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Whatsapp Technology has changed magic, but are magicians changing technology?

Technology is quickly changing the world of magic, as illusionists incorporate everything from iPads to digital projection in their acts. Some magicians, however, object to the use of devices in performances. So when does digital trickery take the magic out of magic? Antony Funnell investigates.

Science fiction supremo Arthur C. Clarke once declared: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. But does the analogy work the other way around?

Techno-illusionists like the internationally renowned Marco Tempest argue magicians and illusionists need to embrace new technologies in order to stay relevant to a modern, digital audience.

'I'm a cyber-illusionist or techno-illusionist,' says Tempest, 'which means I combine magic and science to create illusions. You could think of it as magic for the 21st century.'

We've got this really rich history of magic and technology going together. The whole point behind doing a magic trick is you're trying to shape and control people's behaviour. And, at the heart of technology, that's what it's about as well.

As part of his routine, Tempest employs augmented reality, robotics and even projection mapping and tracking. But while the technology he harnesses is state-of-the-art, and his act is often spectacular, he's cautious about the notion that what he does on stage is revolutionary.

'Magicians have been using robots for 200 years,' he says. 'They had robots which would draw pictures of celebrities and would read minds and play cards.'

In fact, one of the most famous pieces of illusion of all time involved an 18th century Hungarian named Wolfgang Von Kempelen and an 'automaton' or robot he created called the Mechanical Turk.

Von Kempelen's machine appeared to be able to think for itself and play high-level chess. It was, in fact, an elaborate hoax, but it was so convincing to all who saw it, including the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa, that Von Kempelen quickly won international fame.

That historic connection between advanced technology and magic is something that resonates with leading UK-based magician Kieron Kirkland.

Kirkland, who recently spent time as 'magician in residence' for the Watershed Media Centre and the University of Bristol describes magic as the oldest form of interaction design.

'We've got this really rich history of magic and technology going together. The whole point behind doing a magic trick is you're trying to shape and control people's behaviour. And, at the heart of technology, that's what it's about as well.'

'My favourite magician of all time was a guy called Jean Robert-Houdin who was initially a French watch-maker and then became a magician in his mid-30s. He is known as the father of modern magic. So there's lots of learning from hundreds of years of doing really amazing magic tricks that could be picked up and used in technological design and technology build.'

But while the techno-illusionists are gaining ever greater prominence in the world of magic, both Tempest and Kirkland readily acknowledge that many magicians are suspicious of technology, particularly its digital forms. What's more, the craft as a whole, they say, has lagged behind in its understanding of the potential of new technologies. Kirkland attributes part of the reason for that reticence to modern consumer culture.

'We stopped making things ourselves and we became used to consumerism. I think that's affected magic as much as anything else. People would happily pick up and buy a trick or a prop but they wouldn't necessarily make it themselves, whereas if you go back to stuff before the 1950s, a lot of it was about describing how you would make your own props.'

So if change is afoot, what factors are influencing it? Tempest believes it's a situation of both push and pull; this new wave of magicians, he argues, are embracing digital technologies because of the opportunities they represent, but also because of the necessity of staying relevant and fresh in a rapidly changing marketplace.

'As in any industry, in magic we have huge shifts now. It's like the way the music business has changed so dramatically in the last couple of years—live performance is changing dramatically. A lot of the venues where magicians can perform regularly have disappeared. There are only a few outposts like Las Vegas or Atlantic City where you can regularly perform. So magicians who want to do this as a profession, they are looking for ways to make income.'

Out of that change has sprung a movement committed to what's being called 'open source' magic. Open source, Tempest explains, not in the sense of simply giving away secrets, but in having an approach to magic that fosters a greater sense of audience engagement and interaction.

'In one of my pieces, for example, I wear a set of head-mounted displays with a camera and I show my audience what would happen in the mind of a magician when he does something as simple as a card trick. And we use augmented reality to show things which are not visible to the naked eye.'

'In another piece I use three iPods to tell the story about truth and lies and if deception is something which might be good sometimes. And I use a special piece of software for that, which we created which synchronises the iPods and makes them into interconnected movie screens.'

Another dimension to the push for open source magic involves building interdisciplinary relationships between magicians, scientists and technologists. Tempest is now a Director's Fellow with the influential MIT Media Lab in Massachusetts, while Kirkland recently staged the world's first magic hack.

'The idea behind doing a magic hack was to really explode the possibilities for technology and magic,' says Kirkland. 'We live in this incredible world where technology is moving so fast, and magic isn't taking advantage of that because magic is a closed community.'

The magic hack ran over several days last November and brought together magicians, scientists and technologists in a series of collaborative workshops. But Kirkland is adamant that the event wasn't just designed for magicians; the rewards, he says, ran both ways.

'From a technology perspective, the way that you think as a magician, I think that's a really brilliant thing to try and fold into the work that's happening with technology.'

