Daniel Cockburn

CA

Daniel Cockburn's video works deal with rhythm, language, cognitive patterns, and thought experiments. Using gesture, repetition, and a heady quantity of voiceover, they attempt to detail -- in an obsessive, overanalytical, and possibly unhealthy manner – the shape of thought. If his videos set themselves impossible cognitive tasks, they gamely document the traces of their failure.
Cockburn's work has a love-hate relation with pop culture and movies (Hollywood and otherwise), craving and envying their power while simultaneously critiquing their more shadowy ideological aspects -- often via humour. Bergson called humour “something mechanical encrusted upon the living”; being human these days means embodying this mechanical/living tension, and Cockburn's work aims to delve into that tension in a funny and unsettling way.
In his 2015 EMARE residency at Impakt, Daniel Cockburn will research, create, and present an hour-long lecture-performance on Tuesday May 26, with the working title "All The Mistakes I’ve Made, part 2 (how not to watch a film)".

Works
Residencies

2015

IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture]