Re: <nettime> David Cox's obit

[jo van der spek M2M via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Nice one. Gaat ie vooruit?Jo van der Spek M2MT: +31651069318

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NL1094BG Amsterdam

http://schipholbrand.net
-------- Oorspronkelijk bericht --------Van: Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> Datum: 15-09-2026  09:17  (GMT+01:00) Aan: nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> Cc: Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl> Onderwerp: <nettime> David Cox's obit > 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 SignalBy Patrick LichtyDavid Albert Cox, filmmaker, writer, teacher, culture jammer, and to a generation of ussimply @puppenhead died in late June.Those of us who came up through the tactical media moment knew David as one of itsgenuine polymaths, a figure who moved between Melbourne, London, and SanFrancisco the way his work moved between celluloid, code, and the street. Born inKingswinford, Staffordshire in 1963 and trained at Swinburne's Rusden film school inMelbourne, David made his name as a filmmaker with Puppenhead (1990), a German Expressionistnightmare about a puppet-maker under Nazi surveillance in 1934 Berlin — It was film that already containedeverything he would spend the next three decades unpacking: the automaton, theconstructed 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, constructivistlogic predicting the digital industrial complex that would swallow us all.I knew him through the circuits — Other Cinema, where he collaborated with CraigBaldwin on O No Coronado!; Otherzine, where his writing carried the same wit as hisfilms; the culture jamming lineage documented in Sign Wars: The Culture JammersStrike Back, a book that ran parallel to the detournements some of us were staging withRTMark in those same years. We also ran into each other at events like AugmentedWorld Expo, as we were part of the eternal digital fringe. We were fellow travelers in thebelief that media was not something to consume but something to seize, redirect, andtest against the real.What resonates with me now is David's refusal of the single channel. He was afilmmaker who wrote, a critic who worked in the game industry, an opera-maker whotaught storyboarding at City College of San Francisco and design at San Francisco State.With his wife and collaborator Molly Hankwitz he formed Archimedia and laterBivoulab, and even ventured into the Veillance Foundation briefly (with this author), thinking throughthe 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: hisbooks and films were about how people are mediated by technologies that acts asextensions of themselves. McLuhan by way of Tatlin, with a puppet's articulated grin. Ialways identified with this part of David’s practice.Anyone who sat in his classrooms or his kitchen conversations knows he treatedstudents and peers with the same generous assumption — that you, too, were buildingsomething, 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 withoutever losing its source: a deep, humane suspicion of the machinery, held by someone wholoved the machinery anyway. He is survived by Molly, his son Simon Cox, his collaborators, his students, and every jammed sign still standing.-- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: https://www.nettime.org# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org
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