'There were some brilliant projects that came out of the magic hack. We had a mind-reading gong. There were balloons that exploded just with the power of your mind. We had a voodoo doll that if you squeezed it the magician felt the pain, even though he was in a different room.'

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Like Kirkland, Tempest also sees benefits for technologists in working more closely with illusionists.

'It's definitely back and forth I think. The wonderful thing in open source, and that's true for the work with the Media Lab as well, is that it's give-and-take,' he says.

'Magic, due to its introversion, has an amazing kind of secretive publishing industry which has gone on for more than 200 years, where there are tens of thousands of books and pieces of knowledge which you will not find on Google Books, and which has never been liberally interfaced with other fields of research. So, bringing together psychologists and magicians, or roboticists and magicians, artificial intelligence people and magicians, could bring results which could be unexpected and might influence the trajectory of some of these fields just through collaboration with magicians.'

'That can manifest as further development of existing technologies or a way to tell the story of a technology or add a piece of visionary magic to a developing technology and bring that back into the pipeline.'

But can an over-reliance on the power of new technologies inadvertently undermine magic?

Berlin-based illusionist Simon Pierro describes himself as a practitioner of 'digital magic'. His act relies heavily on the use of an iPad—integrating the traditional tricks employed by magicians, such as sleight-of-hand, with applications he's specifically developed for his tablet device.

Pierro says he discovered the limitations of technology several years ago when he tried to incorporate an augmented reality platform into his act. He argues that his audience's lack of awareness about the nature of augmented reality—and crucially, what it could and could not do—made it difficult for them to tell which parts of his act was simply technology at work and which parts were magic. The result, he says, was that many people assumed it was simply all technology and that, in turn, diminished the impact of his illusion.

'It's very tricky because on the one hand you can put something into the reality that you can't see with your own eyes, but at the same time it is something that makes other magic tricks less believable, because the moment you can make things appear that aren't there, the audience will always think, even though you are doing the best magic trick, that you might be using a technology that is projecting something. There is a thin line that you walk on.'

According to Pierro, the secret to incorporating advanced technology into a magician's work is to work with a form of technology that the audience is familiar and comfortable with. If they don't understand the device, they won't appreciate when the magician makes that device do something it shouldn't be able to do; in other words, when they use it to create magic.

The magic of technology Techno-illusionists like Marco Tempest argue magicians need to embrace new technologies in order to stay relevant to a 21st Century audience.

Kirkland agrees: 'For magic to exist, it has to exist in someone's mind, and so the question really is how do you get it into their head, how do you make them believe that it could be possible? And the way you do that is by using things they are familiar with and places they are familiar with. That's why we used to do magic with packs of cards, because everyone had them in their house. Today people are doing magic with iPhones, iPads or office equipment, because that's where people live their lives at the moment. So it's really about technology being a site for magic to happen as much as anything else.'

Another magician who's cautious about his craft becoming too fixated on modern digital technologies is Will Houstoun. Houstoun has written several books on illusion and is currently completing a PhD on Victorian magic. He also edits the journal of Britain's premier professional organisation for magicians, The Magic Circle.

'Magic taps into something that's rather primitive and rather fundamental,' he says. 'For example, you could pick up a coin, make it disappear and then make it reappear somewhere else, and that would be a very, very interesting thing to see several hundred years ago and a very interesting thing today.'

'There are a lot of tricks you can download for an iPhone, for example. If you go into the App Store and look for them you'll find dozens of the things. But there is a core problem with all of them that I don't think I've seen anyone overcome, which is that for something to be a really good magic trick, a really magical, wonderful type experience, you have to not only not know how it's done, you have to not think it's possible to happen.'

'So you have to be very, very careful because as soon as somebody goes, “Oh yeah, it's just a clever piece of technology. Oh yes, it's just a clever app,” even though that isn't really explaining the trick in a nuts-and-bolts, this-is-how-it-works sense, that is more than enough to be a satisfactory explanation. And if an audience has a satisfactory explanation, then the sense of wonder is lost.'

According to Houstoun, the focus for any magician keen on integrating a new technology into their performance should always be around how it aids presentation. How it allows a trick to be better presented in a more contemporary light.

'You can find lots of records in the 17th century, for example, of people presenting a magic show with reference to witchcraft. If you did that today, that would be ridiculous,' says Houstoun. 'On the other hand, if you do a trick today and you talk about it using neurolinguistic programming and body language-based skills, those are topics which are of particular interest to people nowadays, and they are also topics with which people are familiar, but not overly familiar.

'You could use that to present a magic trick today in a way that is relevant. So the core trick itself might well be staying the same for 500 years and just the gloss that you're putting on it through your presentation is the thing that changes.'

Exploring new ideas, new approaches, new technologies—the edge of change. Future Tense analyses the social, cultural and economic fault lines arising from rapid transformation..



