The digital artist is becoming a contradictory creature; occupying the fringes of the online community and existing as a kind of digital subculture, yet still looking to the gallery space, the last bastion for ‘offline’ exchange of information, for exposure.

One artist taking purpose in his position of straddling the in-between is Ed Atkins; a vanguard in digital manipulation creating works that are both technically proficient and penetrating in their presentation of relevant themes, cited by the Serpentine Gallery, an influential establishment in relation to any institutional theory of art, as one of the most prominent creators of his generation.

Working with high definition animation, Atkins creates augmented landscapes in which he channels the poetic though often aggression-filled voice of ‘a character that is literally a model, is demonstrably empty – a surrogate and a vessel’. The resultant work is an audio-visual barrage, using sight and sound to provoke an immersive experience in the traditional sense, while holding strong the digital idiosyncrasies that make computer generated art what it is. As if mimicking the landscape in which they were created, his work responds to the ways in which we perceive and process information – watching the often incomplete and interrupted narrative layered in moving image can be a familiar experience to the scrolling generation fighting to maintain an attention span.

Ahead of his exhibition at London’s Serpentine Sackler gallery this June (one which interestingly coincides with that of performance artist Marina Abramović in the same space) view a selection of works from his current exhibition at Zürich’s Kunstalle and more of his past work on his tumblr http://atumour.tumblr.com embedded below: