<nettime> David Cox's obit

[Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

> From: Patrick Lichty <patlichty@gmail.com>
> Subject: David's obit, nettine.
> Date: 14 September 2026 at 20:56:29 GMT+2
> To: Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>
> 
> Geert,
> If you can post that to Nettime, I'd appreciate it.
> I tried myself through your link, but Molly hankwitz didnlt see,
> I just want to make sure it goes up.
> 
> More soon.

--

David Cox (1963–2026):
The Puppet-Maker's Signal
By Patrick Lichty

David Albert Cox, filmmaker, writer, teacher, culture jammer, and to a generation of us
simply @puppenhead died in late June.

Those of us who came up through the tactical media moment knew David as one of its
genuine polymaths, a figure who moved between Melbourne, London, and San
Francisco the way his work moved between celluloid, code, and the street. Born in
Kingswinford, Staffordshire in 1963 and trained at Swinburne's Rusden film school in
Melbourne, David made his name as a filmmaker with Puppenhead (1990), a German Expressionist
nightmare about a puppet-maker under Nazi surveillance in 1934 Berlin — It was film that already contained
everything he would spend the next three decades unpacking: the automaton, the
constructed self, and the machinery of ideology given a face. Otherzone (1995) investigated the 
same in the context of cyberpunk Melbourne. It is live action fused with 3D animation, constructivist
logic predicting the digital industrial complex that would swallow us all.

I knew him through the circuits — Other Cinema, where he collaborated with Craig
Baldwin on O No Coronado!; Otherzine, where his writing carried the same wit as his
films; the culture jamming lineage documented in Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers
Strike Back, a book that ran parallel to the detournements some of us were staging with
RTMark in those same years. We also ran into each other at events like Augmented
World Expo, as we were part of the eternal digital fringe. We were fellow travelers in the
belief that media was not something to consume but something to seize, redirect, and
test against the real.

What resonates with me now is David's refusal of the single channel. He was a
filmmaker who wrote, a critic who worked in the game industry, an opera-maker who
taught storyboarding at City College of San Francisco and design at San Francisco State.
With his wife and collaborator Molly Hankwitz he formed Archimedia and later
Bivoulab, and even ventured into the Veillance Foundation briefly (with this author), thinking through
the overlaps of digital media, film, and urban space.  The city itself was another screen,
another site of mediation. His own take on his practice was characteristically direct: his
books and films were about how people are mediated by technologies that acts as
extensions of themselves. McLuhan by way of Tatlin, with a puppet's articulated grin. I
always identified with this part of David’s practice.

Anyone who sat in his classrooms or his kitchen conversations knows he treated
students and peers with the same generous assumption — that you, too, were building
something, and he wanted to see it. I was taught that a practice is a long signal, transmitted 
across decades and formats, degrading and reconstituting. David's signal ran from Super 8 to immersion without
ever losing its source: a deep, humane suspicion of the machinery, held by someone who
loved the machinery anyway. He is survived by Molly, his son Simon Cox, his collaborators, 
his students, and every jammed sign still standing.


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