Finding signs of life in the uncanny valley
Watching Sora videos of Michael Jackson stealing a box of chicken nuggets or Sam Altman biting into the pink meat of a flame-grilled Pikachu has given me flashbacks to an Ed Atkins exhibition at Tate Britain I saw a few months ago. Atkins is one of the most influential and unsettling British artists of his generation. He is best known for hyper-detailed CG animations of himself (pore-perfect skin, janky movement) that play with the virtual representation of human emotions.
Still from ED ATKINS PIANOWORK 2 2023 COURTESY: THE ARTIST, CABINET GALLERY, LONDON, DÉPENDANCE, BRUSSELS, GLADSTONE GALLERY
In The Worm we see a CGI Atkins make a long-distance call to his mother during a covid lockdown. The audio is from a recording of an actual conversation. Are we watching Atkins cry or his avatar? Our attention flickers between two realities. “When an actor breaks character during a scene, it’s known as corpsing,” Atkins has said. “I want everything I make to corpse.” Next to Atkins’s work, generative videos look like cardboard cutouts: lifelike but not alive.
A dark and dirty book about a talking dingo
What’s it like to be a pet? Australian author Laura Jean McKay’s debut novel, The Animals in That Country, will make you wish you’d never asked. A flu-like pandemic leaves people with the ability to hear what animals are saying. If that sounds too Dr. Dolittle for your tastes, rest assured: These animals are weird and nasty. A lot of the time they don’t even make any sense.
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With everybody now talking to their computers, McKay’s book resets the anthropomorphic trap we’ve all fallen into. It’s a brilliant evocation of what a nonhuman mind might contain—and a meditation on the hard limits of communication.