Daniel Ernest Cockburn | |
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![]() Daniel Cockburn at TIFF 2010 | |
Born | 1976 (age 46–47) Belleville, Ontario, Canada |
Education | |
Alma mater | York University |
Occupations | |
Years active | 1999–present |
Notable work |
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Awards |
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Website | zerofunction |
Daniel Ernest Cockburn is a Canadian performance artist, film director and video artist. [1] Cockburn won the Jay Scott Prize in 2010 and the European Media Art Festival's principal award in 2011 for his debut feature film You Are Here. [2] [3]
I think I know how I justify asking people to give up their time to watch my work - I try to entertain them... I think that thinking is entertaining.
Daniel Cockburn (interview, October 2003) [4]
Born in Belleville, Ontario, [5] Cockburn grew up in Tweed. He graduated from York University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in film studies in 1999, but felt "dissatisfied with his own final project", a 17-minute film that took him six months to finish; he decided to "abandon all that stuff", meaning big film productions heavy on stage design and light design, with sound engineers and a production manager, "in order to make much simpler films based on his own writing." [6] He discovered the experimental film community in Toronto "and beyond," spending a decade making short films and video projects, [7] which were "experimental, but which always had a strong narrative bent." [8]
The first video Cockburn directed after graduation, Doctor Virtuous, about a troubled fruit fly researcher plagued by existential worries and anxiety concerning his supposed nemesis Doctor Wrong, [9] was shot over 24 hours in the summer of 1999 on a budget of about $500 for the 4th On The Fly Festival. [10]
He has a rare literary talent which he serves up with visual élan, smart design sense and a playful philosophical project whose deeply lived roots is leavened throughout with humour. In fact, he's most serious when he's having fun. And even though his work appears as audio-visual feuilletons—essayistic briefs, missives from the margins—they possess an uncanny narrative order (though it is a narrativity steeped in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth).
Cockburn released around three to six videos a year between 2000 and 2004. Metronome (2002) was his "breakout hit", attracting significant attention, an award, and an honourable mention. [12] In 2003, Cameron Bailey declared Cockburn was "Toronto's best new video artist". [13] Cockburn won more prizes for WEAKEND and Denominations the same year. In 2004, he worked in collaboration with Emily Vey Duke on Figure Vs. Ground, and re-edited and released one of his earlier works in 2005. [14]
Cockburn usually appeared in his own films, not exactly playing himself, but enacting the main (or only) character of his script: "I am interested in this blank face without emotions. It becomes a projection surface for anything that happens in the film, like the Kuleshov Effect", referring to the early Russian filmmaker who showed that the same head-shot could express different emotions according to adjunct edits in the film and he thus had a strong influence on Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage. "And I decided I could do that myself; I didn't need an actor to make the kinds of films I wanted to make". [6] Sometimes, as in The Impostor (hello goodbye) (2003), he played multiple roles, or different aspects of the same role, which were also in some sense fictionalized versions of himself: "I often perform in the work, in a mode that I started calling 'somewhere between fictional character and autobiography' when people started saying, 'that's not actually the way you think, is it?'" [15] Alissa Firth-Eagland, who curated an exhibition featuring his work in 2005, highlighted this feature of his art:
Daniel Cockburn's videos are cleverly self-referential without being didactic. They are deliberately sleek and crafted, even produced, but it is Cockburn's performances within these productions that intrigue me most; his personae are disconcerting in their honesty and familiarity. I find there are many blind spots for me in all his onscreen characterizations. A notable mutability of portrayer and portrayed is evident in particular in his work The Impostor (hello goodbye): there's a mysterious blurring of fact and fiction. I am always left wondering how much of his onscreen personalities are, in fact, him. [16]
Cockburn admits that "over the years, his main characters became more and more influenced by autobiographical ideas." [6]
In 2008, Cockburn won the K.M. Hunter Artists Award for Film & Video [17] ($8000), [18] A video of Cockburn commenting on a few of his films, with clips, was released. [19] He began working on his first feature film that year. [20]
In 2009, Cockburn was one of three directors invited to a six-month fellowship in Berlin (DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program). [6] [21] He returned to Toronto toward the end of the year with a curated programme of his films and videos, [22] to launch a publication about his work. [23] The program included The Chinese Room, a ten-minute work-in-progress excerpt from his upcoming feature. [23] Norman Wilner wrote a brief retrospective review of Cockburn's work prior to the event:
