Daniel Cockburn

Daniel Ernest Cockburn is a Canadian performance artist, film director and video artist. 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.

Education and career in video and filmmaking Early short films and videos (1999–2007)

Born in Belleville, Ontario, 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." He discovered the experimental film community in Toronto "and beyond," spending a decade making short films and video projects, which were "experimental, but which always had a strong narrative bent."

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, was shot over 24 hours in the summer of 1999 on a budget of about $500 for the 4th On The Fly Festival.

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. In 2003, Cameron Bailey declared Cockburn was "Toronto's best new video artist". 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.

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". 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. Cockburn admits that "over the years, his main characters became more and more influenced by autobiographical ideas." ($8,000), A video of Cockburn commenting on a few of his films, with clips, was released. He began working on his first feature film that year.

You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different (2009)

In 2009, Cockburn was one of three directors invited to a six-month fellowship in Berlin (DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program). He returned to Toronto toward the end of the year with a curated programme of his films and videos, to launch a publication about his work. The program included The Chinese Room, a ten-minute work-in-progress excerpt from his upcoming feature.

You Are Here (2010)

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. and the EMAF Award in 2011, 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. and also had two brief stints overseas as an artist-in-residence and a guest professor.

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. In 2014, Cockburn returned to York University to begin working towards his Master of Fine Arts degree. and made the Toronto International Film Festival's annual Canada's Top Ten list in 2017. He began a second Acme residency, "Mind the Gap", in Glasgow, in 2023.

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. The Argument, along with his most recent short films, including God's Nightmares, are Canadian-British co-productions or else British productions. During the residency, Cockburn researched the extension of lecture-performance practice into an expanded-cinema format involving multiple projections and live video feeds.

Performance art Early performances (2005–2007) 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."

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". It was also made into an installation art work as a commission from the university Art Gallery.

Performances on mistakes and failure (2009–present) All The Mistakes I've Made

During his Berlin residency in 2009, Cockburn developed an anti-artist talk, also called a "lecture-performance" about his professional mistakes as an artist, technical, aesthetic, and ideological. "The art world is bursting with events where artists present an anthology of the highlights of their career to a slightly bored audience." It begins as a look at 1990s horror movies before "spinning off into an autobiographical journey full of film references, over-interpretation and paranoia." Cockburn also argues against finding fault with continuity errors, as he says in an essay derived from the performance:

Both Mistakes performance lectures have been presented to "much acclaim."

Heist Gone Wrong 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."

Current projects 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.

Personal life In a number of interviews, Cockburn said that he struggled with a paranoid-delusional breakdown 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." 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.

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. Media City 9, Jury Prize Best Canadian Work, Metronome, 2003 Tranz Tech International Media Art Biennial, Jury Prize: WEAKEND, 2003 One Minute Film & Video Festival, Special Jury Prize: Denominations, 2003 Ontario Arts Council, K.M. Hunter Artists Award (Film & Video), 2008

Residencies and grants Trinity Square Video, "Fraternité" Residency: Brother Tongue, 2006 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, filmmaker residency, 2009

Doctor Virtuous (1999) Rocket Man (2000) The Other Shoe (2001, commissioned by LIFT) monopedal Joy (2001) IdeaL (2002) You Are in a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, all Different (2002, produced for the Trinity Square Video "Devil Music" artist residency) Metronome (2002) i hate video (2002) PSYCHO / 28 X 2 (2002) Subteranea Gargantua (prelude) (2002) The Impostor (hello goodbye) (2003, commissioned by Vtape for The Colin Campbell Sessions) WEAKEND (2003, commissioned by ) Denominations (2003) AUDIT (2003; second version, 2005) Figure vs. Ground (2004, with Emily Vey Duke, commissioned by the 640 480 video collective for the VS. programme) Nocturnal Doubling (2004, commissioned by Friends of Rage Productions) Chicken/Egg: The Williams Equation (2004) Continuity (2004, part of the 2004 Charles Street Video / Images Festival Fear Factory Residency) Stupid Coalescing Becomers (2004) Brother Tongue/Langue Fraternelle (2006, for the Trinity Square Video "Fraternité" Residency) This Thing is Bigger Than the Both of Us: These Are Facts (2007)

Anthology, feature, and later short films (2009–present)

You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different: Films and Videos by Daniel Cockburn (2009; ten of the above titles) You Are Here (2010) The Bad Idea Reunion (2010, for the TIFF Talent Lab) Material (2011, commissioned by the National Parks Project) My Godfather (2011, Impakt residency) Sculpting Memory (2015, commissioned by the National Film Board) The Argument (with annotations) (2017; master's thesis) Repeat Viewing (After Hours) (2017) Pattern Recognition (2017, video essay commissioned by BFI Digital) Correspondence 1989-1999 (2019, British Film Institute) God's Nightmares (2019) Ahead of the Curve (2024), commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella The Invocation and The Abjuration (2024), commissioned as a pair by Weird Weekend Cult Film Festival

Performances and installations

Performances Visible Vocals (2005) ALTOGETHER (2007) All The Mistakes I've Made (2009; Part 2, 2015) Heist Gone Wrong (2014) All the Other Agains (scheduled for 2020)

Installations ALTOGETHER (single-channel video), Art Gallery of York University (2007) I Can Feel It (3-channel video), Art Gallery of York University (2015, commissioned by AGYU Vitrines)

Select publications Book Visible Vocals. Parasitic Ventures Press, 2007. 2 volumes and a CD.

Essays Untitled. Pleasure Dome presents Apotheoses of Everything, 2003. "ExperiMental." Point of View 54, 2004.