Open House residency at Canberra Youth Theatre

My residency with Last Man to Die at Canberra Youth Theatre is finished. We developed heaps of great ideas for our new works in 2010 and put on a fun performance on the 9th of December.

Vital LMTD at the Street Theatre

I've finished a season of Vital LMTD at the Street Theatre in Canberra with Last Man to Die. We performed five shows from 24th - 30th of October and had a great time! Review here.

In this show, Hanna Cormick, Benjamin Forster and myself take the roles of aristocratic scientists (from the future?). As we argue over the definition, meaning and creation of life, we explain our ideas through pieces that combine all of our artforms, creating unexpected interactions and fun experiments into acting, visual art and percussion.

The show featured beautiful projected visualisations by Benjamin, as well as live drawing (mark making?) on an overheard projector; innovative mask theatre and live mask creation by Hanna; and electronic percussion and soundtracks by myself on MalletKat, electronic drumset, Ableton Live, Apple Mainstage, Pure Data and SuperCollider.

For myself and Benjamin, this show was a huge experiment in synchronising gestures and events between the computer based parts of our artforms, our computers were constantly in contact via OSC messages so that we could react to events in the other's artwork. Many of the props in the show also became controllers through the use of our computer vision surface (running ReacTIVision), a Wiimote and the Arduino Heartbeat Sensor. I'm still slightly amazed that we got through the season without any serious train-wreck errors or other serious mistakes on stage. A lot of credit for this should go to our helpful directors/friends Michael Bailey and David Shaw as well as our friends at Belconnen Arts Centre who provided an excellent deal on a studio for two weeks of intensive development!

+ Special thankyou our audience and many new friends who engaged us with great questions!

Performance at the Hughes Festival of Music!

On Friday, I performed with Chi-Hsia Lai and Veronica Walshaw at the Hughes Festival of Music - in a bakery! The programme was:

• Duet for Vibraphone and Computer - Charles Martin
• Hands on Stage ^2 - Chi-Hsia Lai and Charles Martin
• Libertango - Eric Sammut
• Djilile - Peter Sculthorpe
• Electric Counterpoint - Steve Reich
• Descendo a Serra
• Tropical Feeling - Nebojsa Zivkovic
• Ghanaian Bells - Gary France

A bit tricky to fit a marimba, malletkat, computer vision surface and other percussion instruments into the venue but we did it!

Graduation Recital

I performed my final recital for the Master of Music course at the ANU School of Music in July.

The video is available here.

The program was:

1. Rebonds B + A - Iannis Xenakis
2. Losing Touch - Edmund Campion
3. Zeichnung - Fritz Hauser
4. Time for Marimba - Minoru Miki
5. Music for Snare Drum and Computer - Cort Lippe
6. Kalabash - Nigel Westlake

Sounding the Glassworks

Charles at `Sounding the Glassworks'
Source: CIMF Photos

Review of Cognition Pt. 2

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.

Show at the Front!

I played tonight at the Front! Fun! My setup was vibraphone and Ableton Live + Pd.

Blogged here.

Recordings:

1. Duet for Vibraphone and Computer
2. Electric Counterpoint (Steve Reich)

Abstraktions Show at The Front, 20th May 2009

I'm playing at an Abstraktions Show at The Front on Wednesday the 20th of May! Shoeb Ahmad of HelloSquare recordings and Spartak runs these shows every month. Always some great music and interesting artists both local and brought in from interstate. Sometimes even from overseas. It's a small venue though, so the room is usually packed.

I'm going to play my improvised piece called "Duet for Vibraphone and Computer".

Fitter's Workshop

The Fitter's Workshop is a strange place. Click for big.

In2Change performance this Friday!

I'm performing at In2Change - an artistic response to urban renewal in Belconnen at the Belconnen bus interchange, Friday 22nd April, 6pm.

Lisa Lai and I are playing an ambient duo, `Music for Bus Interchanges', she's playing her Hands On Stage instrument and using Supercollider while I'm playing my field and percussion recordings in Ableton Live with my keyboard controller.

