Metropolis meets Necropolis, Gotham gets drawn and erased, and Glasgow plays host to a spectacle that nobody will ever see.
Einstein proposed that time might not flow linearly, suggesting that spacetime bends and warps under powerful matter, seen as gravity's fluctuations. During the pandemic, people experienced this concept firsthand: shrinking horizons made time seem to both stand still and race forward. Daniel Cockburn’s video Ahead of the Curve reflects this surreal period when norms vanished, and internet rabbit holes drew people in—either as black holes for doomscrolling or wormholes to discovery. Through a darkly comic narrative, Cockburn spins a tale full of unexpected twists, linking past and present with disorienting shifts in tone, setting, and tempo, offering hints of what might lie ahead.
Over the course of a ten-year postal correspondence, a pair of movie-going pen-pals share their thoughts on some of 90s cinema’s key traits: the rise of video, the need for speed, and of course the cliff-edge sense of global dread. But do decades have ‘key traits’ at the time? Or do we assign them these characteristics retroactively, trying to make sense of things in hindsight? Only Leonard Nimoy knows for sure.
To celebrate the BFI's Thriller season, filmmaker Daniel Cockburn explores the power of sound to terrify and unsettle. Using sounds from Hollywood's best-known thriller and horror films, Cockburn makes familiar noises frightening and leaves us wondering... What's that sound? And why won't it stop?
Daniel Cockburn discusses that may or may not have seen the film After Hours before
Daniel Cockburn’s exuberantly cerebral, filmically deconstructionist work defies easy categorization, and this program of new work is no exception, from a short that interrogates “things that mean other things before becoming a thing that means other things in itself,” and a performance piece that juxtaposes two postmodern 1994 horror films, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare to explore both the redemptive and destructive powers of storytelling.
One of several works commissioned for The Colin Campbell Sessions and inspired by the makings of video art pioneer Colin Campbell for the Tranz Tech festival. Cockburn's video draws formally on Campbell's style while at the same time metaphorically expressing the artist's anxiety in making the video itself.
Doctor Virtuous can't sleep or stay awake and he's worried about radiation
Daniel Cockburn is a Canadian moving-image artist based in Glasgow. His work deals with rhythm, language, and thought experiments, drawing on sources spanning video games, literature, power ballads, and sci-fi/fantasy/horror. His 2010 feature film You Are Here has been described as “a new kind of narrative for a new technological era” (Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope), “a major discovery” (Olivier Père, Locarno Film Festival), and “a whatsit” (Gavin Smith, Film Comment). He’s currently working on a live performance about medieval music and a movie adaptation of Mark Vonnegut’s memoir The Eden Express.
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