Review of Cognition Pt. 2

24 May '09

A review of Cognition Pt.2 featuring my piece, Duet for Vibraphone and Computer appeared in City News, October 2008.

The review is here. And here’s an excerpt:

Working under the deliberately paradoxical theme “We come in peace, shoot to kill”, “Hunting Season” is the second stage in this series of collaborative cross-arts performances by and for young Canberrans.

“Cognition 2” is quite different from “Cognition 1” by the same team, seen at Belconnen Theatre a month ago. In this case, a series of TV screens, most of them featuring images and brain scans of cats, interact with “Gongs and Augmented Vibraphone,” a percussion and computer music work created by ANU masters student Charles Martin.  

Martin rightly sees this performance as a duet between human and computer musicians, but it is no less a duet between music and live actors. On stage are Cameron Thomas as ringmaster, Luke Ashe as an artist who thinks better of his self-portrait, Hannah Cormick in a tulle skirt, her brains exposed and Emma Gibson as an enticingly pregnant female figure who bursts her womb and spills out, among other things, money. It is intended by the performers to be a garden of experience – and it’s certainly that.