming bits of the world. Pointing it very deliberately at things that are not specific, like lens flare or dust, just for the effects,” he said. He was also making his first forays into CGI. “Very ropey, kind of grotesque stuff.”

In 2010, shortly after he had stopped working for Marclay, Ed landed a meeting with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Swiss curator and director of the Serpentine Gallery. They met at Obrist’s office in Kensington, and after a short exchange at his desk, the curator asked Ed if he wanted to join him on the car ride to his next meeting.

Ed sat in the back of a taxi with Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones, the Serpentine’s then co-director, showing them preliminary edits of his manic video works on his laptop as the city whizzed by and they slid and bumped around with the car’s rickety suspension. Eventually they had to pull over so that Peyton-Jones, feeling nauseous, could lean out of the window for air while Obrist declared triumphantly that all his meetings from now on would be held in taxis.

Obrist invited Ed to speak at the Serpentine’s Memory Marathon in 2012 and implored a global network of curator friends to see his first institutional solo show at the Chisenhale Gallery that same year. It was not long until Ed had shows at major institutions the world over: the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, MoMA PS1 in New York, Kunsthalle Zürich, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, as well as a solo show alongside Marina Abramović back at the Serpentine, all within the space of a few years.

Obrist is also responsible for anointing Ed “one of the great artists of our time” in a 2015 interview in ‘ArtNews’. While generous hyperbole is Obrist’s stock-in-trade (“No one else speaks like that; it’s really a massive pinch-of-salt situation,” Ed told me), it is nonetheless the highbrow art world equivalent of receiving an Oprah’s Book Club mention.

He was soon subject to the kind of cultural oddities that come with zeitgeisty art fame. In 2016 he entered the annual ‘ArtReview’ most-powerful list, debuting at number 50. Luxury brands started circling, trying to get him to make animations for their campaigns. Kanye West found Ed’s Gmail address and asked him to produce the cover art for the album ‘The Life of Pablo’, but he declined and suggested West use the pixellated gifs the rapper had made for a moodboard, insisting that they were more genuine and surprising than anything he could come up with himself. (The album was eventually released with a cover designed by Belgian artist Peter De Potter.)

Perhaps inevitably, the recognition gradually became a burden as much as it was a vehicle for success. “Some of my other works were just sort of trampled on by the spectacle and the overt contemporaneity of ‘Ooh, it’s a computer!’” he said. “It was a gift, but at a certain point it became a dubious gift.”

Ed’s work was often read solely as a rumination on our digital existences. He was grouped, lazily, under the umbrella of post-internet art, alongside artists such as Helen Marten, James Richards and Ryan Trecartin, which he described as “always an uncomfortable fit.” He would find himself in interviews being asked the same things over and over again or urged to pontificate on things he had no real expertise or interest in: “What’s the future of AI going to look like, Ed?”

Beatrix Ruf, the director of the Hartwig Art Foundation in Amsterdam, is one of Ed’s long-term collaborators and supporters, having worked with him on major shows at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2014 and at the Stedelijk in 2015 and now as the commissioner of his new feature-length film. She described having first been drawn to his work less for its digital newness and more for the way it captures something ancient, or new-old. “His work often deals with the condition of an increasingly digital reality, but from the very beginning, what stood out was this incredibly human approach,” she said. “It really comes from something more deeply rooted in a tradition of literature and theatre, built around texts and his incredible voice. Ed’s voice always makes me cry.”

Now that the shiny spectacle of CGI has become less shiny and less spectacular, the often overlooked elements of his work are better able to come to the fore. Ed was never lamenting the loss of humanity to technology or bending technology to become more human again; rather, he was interested in something that is and always will be there.

“The faith of the work is a kind of insuperable humanity,” he said to me at one point. “It’s not about a kind of future human or a sort of speculative fiction. It’s about something opposite. It’s not really about who we will be in our online digitised lives, because we’ll still be us. We’ll still have crap, at the end of the day.”

Coinciding with the Tate show, the book will come out with London-based Fitzcarraldo Editions, which has released two of his works previously. “It’s a sort of memoir, or anti-memoir; perhaps an experiment in confessional writing is the best way to put it,” his publisher, Jacques Testard told me, adding that he thinks it’s the best thing Ed has written. “I love the form of the book – it immediately reminded me of writers like Édouard Levé, Joe Brainard, Georges Perec, Roland Barthes – but it is also very much its own thing, a work only Ed could have written.”

Ed told me when he sent it that he found it “sort of absurd” that the book will be shelved next to memoirs. “It’s written by someone who doesn’t know who they are at all,” he said. “The person in the book is trying to be very honest, but there’s also a lot of insignificant information, insignificant confession. It’s not profound necessarily. There’s just a lot.”

The narrator of the book veers wildly, often unreliably between emotions and registers – from self-pitying to egotistical; sweet to gruesome – to the extent that I wondered if it does a more accurate job of portraying the inside of a person’s brain than most purportedly autobiographical writing.

