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

moons. Simply depressions, concave mirrors. Reflecting our
own unresponsive faces in grotesquely impassioned, perverted
expressions: empathetic crumplings of brows, flirtatious pouts,
encouraging smiles – warmth, living plumpness. Moulten glass
mid-blowing, basically.
This hall of mirrors, stalking the film set.
We turn each round in turn to gaze into the mirrored
bowl at our lacking selves. Serving simply to ape our emotional
coherence.
A certain lexicon of gestures, infinitely evolved from
those contemporary touchscreen swipes, pokes, smears, dismissals
you’re fluent in; we eventually worked out how to leave
a trace on these impervious touch-screen surfaces. As in, we
worked out how to depress them. Troughs ploughed while ‘dismissing’
through photos or ‘sacking’ or ‘deposing’ through the
internet. Eventually, the flaccid median of ‘liking’ everything –
and any concomitant, infantile niceties – are eroded. Or rather
collapsed into passionate, urgent, né violent oppositions.
Hold my hand, you ask.
We hold hands – fingers interlaced and clenched, confused,
balled into planetoids.
We hold on to one another, willing spontaneous synthesis.
We can never be close enough, you and I – there is always
some barrier, however imperceptible.