‘I want everything I make to corpse’, Ed Atkins announces in the wall text of his current exhibition at Tate Britain. It’s a mission statement in more ways than one. Death has been a consistent theme for the artist; his first book is titled A Primer for Cadavers (2016). But the verb ‘to corpse’ derives from theatre, a medium which Atkins – even in the computer-generated animations for which he is most famous – draws from heavily. There, it means breaking character: letting the real, living person show through the fictional one. Atkins’s stated aim in the exhibition is to resist the fixed quality of the retrospective (he prefers the term ‘survey’) and present what he calls the ‘experience of liveness’. Something that distinguishes live performance of course – even as it risks spoiling it – is the possibility of corpsing. Atkins’s work is full of what he calls ‘mocked-up accidents’, deliberate glitches. It is haunted by death but animated by a desire to let ‘real life’ intrude into the scene; full of meticulously rendered, hyper-real representations and yet intent on scotching the effect, breaking the artifice; technically virtuosic yet often acutely self-exposing.

Born outside Oxford in 1982, Atkins is widely known as a digital artist. At art school – Central Saint Martins, then the Slade – he began making conceptually austere video montages using then-novel video editing software; in the mid-2010s, he turned to computer-generated imagery to make unsettlingly detailed animations. The beginnings of his career coincided with a cresting art world interest in experiments with the virtual, and this convergence with the zeitgeist helped catapult his work – with its suggestion of spiritual isolation in the technologized century – to prominence. Hans Ulrich Obrist labelled him ‘one of the great artists of our time’ when Atkins was still in his early thirties. He has had a series of shows at canonical institutions – Moma PS1, Palais de Tokyo, the Serpentine – though the Tate Britain exhibition is his first major show in the UK for a decade (Atkins lives in Copenhagen and teaches in Düsseldorf). Yet while technological experiment has been a defining feature of his practice, Atkins is not preoccupied with tech per se, whether as an industry or as a feature of daily life, so much as with the aesthetic possibilities of certain software. The new exhibition makes clear that he is a versatile artist: alongside video work, it includes installation, painting, drawing and writing. The wall text is by Atkins himself, who is an accomplished writer (of poetry, a play, a libretto, among other things).

The show opens in a dark room with two works that address the death of Atkins’s father in 2009. The first is a stained linen patchwork embroidered with alphabetized words from the diary his father kept during his cancer treatment. It’s an affecting monument: the scale is large, but the dim lighting demands you stand uncomfortably close to the fabric, which looks intensely lived-in (even died-in) and which, at the most legible spot, reads ‘horrible horribly horrific horror hospital hospital’. The videos projected against the back of the tapestry, which Atkins describes as ‘more or less horror films’, are more abstract. These splice together images – a dog, a mountain, fruit, the back of a head – which Atkins filmed to look like stock footage. The erratic rhythm calls attention to the editing process; the images start to lose their mimetic function; the sound, meanwhile – a looping fragment from an 80s B-movie score, Atkins riffing on guitar, some background chatter – is pulled out of the background by continual self-interruption.

The videos stage a breakdown of narrative: Atkins seems to be processing the shock of loss by replicating the way that sense and meaning fail to cohere for the grief-stricken. He cites Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death as a key influence on this period of his work; in it, Blanchot describes a man who, after narrowly escaping execution by Nazi soldiers, uncovers a new understanding of death’s reality, and, with it, an almost ecstatic feeling of lightness: a ‘lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death’, now present underneath every passing moment. These poignant and restrained works allow him to establish the presence of mortality – of Blanchot’s death-in-life – as an undercurrent to the superficially brighter and zanier works that follow.

In his CGI works, Atkins typically uses digital avatars animated by his own movements, which have been recorded using motion capture technology. He calls them ‘dead men’. In Hisser (2015), the first of these videos to be presented here, the avatar’s face contains more visual information – blood vessels, dirt, bruising, exaggerated pores – than is visible on a real human face. The hyperrealism paradoxically underscores the unreality of the skin, which looks strangely textureless and untouchable. Yet, as we watch the avatar languishing in his bedroom, singing, masturbating, standing up and sitting down, we dimly perceive someone human inhabiting the virtual skin – a kind of corpsing. At one point the man’s bedroom is abruptly swallowed by a sinkhole; he falls into a dimensionless white landscape where he walks around naked muttering, ‘I didn’t know’, as if rehearsing to defend himself against some imagined accusation.

Whereas this first avatar seems unaware of our voyeuristic observation, those in Old Food (2019) seem to be appealing to us directly, breaking the fourth wall. In a series of screens hanging between racks of opera costumes, three characters who could be in a medieval fantasy game – a baby, a small boy and an old man – sob imploringly at us from their AI screensaver world. As we wind around the hanging costumes, the characters, each confined to their own screen, resemble zoo animals: they seem aware of our presence but also of an unbreachable barrier between us. Intermittently, the old man stops weeping, hangs his head, then looks up and seems to see us watching him. His face fills with terror, before it relaxes and he starts to weep again; the digital candlelight in which he is bathed makes his tears gleam like oil paint. If paintings, as John Berger said, ‘prophesy the experience of their being looked at’, these video portraits seem to register the moment of viewing them. They render quite beautifully something like the unguarded moments when a child suddenly stops crying because they have forgotten what the matter was, or because they want to check they are still being watched. But a heavy soundscape of creaking leather and parting lips injects a steady supply of bathos. In the end, their anguish is faintly ridiculous.

