Absorbingly repellent: Ed Atkins, at Tate Britain, reviewed

In the old days, you’d have to go to a lot of trouble to inhabit another person’s skin. Today you can simply buy a customisable 3D avatar from Turbosquid.com, animate it with your own movements by wearing a sensor-filled motion-capture bodysuit, and presto! Lifelike but eerily soulless, Ed Atkins’s video portraits occupy a strange visual hinterland between computer-game graphics and deepfake realism.

The close-ups elicit a tingling revulsion: this seems to be a human being, but something is off

A man tosses and turns in bed before his home is violently swallowed up by a sinkhole; a besuited talkshow host puffs away on Silk Cuts while conversing with the disembodied voice of a woman (Atkins’s mother) about her struggles with depression. In both videos, the artist is incognito. In another, he appears as his own digital doppelganger, performing an experimental piano composition while a camera gently zooms in on his face and hands. The close-ups elicit a tingling revulsion: this seems to be a human being, but something is off.

The curators of a new, mid-career retrospective of Atkins’s work at Tate Britain have foregrounded the personal story that inspired his morbid aesthetic. Atkins himself plays the role of tour guide via a series of first person-heavy explanatory texts accompanying the works. In one of these notes, he recalls that his artistic vision started taking shape not long after his father died of cancer in 2009: ‘I began to think of high-definition digital videos as corpses – vivid, heavy and empty.’ Indeed, many of the exhibits on show have an uncanny emotional hollowness. CGI video loops depicting a supposedly distraught young child sobbing on a stool is arresting precisely by virtue of the total lack of emotional purchase: its absurd hyperreality shuts down empathy.