Cog-neato or Cog-NOT-o?
/That post title is why I get the big bucks.
I’ve received a few emails along these lines…
Do you have any thoughts on the new Cognito app? It seems like it could be a useful tool. Have you messed around with it yet? Have any plans for how you’ll use it? —SC
No, I haven’t played around with it yet. But my friend owns it and I’ve learned the workings and seen it in action this past weekend.
My initial thoughts are these:
There’s a lot of really intelligent ideas built into this app.
It’s a very fair price for the app.
The app can be used for many different types of effects.
I will definitely buy the app.
I probably won’t use it that often.
The app allows you to know what someone is thinking from some finite group of items (playing cards, astrological signs, or whatever else you want) without them ever saying or writing down what they’re thinking. There is a fairly extensive process involved, and that is I think the primary weakness of the app. Not that there is a process. I like process. I have a whole performance style based on highlighting process. But here the process involves a whole lot of focus and energy put into the phone. This is kind of an abstract concept, but ideally you want the “energy” of a presentation to be flowing between the performer and spectator (making the trick seem more interpersonal and connective), or flowing outward into your surroundings (making the trick feel more expansive). What’s not ideal is a trick that focuses so much energy into looking at something on a phone screen over and over.
And some of these tricks do require a lot of focus. There is a pretty cool “card” trick (done without any cards) built into the app. My friend tried this on maybe a dozen different people when I was with him and it had about a 50% success rate. The trick relies on the spectator accurately doing something that’s fairly easy to fail at, and it requires them to do it multiple times. If he had “managed” his audience better and took it much slower, he probably would have had a better success rate. But we weren’t in the environment where that made sense.
My advice is to buy the app, because I think there’s going to be a handful of really great ideas that can only be done with this app. I saw the facebook group for this and there are some interesting ideas floating around there already that are using the app in completely different ways. But for every interesting ideas, there are a bunch of shitty ideas that only seem good because they’re taking advantage of some clever aspect of the app. People are getting swept up by the methods rather than the ultimate effect. The truth is that there are going to be very, very few presentations where the process required for the effect to work makes any sense at all. “Come look at my photo collages of Marvel movie posters that I have on my phone for some reason! One after another, after another, after another, after another, after another. Pause for a while and think whenever your chosen movie appears in the collage. And I’ll guess wha it is. ” That’s not good magic, even if the person doesn’t know how it’s done.
If your only goal is knowing what someone is thinking from a group of items without the person ever saying or speaking its name, then a much better option for that purpose is Xeno by Marc Kerstein. It’s one of my favorite apps and completely underrated, in my opinion. It gets you off the phone and onto whatever your mind-reading presentation or process is immediately, without the spectator saying anything, writing anything down, or even indicating anything, as they would have to do (in one form or another) with Cognito.
I’m trying not to sound negative about Cognito, because I do think it’s a good app. The problem is, like many good apps, it will be tempting to overuse it. I would just be cognizant of if a given effect is truly best done with this app.
As for how I’ll use it, I haven’t given it that much thought yet. I’ll let you know if I come up with any good ideas. What I’d like to do, although it would take some effort, is throw a small party and have my friends help me with the pictures I would use in the effect. Then afterwards I could approach someone who wasn’t there and show them some pictures of the party. (A normal thing to have on your camera roll as opposed to… say… a bunch of maps of the United States with different states arbitrarily colored in.) I’d have my friend think of anyone who was at the party, then go through the photos and anytime there was a picture with that person it it, they would pause and try to send a thought, or connect in some mental way to that person. At the end of the photo roll they’d find a photo of the one person they were thinking of holding a sign that says something like, “Thanks for thinking of me. I’ve been thinking of you too. A creepy amount. A lot of it is perverted.” Or something along those lines.