Works

Super_Human, 2021 (for violin, cello, interactive audio and projected video), c.45'

Super_Human is a concert-length work for violin, cello, interactive audio and projected video, where the instrumental and electronic parts combine unpredictably to discuss the relationship between technology, control and creativity.

In this post-digital era, pervasive technology informs our worldview and our assumed technological prowess. We are each like a later-day King Canute, commanding the (viral) tides to be still. Like Doctor Frankenstein, we invent then destroy new life forms; and in the heavens, instead of images of the divine, we see man-made constellations, like Starlink, connecting us to a new mythology. Even that most human of impulses, the creative act, has become a drudgery to be conquered and automated by artificial intelligence.

In this age of super-human feats, what does it mean to create, to shape, or to control the world around us? What do our creations say about us? What would they say if spoke to us? Would they, like Frankenstein's creature, bite back accusingly at their creator and condemn us for our arrogance? Will our creations ultimately prove, like Canute, that even kings (and billionaires) are only human?

In Super_Human the live instrumentalists trigger and interact with computer sounds and computer processes. Sometimes these events are closely coupled, sometimes the connection is less clear, but the impression remains of a changing ambiguous relationship between the live and simulated. At times, the computer part seems to take on a life of its own and to emerge beyond the control of the musicians. At the same time, the instrumentalists seem to provoke recorded voices into a fitful barbed outbursts, as if goading the hidden voices to comment on the unfolding music.

The musical material of warped harmonic series are overlaid, projected and refolded around the instrumental parts. The resulting harmonies seem to contradict, and be contradicted, the computer-generated parts; impossible instrumental parts appear, as if the music is cannibalising itself and reassembling itself at the moment of sounding, as if the music refuses to obey the musicians, or refuses to be created.

Michael Cummins, violin
Ilse de Ziah, cello
Frank Corcoran, vocal recordings
Cormac Plunkett Walsh, vocal recordings and acting
Mihai Cucu, video recording and projection

Thanks to Mark O'Brien, Niamh Ní Chonchubhair and Aifric Ní Ruairc at Axis Ballymun for their production support.