general public: Originalfassung #69: Daniel Cockburn

Originalfassung #69: Daniel Cockburn

// Datum | Date: Mo. | Mon 28. September 2009

// Zeit | Time: 19:30

// Sprache | Language: English

All The Mistakes I've Made

an anti-artist-talk by Daniel Cockburn

I have been making films and videos for 10 years now. In this presentation, I will discuss my body of work in terms of the aesthetic and ideological missteps I have made. I will also explore the ways in which my errors of judgement are representative of certain negative trends in contemporary art- and cinema-making.

I promise to try to be sincere, and to be -- for the most part -- forthcoming about the ways in which I fail to be sincere.

It will perhaps be shown that my regrets constitute a parallel body of work.

If there is a difference between a "talk" and a "performance", I do not know which term better describes this presentation.

It could be described as a live version of one of my videos -- in which case it is possible that the presentation will make all the same mistakes the videos have.

The talk will be illustrated with excerpts from my own work, as well as relevant examples from the oeuvres of image-makers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Tim Burton. There will be music, but I will not now tell you whether there will be dancing.

Perhaps this presentation is, at its core, a bad idea.
(This will also be one of the topics discussed.)

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Further Information:

“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

“He has a rare literary talent which he serves up with visual élan, smart design sense and a playful philosophical project whose deeply lived roots is leavened throughout with humour.”

- Mike Hoolboom, Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists

DANIEL COCKBURN has been making short films and videos since 1999; inhabiting a space between narrative film and experimental video art, they have been screened at festivals and galleries worldwide.

He is a subject of Mike Hoolboom's recent book Practical Dreamers: Conversations With Movie Artists (Coach House Books, 2008), a recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artists Award for Film & Video (2008), and a 2009 guest of the DAAD's Berliner Künstlerprogramm.

He is currently in post-production on his first feature, You Are Here, which takes the techniques and concepts he has honed over the last

decade as a video artist with a penchant for narrative, and works them into a complex and unique cinematic structure.

His solo video program You Are In A Maze Of Twisty Little Passages, All Different is currently on international tour (presented by Pleasure Dome with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts), with an accompanying publication including essays by Sheila Heti, Don McKellar, Emily Vey Duke, Spencer Parsons, and Steve Reinke.

Cockburn's video work is distributed by Vtape.

In co-operation with the Embassy of Canada, Berlin and the DAAD's Artists-in-Berlin Program.

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