Magician and consultant Stuart Nolan visited the Studio recently to tell us about three key areas of work he has been involved with, giving us an idea of the variety of projects that he undertakes and an insight into how his background in magic has influenced his work in different roles.

Stuart has been practicing magic since the age of eight or nine and for the past decade he has been performing professionally, as well as working in a range of other capacities. This includes a position in the early 2000s as a marketing strategist and designer on campaigns for movies, games and events: helping to develop interface designs through the application of the underlying principles of magic.

Stuart explained that magic is a design form that draws upon technology, psychology and theatre to create immersive experiences, as well as being one of the oldest forms of interactive storytelling; often utilizing the concept of multiple endings to help sustain a sense of mystery.

This understanding fed into Stuart's design work for the V&A Museum, in which he sought ways to hold people's attention when they visited the Museum's displays and website. He studied the way that people moved around museums and, finding that their activity within such spaces was somewhat unorthodox, worked to develop ways of arranging exhibitions that would accommodate for unusual perambulatory habits.

He employed a similar understanding of audience behaviour in the creation of the promotional website for the film The Game, which presented the user with a personality test and randomly decided to exclude a proportion of people from accessing the website upon their completion of the test, thus creating a sense of intrigue about the undisclosed content by playing upon the user's potentially indignant response to such a refusal.

In 2002, Stuart was granted a funded Fellowship by NESTA, which he says changed his life and led to him doing the more cultural and social kinds of work that he really loves.

Discussing the connection between illusion design and futurology and the concept that magic tricks are seen as signposts towards the technologies of the future, Stuart refuted Arthur C. Clarke's statement that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" as both a tautology (in Stuart's words: "any sufficiently advanced carrot is indistinguishable from magic") and as being based upon cultural myths about "less developed" societies being awestruck when presented with technology.

Stuart told us about his work with teenagers, amongst whom he found that, although the language of science fiction and fantasy was employed as a framework to describe new technologies, there was a clear understanding that no inexplicable or "magical" forces were at work behind technological processes; exemplifying how there is no sense of mystery fundamentally associated with technological advances.  

Stuart was asked to act as a consultant for the Interactivos? research and production platform run by Medialab-Prado in Madrid, which called for artists to come up with ideas for projects based around the theme of magic and for technologists to assist in making these ideas into realities.

He showed us some examples of the work that was produced as part of the scheme, including "abracadabra pata" by Carles Gutierrez, which allowed a person to insert their arm into a box and see it transformed into the limb of an animal; "mestre de las sombras" by Ricardo O'Nascimento, in which people could use a magic wand to control shadows and Francisco Castro's "tiempo maleable", an updated version of a classic illusion in which a water droplet appears to be suspended in the air due to the use of strobe lighting, with the observer's arm motions dictating the speed of the strobe and thus causing the perceived droplet to travel up or down. These works were shown at both art and magic festivals around the world; crossing over the barriers between different disciplines.   

Stuart explained that magicians see what they do as a form of art and that they tend to have a particular interest in the meanings and implications of certain aspects of events, as understanding the significance of permutations of a spectacle is a key element in the designing of mysteries. As part of his work on the Interactivos? scheme, Stuart was tasked with helping the artists to think more like magicians and so started a group named Beer and Awe, that met regularly in a local bar to discuss things that they found genuinely awe-inspiring: to share in a sense of wonder and reinvest meaning in the word "awesome". Swearing members to a magic oath, the group would perform and teach each other tricks and so help the artists to understand the enigmatic power that magic can have.

The Talk then moved to the topic of Sly-Chi, a system of attention control techniques that Stuart has been developing in collaboration with sports-people. Sly-Chi is named after the magician Tony Slydini (known as the Master of Misdirection) and the meditative, T'ai Chi-esque feeling that Stuart experienced when demonstrating misdirection manoeuvres at slow speed.

Stuart showed us a basic sleight-of-hand trick involving two tinfoil balls that appeared to pass imperceptibly between his closed hands and discussed how misdirection is a subtle art, the real trick of which is to make the audience unaware that they have been tricked.

The tinfoil ball trick exploits the human eye's propensity for predicting future events, jumping between spaces and backfilling in the mind to create the impression of continuous observation. It is the same function that allows sports-people to predict the path of a travelling rugby ball, for example. However, magicians can make use of the unobserved space to undermine the viewer's expectations and leave them baffled.

The workings of this trick fed into the development of a technique called "soft looking", which helps to improve the vision tracking skills of sports people by encouraging them to trust in their peripheral vision rather than focusing too intently on things (i.e. an incoming ball).

We were then asked by Stuart to each draw a quick sketch of a pig, some of which he analysed for us: telling us the significance of attributes such as the direction the pig is facing and the number of curls in its tail in relation to the artist's personality.

This kind of interpretation of the unconscious aspects of a person's actions and presenting truisms based upon these assessments as insights forms the basis of a technique known as "cold reading" that can be used by a magician to simulate psychic powers. This method was employed in a refined form by the vaudevillian magician Alexander, The Man Who Knows, who used to put on women-only shows during wartime that consisted of psychic readings and horoscope-style interpretations of audience members' lives.

Stuart told us about an experiment conducted by the American psychologist Bertram R. Forer, in which a Personality Test questionnaire was filled out by students and a uniform list of truisms, presented as individually-tailored evaluations of the students' responses, was given to them in return. This included statements such as "You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage" and "At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved".
 
When asked to rate the personality assessment for accuracy, the students gave an average score of 4.6 out of 5, a score that has since been approximately reproduced through thousands of repetitions of the experiment. This shows that a person's idea of a statement being specific to them can influence their willingness to accept it as correct and pertinent, however vague it may objectively appear.

Looking at the list of statements that made up the false personality evaluation, Stuart felt that they seemed very similar to business strategies and so decided to reenact the experiment using companies instead of individuals. He sent "Company Psychology Evaluation Matrix" questionnaires to companies, offering a free analysis of their business model and sent an edited version of Forer's false evaluation back to the 650 companies that replied.

When asked to give a percentage rating of the assessment's accuracy, the companies gave it an average of 87% and when subsequently asked if they would like follow-up advice based upon the evaluation, 89% of the companies said "Yes". Stuart then provided further truistic "can't fail" advice to these companies and asked them if they would be interested in paying him for some consultancy work, with 54% saying "Yes" again.

Interestingly, Stuart found that when he let companies know how they were being tricked, many of them would offer to pay him to help them avoid having someone else pull a similar con upon them, opening up yet another potential avenue of employment on his multifarious and magical career path.

If you’d like to find out more about Stuart’s work, visit: www.hexinduction.com  

Lunchtime Talks are an ongoing series of presentations and discussions by Studio residents and associates. They take place at 13:00 on Fridays and are free and open to everybody who’s interested in what we do. For the full programme of talks, please visit: http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/events