Ed Atkins
“Get Life/Love’s Work”
New York, 235 Bowery Street
Over the past decade, Atkins has created a complex body of work that considers the relationship between the corporeal and the digital, the ordinary and the uncanny, through high-definition computer-generated (CG) animations, theatrical environments, elliptical writings, and syncopated sound montages. With these filmic and text-based artworks, Atkins tracks forms of feeling, living, and communicating hidden behind or curtailed by technological representation, which unfold into sensitive and often somber narratives.
At the New Museum, Atkins will premiere a new project that focuses on the ways bodies and technologies are intertwined, particularly in the field of digital communication and telepresence. As always in Atkins’s work, technology is analyzed as a theoretical and even allegorical interrogation of itself, rather than in any literal terms.
Installed in the Fourth Floor gallery, the exhibition will debut a new body of work made with technologies that profess to “capture” life. The central piece of the exhibition is a CG animation recorded using motion- and facial-capture technologies, which documents an interview between the artist and his mother—shot during the isolated months of lockdown that have defined the Covid-19 pandemic.
Weaving together a variety of references—ranging from British playwright Dennis Potter’s last televised interview to English philosopher Gillian Rose’s memoir Love’s Work, along with autobiographical notations and confessional digressions—the exhibition composes what the artist describes as an “essay about distance.” The show reflects on the ways in which technologies designed to facilitate connection and representation, paradoxically expose loss and underscore separation, oftentimes amplifying corresponding feelings in a manner that—according to the artist—“mirrors the travesty of the representation.”
The newly commissioned video will be presented within an impoverished and estranged domestic scene of embroideries, paintings, and text compositions—the latter made in collaboration with the anonymous author project, Contemporary Art Writing Daily. This staging will not only interrogate certain limits of communication and empathy, but also reimagine constituent technologies simultaneously as forms of sustenance and existential threat. Combining computer data and concrete matter, Atkins tests the borders of digital simulation and proximity, looking to the ways in which technologies both mediate intimacy and shape human relationships. “I think of it as augmented and simulated sentiment, comparing and supplementing it with those objects and materials we might more familiarly expect to surrogate our love,” the artist explains.
Atkins’s is the culmination of a series of exhibitions produced in collaboration with scientists, engineers, and researchers from the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) program at Nokia Bell Labs. Inspired by the pioneering legacy of E.A.T., the series aims to channel the interdisciplinary spirit initiated in the 1960s by Bell Labs engineers in collaboration with artists such as John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Marta Minujín, Robert Rauschenberg, and Stan VanDerBeek.
