You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different

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An attempt to graph the shape of a human life through animation, with all its coincidences and repetitions.

Texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein are set against lyrics by the cock rock band Faith No More in a "1-to-1 syllable-to-syllable ratio."

A karaoke muzak video version of Elton John / Bernie Taupin's Rocket Man set to clips of fifty years' worth of American space films like Forbidden Planet and Lost in Space.^[4]

An artist goes through his day keeping to a steady rhythm. All the while, his voice-over speaks rapidly, discussing mental patterns in life, language, rhythm, as well as determinacy and free will. He talks about Hollywood films that have inspired him, and appropriated clips flow along with the artist's own footage. He wonders how many of his daily thoughts are his own, as opposed to ideas coming from films or indeed the rest of his life experience.

Video and audio of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Adam Gibson from The 6th Day is reworked by a videomaker. The manipulation stops with the arrival of the Sabbath, when the videomaker rests, and the Schwarzenegger of his creation speaks angrily for himself, and the videomaker answers.

In a split screen, a man dressed in a black suit and tie speaks directly to the audience, while a black and white home movie is being projected next to him, on the left. He describes a dream in which he was asked to read a eulogy for his father. The man wonders if his words killed his father.

As a metred beat thumps, and a metred line is pulled across the screen, a narrator asserts with certainty that the entire universe expanded to twice its size overnight.

A journey from cacophony to harmony.

A "backwards time fantasy"^[9] in which a narrator lashes out at the "little opposite rebellions" he sees in which everything is reversed: "paper uncuts itself, cigarettes unsmoke, broken lightbulbs re-form, pills re-gather and in the final image, the artist himself flies out of the frame."^[10]

A shadowy figure speaks in a modulated whisper attempting to guess what sort of video artist Matthew C. Brown made for the One Minute Film & Video Festival (This Thing Is Bigger Than the Both of Us: The Secret of String).^[5]

Another, different attempt to graph the shape of a human life through animation.

The guide for the 2011 Impakt Festival suggests Daniel Cockburn's films are found at the intersection of avant-garde and narrative cinema, combining innovative storytelling strategies and structuralist experimentation, breaking open "day-to-day reality to reveal the strange codes beneath."

Self-reflexive to the point of neurosis, Cockburn is fascinated with how moving images can illuminate the structures and rhythms of our lives; he is forever looking for hidden meaning in randomness and patterns in chaos.^[11]

In 2009, Cockburn was invited to a six-month fellowship in Berlin (DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program),^[12] where he began showing a curated programme of his films and videos. An anthology film tour was coordinated by curator Jon Davies (Pleasure Dome) with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.^[13]

Cockburn returned to Toronto toward the end of the year with a revised programme which also saw the launch a publication about his work.^[5] The catalogue, also titled You Are in a Maze of Twisty Little Passages all Different, was edited by Daniel Cockburn and Jon Davies, and included five commissioned essays by video artists Steve Reinke and Emily Vey Duke, author Sheila Heti, filmmaker Spencer Parsons, and theoretical physicist Lee Smolin.^[5][13]