Still from Daniel Cockburn’s Metronome, 2002. Image: nowtoronto.com

If you’ve never seen a performance by video artist DANIEL COCKBURN, VoCA highly recommends it!

This Wednesday April 4th, Cockburn with present a piece titled Altogether as part of In There, an “experimental process-based collaboration” between artists and students at Toronto’s York University. It’s FREE and it’s one night only. Performances are at 7:30pm and 9 pm.

Click HERE for more information.

VoCA first came across Toronto-based video artist Daniel Cockburn in 2002, when his work Metronome was featured in our screening at Canada House, London UK.

Metronome is a piece that refers directly to the voice-over monologue from the film Fight Club and takes in the protagonist’s daily grind though a rythmn that brings together his staccato dialogue, his heartbeat and a the ticking of a metronome.

Still from Metronome. Image: hallwalls.org

Experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom calls Cockburn “a rare literary talent”, and says this of Metronome:

“Rhythmic infinity (when a groove becomes a loop) is the author’s definition of hell. No matter that there are so many thoughts to think, Cockburn confesses that his experience turns around just a few. What clings to him are repeating moments, already mirrors for his own obsessions.”

Click HERE for a clip of Metronome.

Visible Vocals was a piece performed as part of Feats, might in 2005. Cockburn did a piece where he recorded himself typing a page of text on an old-fashioned typewriter, and began with a fresh page, accompanied by the soundtrack of his original typing. It was something poetic, using time stops and starts - John Cage would surely have approved.

Visible Vocals developed into a recently released artist’s book, developed with Michael Maranda and available at Toronto’s Art Metropole.

The book presents the original typed monologue spaced out three-dimensionally. Click HERE to download a preview of the book.

Cockburn says: “When (curator) Alissa Firth-Eagland asked me to present a live performance in March 2005, I conceived and performed “Visible Vocals” as an exercise in divided attention (when you walk and chew gum at the same time, are you in your mouth or in your feet?): typing the first page of a two-page monologue in a rhythm unrelated to the words’ meter as speech, then typing the second page in an attempt to mesh rhythmically with audio playback of the first page.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Sixth Day, 2000. Image: us.movies1.yimg.com

Weakend (2004) was a piece commissioned by video collective FameFame as part of a screening, each work having to do with the Arnold Schwarzenegger’s film The Sixth Day. Cockburn splices Arnie’s dialogue into the following indignant speech:

What are you doing to me? I don’t think this is very funny. Who are you? You think you are a media artist because you control me with a piece of software. This is terrible. This is not natural. This is creepy…

As Mike Hoolboom notes, Schwarzenegger speaks to the artist and “is spoken by the artist, like we are spoken by language, though here in the gridlocked codes of narrative we can see the tensions of power at work..”

For more information on Cockburn’s work please look HERE

Cockburn’s single-channel video work is distributed/represented by Vtape, Toronto.