Cognition Part 2 - This week at Street 2!

Cognition Part 2 is being performed this week in Street 2 at the Street Theatre, Canberra. There are shows on Wednesday 15th - Saturday 18th of October at 8:30pm and on Saturday afternoon at 2pm.

The show is a live gallery of four dramatic installations. I'm performing soundtracks for each installation on percussion and computer. A special feature of my performance is the debut of my computer-augmented vibraphone project, using the Pd environment to analyse sound in real time and control a computer backing.

We're also using Pd and Gem for interactive visuals that are incorporated into the performance.

Tickets are $8. Here's my setup:

Review of Cognition in City News!

A review by Helen Musa appears in the 24th September 2008 edition of City News. The relevant excerpt is here:

"Hunting season 08”

Belconnen Theatre, September 17-21.
Reviewed by Helen Musa

Devisers of “The Hunting Season”, a multi-faceted multi-media youth arts project, have threatened to “track down and murder the arts scenes of this city”. And sure enough, “Cognition: Part 1,” the first work in the project’s continuing theatre season, throws out a challenge to those of us living in the Brave New World.
A girl (Hannah Cormick) contemplates selling her soul on eBay. Instead, she puts her brain on the internet, deleting it the next morning, though all-too-aware that her innermost thoughts are now out there in cyberspace. A young man (Michael Ellis) addresses us directly. He loves us; he hates us. Then his deepest thoughts are interrupted by his mobile phone.
The girl scrapes her feet and rolls the dice as she tells us of three deaths caused by computers. The man moves in synergy with computer writing and live music on an upstage video screen. Clearly and cleanly, the seven talented creators of “Cognition: Part 1” delineate “the disquieting consequences for humanity” of new technologies. And the worst possibility of all? A supercomputer might delete all memory of us.

Read the full article here.
Thanks for the great comments Helen!

Cognition

Cognition is an audio/visual performance inspired by the possibilities and consequences for humanity of near-future technologies.

Human reliance on technology to augment our lives is inescapable. Our pre-human ancestors used simple digging and cutting tools, large-scale societies are due to the emergence of agriculture and domesticated animals, and now, among other advancements, world-wide computer networks have allowed instantaneous and near perfect communication for much of the human race. This technology has become ubiquitous within a single human life span.
Such fantastic progress in only a few short decades has prompted some futurists to predict that in a few decades, computers will be advanced enough to connect to a human brain directly or even to upload and simulate a human mind. Could we live forever inside a computer?
Another striking prediction is the idea of a singularity of technological advancement. If it took humanity thousands of years to develop agriculture, hundreds to develop efficient worldwide transport, decades to develop miniature electronic circuits and only a few years to develop ubiquitous computer networks, what next? The singularity is when our rate of technological advancement has increased to infinity. Will we have truly sentient computers? A complete understanding of genetics and our own biochemistry? Any of these possible technologies would have disquieting consequences for humanity.
Cognition has been created by the Hunting Season 2008's cross-artform collaborators. We are actors, musicians, programmers, sculptors, visual artists and writers who have been generously invited to create a unique performance that combines elements of all of our skills and experiences.

Creators:
Hanna Cormick - movement, vocals
Michael Ellis - movement, vocals
Benjamin Forster - live visuals
Emma Gibson - writing
Charles Martin - improvised and pre-recorded music
Sally McKittrick - costume design, sculpture, lullaby

David Shaw - lighting, set design and technical operation

Special Thanks:
Hunting Season Directors:
Ben Drysdale
Michael Bailey
Alley McGregor
Belconnen Community Services
ANU School of Music, New Media Laboratory

Other Collaborators:
Christina Hopgood - pre-recorded vocals

Hunting Season: Cognition 1

I'm putting together a cool show that will be on this week at Belconnen Arts Centre! It's called Cognition part 1 and it's part of the Hunting Season series of Arts Events in Canberra. Dates are September 17-20 at the Belconnen Theatre.