Daniel Cockburn

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]

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.

• All The Mistakes I've Made (Part 2)

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 dervied 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]

• Images Festival, Homebrew Award (honorable mention): Metronome / The Other Shoe, 2002[57]
• Media City 9, Jury Prize Best Canadian Work, Metronome, 2003
• Tranz Tech International Media Art Biennial, famefame 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[17]
• Toronto Film Critics Association Awards 2010, Jay Scott Prize, You Are Here
• 24th European Media Art Festival, EMAF Award You Are Here, 2011[26]
• Telefilm Canada, Pitch This! Award, The Engineers film script, 2013[30]
• 42nd Toronto International Film Festival • Canada's Top Ten, The Argument (with annotations), 2018 (selected in 2017)[58]

• Trinity Square Video, "Fraternité" Residency: Brother Tongue, 2006
• DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, filmmaker residency, 2009[6]
• Centre For Art Tapes (Halifax), artist in residence, 2010
• Impakt Foundation (Utrecht), artist in residence, 2011; European Media Artists Residency Exchange, artist in residence, 2015[28][3]
• Ontario Arts Council, Chalmers Arts Fellowship, 2012
• Canada Council for the Arts, Screenwriting Grant, 2014; International Residencies Grant, 2017
• Acme Studios, London, Associate Artist Residency, 2017; Alumni Artist Residency, 2019[33]
• Queen Mary University of London, Research Fellow, Film Practice, 2017[3]

Early short films and videos (1999-2007)[note 2]

Anthology, feature, and later short films (2009- )

• Visible Vocals. Parasitic Ventures Press, 2007. 2 volumes and a CD.

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

• You Are in A Maze Of Twisty Little Passages, All Different. Pleasure Dome, 2009. A collection of essays by Sheila Heti, Don McKellar, Spencer Parsons, Steve Reinke and Emily Vey Duke.
• Time Being: The Moving Images of Daniel Cockburn. Canadian Film Institute, 2014.

• Hoolboom, Mike. "Experimental: Daniel Cockburn-Preliminary Notes." Point of View 60 (Winter 2005).
• __________. "Daniel Cockburn: Smartbomb." In Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists. Coach House Books, 2008.