‘They’re me’, Atkins writes in the wall text. But the wordless avatars of Old Food form an arresting contrast with their creator’s eloquent first-person commentary. Tate has been experimenting with allowing artists to write their own wall text in recent years, and this is perhaps the most experimental and personal iteration so far. Atkins’s texts are consistently interesting and surprising, at times humorously glib (‘I do love spending a long time on barely anything’), at others shockingly confessional (‘I hate the way I look’). He also inserts texts from anonymous critics, which ape academic wall text with AI-generated nonsense. ‘If Atkins’s work is positioned in a museum’, one reads, ‘it is because its dark comedy pre-sprinkles our shiny digital dreams with the hotdog’s various organ meats…’ These self-aware parodies display his willingness to mock himself as much as art world institutions. But his commentary can also be overbearing. Midway through the Old Food installation, for example, Atkins tells us precisely what we are to take from it: ‘I’m trying to compare (but not confuse) CGI’s representational impotence with some essential melancholy of the human experience.’ In the exhibition he has been given a remarkable degree of control, and it’s hard to say unreservedly that this is always a good thing. Atkins is always discursively two steps ahead, our experience of the work to some extent pre-empted by the ekphrasis that accompanies it.

Perhaps the wall text should be seen as part of the exhibition as much as a commentary on it. It often reads like an extension of Atkins’s new experimental memoir, Flower. His use of digital technology can in a sense also be seen as part of a wider autofictional strategy. Autofictional, as opposed to straightforwardly autobiographical, since it is less about the narrative of a life than a reconstruction of subjectivity. ‘My whole technologically specific bit’, Atkins admits in the exhibition catalogue, ‘has always been a way to protect extremely tender parts of myself.’ This distancing effect has become more apparent as his work has become more personal. ‘My life and my work are inextricable’, Atkins is quoted as saying at the beginning of the show, which is titled simply Ed Atkins. Worms (2021), one of the final exhibited pieces, records an intensely personal phone call with his mother, about inherited depression and the ‘sadness’ of reality. We listen to her voice while watching Atkins’s reactions – or rather those of a digital avatar, a 90s-style talk show host, suited and smoking, ‘played’ by Atkins, in a typical juxtaposition of tenderness and theatricality. The avatar is rendered in crystalline high-resolution, yet his expressions are somehow inscrutable. The video’s strange synthetic sheen disavows, and at the same time calls attention to, every flicker of discomfort or hesitation.

In Pianowork 2 (2023), the avatar is the first of Atkins’s CGI figures to be modelled on his own appearance – we recognize the side profile, his shaved head and earrings. The work registers in close-up Atkins’s every twitch, his held breath and cramping hands, as he struggles through an experimental piano piece. It is this emphasis on intimate self-exposure that differentiates Atkins from many of his contemporaries working in digital or ‘post-internet’ art.  His visually restrained videos often seem to use default backgrounds and preset objects, in contrast to the audiovisual excesses of Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s fever dream performances, or Cécile B. Evan’s deepfake Philip Seymour Hoffman. Where these works express an etherized collective or social consciousness, Atkins’s art draws us back repeatedly to the individual. And yet there is something deathly about Atkins’s modelling of the self, in that virtually all of it evokes a human absence. The non-virtual works on show here – the stained tapestries, racks of old costumes, a mechanically writhing bed – act as ghostly indexes of absent bodies. In the works in more conventional media – paintings of unmade beds, painstaking drawings of his own hands and feet – Atkins seems anxious to record and preserve some proof of living. (All memoir can be said to have an element of eulogy, Derrida says: ‘Funerary speech and writing would not follow upon death: they work on life in what we call autobiography.’) The CGI figures, meanwhile, are a kind of death mask: imprints of a body’s live movement caught in an endlessly looping present.

Atkins loosens his grip in the last two rooms. The penultimate one displays a selection of 700 drawings made on Post-it notes, initially to drop in his daughter’s lunch box. Sweet, often funny, these sketches – on paper designed to be functional and transient – are the least mediated things in the show. Atkins describes them as ‘the best things I’ve ever made’. In the feature-length, non-CGI film showing in the final room, the actor Toby Jones plays an improvised game invented by Atkins’s daughter and reads out his father’s cancer diary for a small audience. Here the words stitched on stained linen in the first room are brought into the light. It is logical that Atkins’s turn to more intimate subject matter has found its expression in more analogue forms (perhaps it is also a shrewd move, a bulwark against obsolescence, given the growing fatigue with computer-generated images). By the exhibition’s end, it’s clear that it has followed a trajectory: the shedding of technological self-protection, the gradual lifting of the digital veil.

It would be wrong however to consider this body of work as retreating into Atkins’s own life. As an artist, he is interested not so much in the particulars of his own biography as in staging his affective experience of them – and less his own life than ‘lifeness’ (‘How do I convey the lifeness that made these works through the exhibition? Not in some factual, chronological, biographical way, but through sensations’). Still, his work typically deals with selves in isolation, and places us well outside the social and the flow of history. When we are brought into contact with the outside world just before the exhibition’s end – in the form of a TV playing Sky News (a very literal ‘experience of liveness’) – it seems an after-thought, a perhaps deliberately crude way to situate all that has come before in its contemporary moment. Emerging from the exhibition’s strange, immersive world, it’s difficult to process this lurid stream of daily news as real information. During one of my visits, it was showing eerie green night-cam footage of a homeless woman in a tent; on the next, a Reform councillor passing around a celebratory jug of Pimms at a garden party. It was almost hard to believe that this was real: the images seemed somehow too obvious and perfect, too much like art.

Read on: Malcolm Bull, ‘Why Is There the Amount of Art That There Is?’, NLR 151.