Cockburn's work is strange and recursive and curious and enthralling, and sometimes all at once. In works like Metronome and The Impostor (hello goodbye), he considers life, death and dreams - and dreams about death - with a childlike fascination and an adult's sense of gravity. He'll ponder the collective illusion of time in Stupid Coalescing Becomers, or investigate his suspicion that everything in the universe has doubled in size overnight in the aptly titled Nocturnal Doubling. Calmly offering philosophical and metaphysical insights on the audio track, while evidence of his thesis plays out on the screen, he's both prankster and serious inquisitor; there's no way anything he's talking about is even plausible, let alone probable, but he's going to explore the possibilities as if it were. [24]
Cockburn's first feature film has been presented at over forty film festivals worldwide, and compared to the works of Charlie Kaufman, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. [3] The film won both the Jay Scott Prize in 2010, [25] and the EMAF Award in 2011, [26] and with few exceptions, was received enthusiastically by critics. Marcos Ortega de Mon noted that in the film, finding and archiving material plays a big role in the narration:
The activity of collecting seems to be a trap and source of obsession, but in other respects, it may also be a base for resistance, an escape from those powers that seem to have control over the claustrophobic situations his protagonists find themselves in, not only in the feature film but also in his shorts. [6]
Following the release of You Are Here and the short The Bad Idea Reunion , Cockburn participated in the National Parks Project, visiting Bruce Peninsula National Park with musicians John K. Samson, Christine Fellows and Sandro Perri, [27] and also had two brief stints overseas as an artist-in-residence and a guest professor. [note 1]
Cockburn's feature film script The Engineers won the Telefilm Canada Pitch This! prize ($15,000) at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, and was reported as in development with the Canadian Film Centre. [30] In 2014, Cockburn returned to York University to begin working towards his Master of Fine Arts degree. [29] During this period, he made the short films Sculpting Memory (2015) and The Argument (with annotations) (2017), the latter of which was also presented as his master's thesis, [31] and made the Toronto International Film Festival's annual Canada's Top Ten list in 2017. [32]
By the time The Argument was released, Cockburn had begun an artist-in-residenceship at Acme Studios and research fellowship at the Queen Mary University of London's School of Languages, Linguistics and Film in its pilot year. [3] [33] The Argument, along with his most recent short films, including God's Nightmares , are Canadian-British co-productions or else British productions. [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] During the residency, Cockburn researched the extension of lecture-performance practice into an expanded-cinema format involving multiple projections and live video feeds. [33]
Cockburn curates film and video and is a member of the Pleasure Dome programming collective, writing for their publication A Blueprint for Moving Images in the 21st Century. He has also contributed to publications such as Year Zero One Forum and Cinema Scope magazine. [39]
In March 2005, Cockburn presented Visible Vocals, a typing performance for Feats, might, a night of performance art by video artists curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland, presented by Fado and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. In 2007, a set of two books and a CD was published by Parasitic Ventures Press "to replicate the performance in book form." [16] [40]
ALTOGETHER is an ensemble performance of music, movement, and monologue produced with the participation of York University students in 2007, the work explores "semantic/somatic overlap and overload". [41] It was also made into an installation art work as a commission from the university Art Gallery. [42]
During his Berlin residency in 2009, [43] Cockburn developed an anti-artist talk, [44] also called a "lecture-performance" about his professional mistakes as an artist, technical, aesthetic, and ideological. [45] "The art world is bursting with events where artists present an anthology of the highlights of their career to a slightly bored audience." [44] Cockburn decided to turn this idea on its head with All The Mistakes I've Made, examining to what extent his own inability to properly judge is representative of a "negative trend" in contemporary art and cinema, and supporting this argument with excerpts from his own work, and that of artists like Andrei Tarkovsky and Tim Burton. [44] The performance toured internationally, [43] described in 2013 as "both playful and profound, personal and wide-reaching in its meditation on creative misguidance." [45] Cockburn performed All The Mistakes I've Made from 2009 to 2013.
