Daniel Cockburn

As of late 2019, Cockburn is adapting Mark Vonnegut's memoir The Eden Express into a feature screenplay, and developing a new one-man multi-screen live show called "All of the Other Agains", which will premiere at the Flatpack Festival in Birmingham in 2020.

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.

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."

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. In 2014, Cockburn returned to York University to begin working towards his Master of Fine Arts degree. 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.

Daniel Cockburn is a Canadian performance artist, 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 debut feature film You Are Here. Usually based in Toronto where he began his career in video, he has obtained several overseas academic or professional residencies and currently resides in London.

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. 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. Marcos Ortega de Mon noted that in the film, finding and archiving material plays a big role in the narration:

In 2009, Cockburn was one of three directors 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 programme of his films and videos, to launch a publication about his work. 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:

During his Berlin residency in 2009, Cockburn developed an anti-artist talk, also called a "lecture-performance" about his professional mistakes as an artist, technical, aesthetic, and ideological. "The art world is bursting with events where artists present an anthology of the highlights of their career to a slightly bored audience." 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. The performance toured internationally, described in 2013 as "both playful and profound, personal and wide-reaching in its meditation on creative misguidance." Cockburn performed All The Mistakes I've Made for several years.

In 2008, Cockburn won the K.M. Hunter Artists Award for Film & Video ($8000), and began working on his first feature film.

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". It was also made into an installation art work as a commission from the university Art Gallery.

Cockburn has called fellow video artist Matthew C. Brown a friend. When 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 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.

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."

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". 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?'" Alissa Firth-Eagland, who curated an exhibition featuring his work in 2005, highlighted this feature of his art:

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.

Originally from Tweed, Ontario, Cockburn 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." 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."

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, a follow up to All The Mistakes I've Made; it is not necessary to have seen the original performance, as How Not To Watch A Movie is "an independent, stand-alone work." It begins as a look at 1990s horror movies before "spinning off into an autobiographical journey full of film references, over-interpretation and paranoia." Cockburn argues against finding fault with continuity errors, as he says in an essay dervied from the performance: