Ed Atkins

‘The Worm’ is a performative video work based on a call from artist Ed Atkins to his mother, with Atkins himself as the digital avatar, caught in an endless loop of glitches.

In his new video work, Atkins plumbs the corporeal depths of digital moving imagery. Computer generated animation, emo musical theatre, collaged stock imagery, field recording, performance capture, disease, motion graphics and starless humour muster within his videos. Atkins’ unique visual language, both melancholic and absurd, confronts the viewer with intimate, arcane visions that seem caught in a purgatory of afterwards.

A live-action and CGI burlesque of airport security instruction videos set to Ravel’s Bolero: A carousel of protocol, rendered bodies, abattoirs and metal detectors.

A dark and magical visit to the fabled Parisian address Rue Fontaine 42. This was the residence of André Breton, the mastermind of surrealism, who surrounded himself with an impressive collection of modern, Western art and ethnographic objects from Oceania and North America. The collection was sold and divided up in 2003 at a controversial auction. 'The Trick Brain' is a delirious montage and a trip back in time to Breton's private art collection, where Atkins has been scouring the archives and come up with a possessing interior film of the place that once was, complete with surrealistic paintings, scores of Indian figures and hundreds of other displayed rarities. The film's soundtrack is provided by an observant narrator, who reveals to us that the objects shown are not necessarily what they claim to be - but instead are catalysts for some kind of wonderful linguistic virus which reveals the real identity of things.

A computer-generated figure sits in a television studio and invokes a-histories and immaterial indices; thick, warm surfaces and dramatic lighting states; a neural network and those eternal celestial bodies; a final broadcast and some overt tattoos; a map of its being and the space where the crime occurred…

Delivery to the Following Recipient Failed Permanently, is visually restrained compared with his usual experiential overload. There is, though, an astonishing monologue, designed to invoke a material sense of the word "smoke" like a haemorrhage in your brain. - The Guardian