A mesmerising film by the British artist Ed Atkins (b.1982) shows a pianist performing – with excruciating difficulty – what seem to be arbitrary chords in some mysterious sequence. Straining and sighing, pausing and deliberating, he appears to be guessing the notes. Yet every strike is right, or so the visible relief running through his face and body appears to confirm. Except that the pianist is not real, and nor are his emotions.
The man is a digital avatar of Atkins himself, his performance translated by motion capture into this hyperreal model. The excessively perfect rendering of every imperfection, from stubble to wen, gives it away. But so do the movements of eyes and head, which have a trace of the super-glide smoothness of CGI – expertly programmed and yet still unable to capture the vagaries of human vitality.
