Part of Fall 2009
You Are In A Maze Of Twisty Little Passages, All Different
Daniel Cockburn In Person
Screening & Catalogue Launch
Fresh from a six-month DAAD residency in Berlin and a number of screenings in Europe and Asia, Daniel Cockburn returns to Toronto with a curated program of his films and videos and the Toronto launch of a new publication about his work. Cockburn plays at the intersection of avant-garde and narrative cinema. Bringing together innovative storytelling strategies with structuralist experimentation, he breaks open day-to-day reality to reveal the strange codes beneath. What if time ran backwards? What if everything in the world doubled in size? Self-reflexive to the point of neurosis, Cockburn is fascinated with how images and words can illuminate the structures and rhythms of our lives.
Daniel Cockburn is a Toronto-based independent film/video maker and writer. Cockburn’s wry sense of humour and his curious, engaging approach to experimental imagery is well-known and celebrated. His work has been exhibited at various international venues, including: Cinematexas International Short Film Festival; Images Festival of Independent Film & Video; Cinematheque Ontario and the Venice International Short Film Festival. He has won the Images Homebrew Award for work by a local emerging artist (for Metronome and The Other Shoe) Media City: Jury Award for best Canadian film/video/installation (for Metronome) Tranz Tech Media Art Biennial: FAMEFAME Jury Prize (for Weakend). Additionally, Cockburn has curated film and video both independently and as a member of the Pleasure Dome programming collective, and has written on media arts for such publications as Year Zero One Forum, Cinema Scope magazine, and A Blueprint for Moving Images in the 21st Century (Pleasure Dome).
“Watching one of Cockburn’s videos is like watching a Philip K. Dick novel stripped down to its girders: a collection of peculiar personal obsessions spun out into elliptical, witty/paranoid mini-narratives.” Wendy Banks, NOW Magazine
Programme:
AUDIT, 2003, 3 min, super 8 w/ audio CD
An animated attempt to graph the shape of a life and all the coincidences and repetitions which occur in it.
IdeaL, 2003, 2:18 min, video
Canonized intellectual musings (Wittgenstein) meet modern cock rock (Faith No More) in a 1-to-1 syllable-to-syllable ratio.
Rocket Man, 2000, 5 min, video
A karaoke video taking the lyrics and sentiment of the Elton John / Bernie Taupin pop classic at face value… and then puts a different face on them.
Metronome, 2002, 10:40 min, video
A multimeter cinemajunkie journeys to the depths of his cranium (and beyond!) in search of the greatest lowest common denominator of them all.
WEAKEND, 2003, 7:15 min, video
A videotape whose sole audio/video source is The 6th Day, a Hollywood feature film about cloning.
The Impostor (hello goodbye), 2003, 8:48 min, video
A circular lament in memory of a eulogy.
Nocturnal Doubling, 2004, 4:07 min, video
If the universe doubled in size, would anybody know? One person does. This is his story.
Figure vs. Ground, 2004, 7 min, video (with Emily Vey Duke),
A roving search across endless colour-fields gradually reveals a solitary singer, struggling to be heard over distortion and doppelgangers.
Stupid Coalescing Becomers., 2003, 2:31 min, video
A narrator lashes out at the “little opposite rebellions” he sees everywhere, secret pieces of the universe that obstinately refuse to follow time’s forward flow.
This Thing Is Bigger Than The Both Of Us: These Are Facts, 2007, 1 min, video
My friend has an idea for a movie about secrets – but he won’t tell me what it is. The movie about his secrecy becomes my attempt to guess what his movie idea is.
This Thing Is Bigger Than The Both Of Us: The Secret Of String, Matthew C. Brown, 2007, 1 min, video
Mice, string, and Danny Elfman’s agonizing 3-note progression from his Planet of the Apes score. And all of these centered around The Secret of NIMH, which is the most fucked-up movie ever made.
AUDIT (version 2), 2005, 3 min, super 8 w/ audio CD
An animated life-graph of coincidences and recurrences recurs, with a difference.
The Chinese Room, 2009, 10 min, video
A work-in-progress excerpt from Cockburn’s upcoming feature You Are Here.
