Video

You are Here

Daniel Cockburn

2010, 78:00 minutes, colour, English

TAPECODE 209.18

Do you suffer under the tyranny of Twitter? Is your life story written in status updates? Are your thoughts search engine optimized? When you picture the future, do you imagine Mark Zuckerberg’s sneaker stomping on a human face—forever? If so, you may find comfort in You are Here, Daniel Cockburn’s playfully puzzling debut feature. ...

Perhaps best described as a droll philosophical sketch comedy, the film is an imaginative, often clever reaction to our crippling dependency on information technologies. Under Cockburn’s laser eye, the high-tech world becomes fodder for low-tech surrealism: an archive that may or may not be alive, a call centre that acts like an analog version of FourSquare, a devious genius that tricks the world into only seeing through his eyes. ...

Of course, it would be easy for a film about technology to turn cold and inhuman, but Cockburn wisely leaves room for the pathos of characters like the Archivist—a sensitive performance by the late, great Tracy Wright. ...

When our brains become but fleshy outlets for the app store, this film may be fondly recalled as the manifesto of the human resistance. — Kino in Purgatory

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Critical Writing

Time Being: The Moving Images of Daniel Cockburn
by Tom McSorley. Canadian Film Institute, 2013.
Explosion in the Machine: Essays and Documents on Toronto Artists'...
by Chris Gehman. Toronto: Images Festival, 2013.
Daniel Cockburn: You Are Here
by David Balzer. Canadian Art, Aug. 18, 2011.