The first pages are largely about Ed buying and eating the very specific type of sad, “corpse-like” sandwich wrap found in chain pharmacies and petrol stations. There are also long passages on everything from how much he enjoys Andrea Bocelli’s appearance in ‘Sesame Street’ to his struggles with his appearance. Mixed in with the quotidian reflections are fantastical passages in which he describes donning a large mechanical suit and toppling over buildings.

Somehow, it is a brilliant and engrossing read. I finished it and found myself being unsure if I understood Ed any better, but feeling that I at least had a collection of strange facts about the man I was in the process of writing about. Very little detail is spared, including the specifics of how he goes to the toilet.

I met Ed again in late January. It was a grey Thursday morning as I approached a cafe located in a former abattoir complex not far from his studio. There was a slight drizzle in the air. It was odd meeting him after having read a book grounded so deeply in awkward, hyper-detailed confession. How do you a greet a man after you have read a page and a half about him doing a shit?

He stood up, hesitated for a moment and offered a friendly embrace. He had been up till late editing video files and his kids were home with colds. He looked a little sleepy but content, drinking a glass of cloudy apple juice with ice cubes in it. I asked him if he wanted a pastry.

“No, I tend to hoover up whatever my children have left over from their breakfast,” he said.

Immediately I recognised this from a passage in Ed’s book: “I like to eat her leftover bowl of milk-swollen cereal from the morning in the mid-afternoon at the sink instead of doing myself some real lunch. I like eating his rubbery triangles of buttered toast from the morning and downing his backwashed orange juice dregs.”

In fact, within the first five minutes of our meeting I kept being confronted with things I was sure I had already read. The phone rang, and Ed stared at the screen intensely but ignored the call (this is in the book). It rang again, and he picked it up. The person on the other end was the dentist, asking about scheduling a check-up for his daughter. He finished the call, apologised and told me he has a profound mistrust of dentists and hasn’t been to one in years. “Hang on – this is in the book, actually,” he said. Yes, I replied.

I asked Ed how much of ‘Flower’ is him and how much is made up. “I’m starting to realise that it’s basically all true,” he said. “Apart from things like me flying around in a large metal suit.”

You have incredible bladder strength. “Yes, definitely.”

You have an affliction in your right hand that makes it convulse uncontrollably whenever you have to hold something in it without support.

“Yes. All of that’s totally true.”

You’ve never had a massage.

“Yes, I don’t really like being touched.”

You have a fake, exaggerated cough that you have developed carefully since childhood.

“Yes. I push it; I make it sound worse than it actually is. I also fantasise about being a butler. It’s all true!”

Ed told me that he wrote the book partly as a response to the ways in which people have made assumptions about him based on his work. “I think I’ve gone through my fair share of people presuming to know who I am,” he reflected. “I think obviously if you make work that has a certain kind of sentiment or feeling to it, people will presume to read you through it and try to understand you. So this is part of what ‘Flower’ is for: it’s to cut that off at the pass a little bit.”

Less true is the voice that Ed employs throughout the book. “I worked very hard on finding a style and a voice that isn’t really me,” he said. “I remember Sally saying she recognised a lot of me in it, except for the voice. It was like, ‘Who the fuck wrote this?’” Ed describes it as existing somewhere between AI slop and the kind of flat, descriptive language you might find on online message boards like Quora or Reddit. “You can’t quite tell if it’s an eight-year-old or a 60-year-old who just can’t write,” he said. “I enjoyed it so much; it felt like I’d unwrapped a gift. I discovered that all you do is describe stuff and it sounds insane. It’s all flat and full of jargon, but it’s also full of sincerity. None of it is sarcastic.”

Such deliberate corruption is a recurring interest: making things that are slightly off or weird or unclear in their worth. Ed is interested both in the act of writing about himself and in the thrill of being misinterpreted. He wondered out loud if people might read the book and think he’s a sociopath, seeming quite pleased.

“I will fight to the death for ambivalence and ambiguity as the most thrilling conditions of experience,” he said. “Not even in terms of meaning, but in terms of value. ‘Hang on, is this good, or crap? What am I doing reading or watching this thing?’ All of this I find tantalising and sort of thrilling.”

“The prevailing wind of art is for the moral good. Art is good for you, and artists are paragons of virtue,” Ed said. “It doesn’t bother me that much, but I’m also fascinated by it, because personally I’ve often thought of art as a kind of hellishness. My favourite stuff is often not made by particularly nice people, nor is it particularly good for you to look at or spend time with.”

In the weeks before we met, Ed performed at an organ music festival in which musicians took it in turns to perform on the pipe organ of the Blågårds church in Copenhagen. Some of his fellow attendees worked through grand pieces by composers such as Messiaen. For Ed’s performance, he attached an array of different microphones to the interior and exterior of the gigantic instrument, and then barely played it.

He pushed it to just the edge of making a noise, teasing out the sound of air, valves, springs and resonance. As he played he also sang, similarly keeping his voice at the edge of actually hitting a note. He leant very close to the keys and emitted a scarcely audible whimpering sound.

“We just surfed the edge together,” he told me later. “I think it could have been awful, but it was really good.”