Sometimes also featuring a subtitle (How Not To Watch a Film) or alternate title (How Not to Watch a Movie), the performance is not, despite the titular suggestion, strictly follow up but a spiritual successor: "an independent, stand-alone work." [46] It begins as a look at 1990s horror movies before "spinning off into an autobiographical journey full of film references, over-interpretation and paranoia." [47] Cockburn also argues against finding fault with continuity errors, as he says in an essay derived from the performance: [48]
Both Mistakes performance lectures have been presented to "much acclaim." [49]
In 2014, Cockburn put together a performance about failure, Heist Gone Wrong, which opened for the It wasn't supposed to be like this exhibition at Videofag in Toronto. The exhibition embraces "the messy, mistaken, or misshapen," and "explores how we might learn more from the times when things didnt work out, than from those times that they did." [50] [51]
As of late 2019, Cockburn is adapting Mark Vonnegut's memoir The Eden Express into a feature screenplay, and developing a new one-man multi-screen live show called "All of the Other Agains", which was scheduled to premiere at the Flatpack Festival in Birmingham in 2020. [52]
In a number of interviews, Cockburn said that he struggled with a paranoid-delusional breakdown [20] during which "everything I saw, read, and heard was some sort of message to me that needed to be decoded." [53] It was a period of "intense meaning-making ... I'd be looking at any text I'd encounter like a menu or road sign and I'd scramble the letters around and see if there were any different codes there that needed to be deciphered." After a long time, he realized that this behaviour, which was emotionally exhausting and troubling, had emotional underpinnings: "It became something that wasn't just an enjoyable intellectual play. ... In a number of ways I worked through it, and part of that was figuring out what the emotional reasons were." [54] That experience "stayed" with him and worked its way into "just about everything" he wrote or directed, including his first feature film:
You Are Here is a compendium of characters dealing with the question of whether their life is just a series of random events, or whether there’s some "Great Code" at the heart of it all. It's a cerebral concept, but when you're in the middle of it, it's scary and exciting and sometimes even funny, and that, for me, is the heart of the movie. [53]
During postscreening question-and-answer sessions for You Are Here, audiences often asked Cockburn what is religious beliefs were, and he answered: "I don't know." [55]
Daniel Cockburn is currently living in London, recently as a Research Fellow in Film Practice at Queen Mary University of London and on an Acme Studios residency. [52] He was married to installation artist Brenda Goldstein from 2010 to 2015. [56]
Cockburn has called fellow video artist Matt Brown a friend. When Brown made a work for the One Minute Film & Video Festival titled This Thing Is Bigger Than the Both of Us: The Secret of String (2007), and would not tell Cockburn what it was about, he made one of his own with a view to hazarding a guess. Both were shown together at a screening of Cockburn's anthology film in Toronto by Pleasure Dome in 2009. [23]
The following two lists should not be considered complete or up to date. [52]
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The Argument is a 2017 Canadian-British short experimental drama film written, directed, and edited by video artist Daniel Cockburn. The short's first half attempts to deceive the audience into thinking it is a non-fictional video essay, revealing itself mid-way to be a work of fiction, the essay actually the work of the film's protagonist, an elderly professor. Submitted as Cockburn's thesis for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Film studies at York University, the film had its world premiere at the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival, and has been warmly received by critics.
God's Nightmares is a 2019 Canadian-British short experimental black comedy film created by Daniel Cockburn that "mashes together" appropriated film clips, creating a visual collage that imagines the thoughts that plague God at night, his "interior monologue," in which he muses about a recurring nightmare of being an everyman.
Metronome is a 2002 Canadian short experimental film which mixes appropriated film clips and video by video artist Daniel Cockburn to express ideas about rhythm and order, the self and other minds, and the digital age. Densely philosophical, the work is acknowledged as his international "breakout hit" after several locally successful short works, winning praise from critics, a mention, and an award.
WEAKEND is a 2003 Canadian short experimental film created by video artist Daniel Cockburn, made through a remix of audio and video from The 6th Day, a Hollywood feature film about cloning starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Commissioned by famefame for the third biennial Tranz Tech Media Art Festival, the work was awarded the Jury prize.
Nocturnal Doubling is a 2004 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn based on a thought experiment in Henri Poincaré's essay The Relativity of Space.
The Impostor is a 2003 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn, one of several works commissioned for The Colin Campbell Sessions and inspired by the makings of video art pioneer Colin Campbell for the Tranz Tech festival. Cockburn's video draws formally on Campbell's style while at the same time metaphorically expresses the artist's anxiety in making the video itself.
You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different: Films and Videos by Daniel Cockburn is a 2009 Canadian experimental film anthology consisting of a curated programme of eleven short films by video artist Daniel Cockburn.
The Other Shoe is a 2001 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn, his third, which, along with Metronome (2002), earned a mention for the Homebrew Award when shown at the Images Festival and thereby broadened his reputation beyond Toronto.
All The Mistakes I've Made is the common title of a pair of distinct performance/lecture pieces conceived and performed by Canadian video artist Daniel Cockburn.
The Bad Idea Reunion is a 2010 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn, in which an infant muses in an internal monologue on the future and the forms its good and bad ideas will take.
Denominations is a 2003 Canadian short experimental documentary film created by video artist Daniel Cockburn about some time spent with American video artist Joe Gibbons.
Stupid Coalescing Becomers is a 2004 Canadian short darkly comic experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn about time running backwards as an act of rebellion.
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