Daniel Cockburn

Daniel Cockburn
Daniel Cockburn, at TIFF, 2010
Born	1976 Tweed, Ontario, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Alma mater	York University
Occupation(s)	Video artist, film director, performance artist, professor
Years active	1999–present
Spouse	Brenda Goldstein
Awards	Jay Scott Prize

Daniel Cockburn is a Canadian film director and video artist, who won the Jay Scott Prize in 2010 and the European Media Art Festival's principal award in 2011 for his film You Are Here.

Education and career

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)

Early short films and videos (1999-2010)

Originally from Tweed, Ontario, Cockburn graduated from York University with a degree 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."

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).

Mike Hoolboom

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 (2003) and Denominations (2004), the same year 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 cast himself in these short films and videos. 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. 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.

In 2008, Cockburn won the K.M. Hunter Artists Award for Film & Video ($8000), and began working on his first feature film. In 2009, Cockburn was 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 program of his films and videos to launch of a publication about his work by Spencer W. Parsons. The program included The Chinese Room, a ten-minute work-in-progress excerpt from his upcoming feature. 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.

Feature film, graduate studies, and new short films (2010- )

Cockburn completed his first feature, You Are Here in 2010. It has been presented at over forty film festivals worldwide, and compared to the works of Charlie Kaufman, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. The film won both the Jay Scott Prize in 2010, and the EMAF Award in 2011, and with few exceptions, was received enthusiastically by critics.

Following the release of You Are Here, Cockburn participated in the National Parks Project, visiting Bruce Peninsula National Park with musicians John K. Samson, Christine Fellows and Sandro Perri, and also had two brief stints overseas as an artist-in-residence and a guest professor.

Cockburn returned to York University to begin working towards his Master of Fine Arts degree in 2014. 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, and made the Toronto International Film Festival's annual Canada's Top Ten list in 2017. By the time the film was released, Cockburn had begun an artist-in-residenceship 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 film, God's Nightmares, are considered Canadian-British co-productions.

Personal life

In a number of interviews, Cockburn said that he struggled with a paranoid-delusional breakdown during which "everything I saw, read, and heard was some sort of message to me that needed to be decoded." 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.

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."

Daniel Cockburn is married to installation artist Brenda Goldstein.

Cockburn has called fellow video artist Matthew C. Brown a friend. When Brown made a video for a one-minute video festival in 2007, titled This Thing Is Bigger Than the Both of Us: The Secret of String, 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.

Filmography

Early short films and videos (1999-2010)

• Doctor Virtuous (1999)
• Rocket Man (2000)
• monopedal Joy (2001)
• The Other Shoe (2001)
• IdeaL (2002)
• You Are in a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, all Different (2002)
• Metronome (2002)
• i hate video (2002)
• PSYCHO / 28 X 2 (2002)
• Subteranea Gargantua (prelude) (2002)
• The Impostor (hello goodbye) (2003)
• WEAKEND (2003)
• Denominations (2003)
• AUDIT (2003; second version, 2005)
• Figure vs. Ground (2004, with Emily Vey Duke)
• Nocturnal Doubling (2004)
• Chicken/Egg: The Williams Equation (2004)
• Continuity (2004)
• Stupid Coalescing Becomers (2004)
• Brother Tongue/Langue Fraternelle (2006)
• This Thing is Bigger Than the Both of Us: These Are Facts (2007)
• The Bad Idea Reunion (2010)

In 2009, a 55-minute anthology film was released under the title You Are in a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, all Different: Films and Videos by Daniel Cockburn. The anthology DVD brings together ten of the above films, one of them in two versions.

Feature film and later short films (2010- )

• You Are Here (2010)
• Material (2011) (commissioned by the National Parks Project)
• Sculpting Memory (2015) (commissioned by the National Film Board)
• The Argument (with annotations) (2017) (master's thesis)
• God's Nightmares (2019)

External links

• Daniel Cockburn at IMDb
• Daniel Cockburn on Vtape