Ed Atkins: Melancholic Avatars in HD

Among the most interesting artists of the emerging post-internet generation, Ed Atkins (Oxford, b.1982) refers to both the history of cinema and electronic media in his film production. His high-defnition video animations are conceived as lacanian moments of retrospection and stream of consciousness that explores materiality and corporeality in the digital era. Some of them show hyper-real melancholic self-portraits, avatars that talk about loneliness and illness. This paper takes into account Atkins’s production focusing on the role of avatar performances in his films. Of particular interest is the atmosphere of depression that surrounds these alienated beings, which deal with issues like illness – cancer in particular – and death. No surprise that the avatar is represented as a decapitated head or a cadaver sometimes, which also become a metaphor of cinema as producer of death. The paper also explores how the visualization of the audio-visual texture is intended to be part of the film’s content, ending with considerations on Atkins’s productions as mediations of previous narrative forms – cinema, literature, music – and suggesting a trans-historical comparison between the post-internet era and surrealism.