For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

a golf ball. I fucking hate golf, you say, and we share a smile.
The camera plummets in, past the smile, down through the
labyrinth and slows to a stop before the altered tumour – a
false idol to that massive fleshy god, always-already rendered
in the latest HD technology – an Nvidia graphics card with
some unholy amount of memory; running on a quad, quadcore
thing with TWO massive monitors – one for editing
on (vivisection), the other for viewing the rendered footage
(rendering is amazingly fast, of course). The rendering on
the hair of the GOD: moving in treacly gusts, slow, as if held
underwater, snagged in the hatch of the bathysphere by the
sleeve of the bathrobe it went in wearing – wet-look, clumped
together in attractive,
sinuous ridges – the
way you wish you
could get it. Perfect
drift – a lunar tide,
sucking the hair
eternally. Per-
haps even a few
fizzing bubbles
added (an excess
of demonstra-
tional effect) to
CONVINCE.
On the surface,
the lens of the
camera BOBS,
bisected, the upper
half relatively clear
(though flecked –
again to convince
– with droplets that act as prisms to the image), while
the lower magnifies. Bifocals worn by someone clearly
in need of something more variable, less harshly delineated.
Certainly a relative of ours. Mitochondrial.
And in the distance – seen in the upper, above-water half –
a dramatic shoreline; the shoreline of a fictional island – a
Skull Island – that forbodes, presents a front of jagged cliffs,
screeching seabirds, a crest of jungle visible beyond all that; a
cave, it’s mouth a retarded gape – swilling brine like mouthwash
or drool over KEEN, sharded rocks. An ominous tone
from the soundtrack, but you decide to strike out, front crawl,