Nocturnal Doubling

Martinson discusses Daniel Cockburn's narration mainly in philosophical terms: it is "a series of exploratory gestures and thoughts in this new yet strangely similar world",[2] in which empiricism is itself tested, "secured by the senses and questioned by the restless mind."

Something does not compute. If "no measurements could be taken" given the spontaneous growth of absolutely everything—the sameness is unnervingly all encompassing—how does the mind know?[2]

Mike Hoolboom discusses the theme of the media artist as God as an idea found in a number of Daniel Cockburn's short works such as WEAKEND: "In order to be a media artist, one must be God, the father, the one who controls. Or else one is the son, the subject, the controlled." The narrator of Nocturnal Doubling likewise compares himself to God, "the first and last measurement, or ruler."[6]

The mid 2000s were an especially productive period for Cockburn, who made several short films or videos a year during this stage of his career. The year Nocturnal Doubling was produced, he also made Chicken/Egg, Continuity, Stupid Coalescing Becomers and Figure vs. Ground,[7] the latter a collaboration with Emily Vey Duke.[8]

Shot on video, Nocturnal Doubling was created for a project commissioned by Friends of Rage Productions in which a one-word theme ("giants") was drawn from a hat, and participants were given half an hour to write a script, and then an hour immediately after to shoot, and finally "a 24-hour period later on to edit."[1]

Beginning in 2009, Nocturnal Doubling began to be shown along with a selection of Cockburn's other films, under the collective title You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different, the actual programme varying with the venue.[9][10]

A 55-minute DVD (for exhibitions and educational institutions) of one version of the anthology film was released in 2009.[11]

On the purely visual level, Hoolboom notes Cockburn's montage consists of deliberately banal images, "indifferently shot and largely illustrative of the voice-over" to emphasize the fact that, to all appearances and for all practical purposes, nothing has changed.[6]

Norman Wilner notes that as is typical of him, Cockburn's narrator is both prankster and serious inquisitor, calmly offering philosophical and metaphysical insights while his thesis plays out on the screen; "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."[12]

Treating the narrator exclusively as a persona, Martinson remarks that he is both rattled by and curious about the uniquely private and perturbing knowledge that he has mysteriously acquired, and, if we take the narrator at his word, a universal expansion is reducible to "a blip in the order of things, barely perceptable." The narrator is certain about what happened and yet nervous about it at the same time, aware that the "residue" of the event exists "only in this mind" in the form of a "barely sensed sense" which, having happened once, may happen again.[2]