An artist goes through his day keeping to a steady rhythm. All the while, his voice-over speaks rapidly, discussing mental patterns in life, language, rhythm, as well as determinacy and free will. He talks about Hollywood films that have inspired him, and appropriated clips flow along with the artist's own footage. He wonders how many of his daily thoughts are his own, as opposed to ideas coming from films or indeed the rest of his life experience.
2002, 11 minutes, video
Images Festival • (Honourable Mention) Homebrew Award for work by a local emerging artist[5][6]
Media City Film Festival • Jury Award for best Canadian film/video/installation[5][6]
Video and audio of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Adam Gibson from The 6th Day is reworked by a videomaker. The manipulation stops with the arrival of the Sabbath, when the videomaker rests, and the Schwarzenegger of his creation speaks angrily for himself, and the videomaker answers.
2003, 7 minutes, video
Tranz Tech Media Art Biennial • FAMEFAME Jury Prize[6]
In a split screen, a man dressed in a black suit and tie speaks directly to the audience, while a black and whitehome movie is being projected next to him, on the left. He describes a dream in which he was asked to read a eulogy for his father. The man wonders if his words killed his father.
2003, 9 minutes, video; commissioned for The Colin Campbell Sessions and inspired by the makings of video art pioneer Colin Campbell
As a metred beat thumps, and a metred line is pulled across the screen, a narrator asserts with certainty that the entire universeexpanded to twice its size overnight.
Emily supplied him with a clip of her singing on a boat, which he promptly layered up into a dizzying multi-screen display that buried her "figure" beneath his "ground." Emily dubbed his aggressive material assertions "like being gang raped by video."
A meandering video trek across bands of colour gradually reveals a solitary singer struggling to be heard over distortion and echos. A journey from cacophony to harmony.
2004, 7 minutes, video; a collaboration with fellow video artist Emily Vey Duke, commissioned by the 640 480 video collective for the VS. programme[8]
A "backwards time fantasy"[9] in which a narrator lashes out at the "little opposite rebellions" he sees in which everything is reversed: "paper uncuts itself, cigarettes unsmoke, broken lightbulbs re-form, pills re-gather and in the final image, the artist himself flies out of the frame."[10] These are the secret pieces of the universe that obstinately refuse to follow time's forward flow.
2004, 2 minutes, video
This Thing Is Bigger Than the Both of Us: These Are Facts
When fellow video artist Matthew C. Brown made a work for the One Minute Film & Video Festival titled This Thing Is Bigger Than the Both of Us: The Secret of String (2007), and would not tell him what it was about, Cockburn made one of his own with a view to hazarding a guess.[5]
2007, 1 minute, video
AUDIT (version 2)
Another, different attempt to graph the shape of a human life through animation.
In 2009, Cockburn was invited to a six-month fellowship in Berlin (DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program),[11] where he began showing a curated programme of his films and videos. An anthology film tour was coordinated by curator Jon Davies (Pleasure Dome) with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.[12]
Cockburn returned to Toronto toward the end of the year with a revised programme which also saw the launch a publication about his work.[5] The catalogue, also titled You Are in a Maze of Twisty Little Passages all Different, was edited by Daniel Cockburn and Jon Davies, and included five commissioned essays by video artists Steve Reinke and Emily Vey Duke, author Sheila Heti, filmmaker Spencer Parsons, and theoretical physicist Lee Smolin.[5][12]
Release and reception
The final version of You Are in a Maze of Twisty Little Passages all Different was screened in Toronto on 5 December 2009. In addition to the eleven shorts which form the core of the standard programme, the Pleasure Dome screening included The Chinese Room (a ten-minute work-in-progress excerpt from Cockburn's upcoming feature, You Are Here) and Matthew C. Brown's This Thing Is Bigger Than The Both Of Us: The Secret Of String.[5]
Home media
A 55-minute DVD (for exhibitions and educational institutions) of the final version of the anthology film was released in 2009.[12]
Critical response
Norman Wilner wrote a brief retrospective review of Cockburn's work in advance of the Pleasure Dome event in Toronto:
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.[13]
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