This talk marked the beginning of two months of magic at the Studio. Our magicians in residence, Kieron Kirkland and Stuart Nolan each have exciting visions for the future of magic. They will be collaborating with the Interaction and Graphics lab at Bristol University, and will be showcasing the outcome of their residencies on 4 December, where we can expect wonderful things. Both spoke for half an hour each about innumerable topics including mind reading birds, Star Wars, and a Vaudeville crystal ball seer who was richer than the Beatles.

Belief and the Mechanics

At the very beginning of the talk, Kieron produced a small black pouch from his pocket, from which emerged five Lego Star Wars figures; Princess Leia, Admiral Ackbar, C3PO, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. He asked five members of the audience to come up and blindly pick a figure from the pouch. Whilst exclaiming that Darth Vader was taking over the mind and body of the person who was holding him, he proceeded to scour the faces of the volunteers, whittling them down to the person holding the Dark Lord. Kieron’s narrative kept our eyes glued to the stage. After the trick, he explained to us that there are two elements to magic: the belief and the mechanics. Integral to this is the narrative; the storytelling and the performance of a magician, but this is not the only component of illusion. Something that has been a consistent counterpart to this in the history of magic has been technology. Many of the world’s most celebrated magicians have been wonderfully talented innovators.

Kieron then took us on a whistlestop tour through the history of magic, from the Far-East’s influence on late 19th - early 20th Century magic, to the spoon bending Uri Geller In the 1990s. The most notable of the magicians he mentioned were Vaudeville ‘psychic’ Alexander the Crystal Seer, and 19th Century Watchmaker and Conjurer, Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. Both of these incredible characters developed their own ground-breaking technologies to use in their magic shows. Alexander the Crystal Seer developed a number of electrical stage effects, which helped bring him such huge acclaim that he earned multiple millions of dollars, meaning that he was richer than the Beatles in his time. Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin became interested in the world of magic after mistakenly borrowing two books from a library that were on magic and not watchmaking. His skills as a watchmaker led him to craft the most astounding mechanisms, such as the ‘mystery clock’ with no moving parts and an orange tree that flowered and bore ripening fruit on stage. These two magicians were so successful because their performances united a fascination for technology and the construction of mechanisms with boundless imagination; the balance of belief and mechanics.

While here, Kieron will be organising the world’s first (or so we think) magic hack, in which creative technologists and magicians will come together to share their knowledge and create the seedlings for spectacular magic using new technologies.

The Ideobird

Stuart began his talk with two quotes:

“The best magic happens in the hands”
“All magic happens in the mind.”

Agreeing with both of these statements, Stuart quelled any further confusion by telling us that he is interested in a kind of magic that concerns the mind and the body at the same time. In relation to this, he told us a story:

There once was a skinny, wily fox and a fat, naïve hen. Every night in the barn where the hen slept, the fox would sneak in and try to eat the hen, whereupon the hen would fly up to the rafters to escape. One night, the fox ran in quick circles below the bird. Watching, the hen became dizzy, fell from the rafters and was promptly eaten by the fox.

Why did the hen fall? Cognitive science’s answer to this would be Common Coding Theory. This theory finds a links between our perceptual representations (seeing or hearing) with our motor representations (moving) so that perception is a means to action and action is a means to perception. For example, if you practise taking a serve in tennis, the body and brain will fire up in order for you to do so. The same can be said when you think about taking a serve in tennis; your body and brain mirror each other in thought as well as in action.

As a practical test to this theory, Stuart had provided us all with pendulums. He asked us all to hold these out in front of us and to picture them swinging. Lo and behold, despite keeping still, our pendulums began to swing. When asked to picture them swinging in circles instead of from side to side, the pendulums did exactly this. It felt strangely alien, as though something was operating through us. Stuart explained that past experiments have proved that the movement of the pendulum is down to micro muscle movements, as when the arm and hand is clamped, the pendulum does not swing. These discreet movements are subconsciously linked with what we see or what we picture in our minds. In the next test, we watched a video of metronomes ticking to see if it affected the swing of our pendulum. Watching us all, Stuart picked out Zoe as the most receptive pendulum swinger from the audience.

This is the point at which we met Ideobird; an enigmatic little latex creature (with its own twitter account) who perches atop a simple black box. Using delicate sensors, the bird reads the kind of micro-muscle movements that spookily moved our pendulums. When Zoe imagined the bird nodding, it gave a ‘yes’ beep, and when she pictured the bird wagging from side to side it gave a game show style ‘no’ buzz. Zoe soon became fluent in Ideobird, swiftly answering yes or no questions, effectively with her mind.

Stuart told us that because using the Ideobird to answer questions works on a kind of subconscious level, it taps into sensitive information, gathered by us, that we perhaps cannot reach when answering questions on a conscious, vocal level. He told us of an experiment at the University of British Columbia, in which participants were quizzed yes or no questions, and had to answer first by typing yes or no into a computer, and then by using a Ouija board. The participants were asked which answers they knew, and which they guessed at. On a computer, an average of 50% of the guessed answers were correct. On a Ouija board, an average of 65% of these answers were correct. The Ouija board channels the ‘inner zombie’, allowing a hunch to be expressed through subconscious micro-muscle movements.

For Zoe and the Ideobird’s grand finale, they were asked to turn their backs while a member of the audience gave zoe’s watch in secret to another audience member to hide. When the watch was out of sight, Zoe turned round and paced up and down the aisle, asking the Ideobird whether the culprit was a man or a woman, wore glasses or not, had a beard, was sitting in this row or that row, etc. Despite leading her off course here and there, the more questions that Zoe asked the Ideobird, the closer she got to finding her watch, until eventually, she found exactly the man who had it. The whole thing was riveting. When asked what the future held for the bright yellow little Ideobird, Stuart disclosed his plans for a potential app, a game mechanism, and entering the 2015 World Championships of Magic in Rimini.

Open Source Magic

At the end of the talks, an interesting conversation sprung up about the possible dilemma of an open source magic movement. Having magic open source would be a brilliant way to keep it current in our culture of information-sharing and online communities. The question is: would this do a disservice to the magic industry? Both Stuart and Kieron argued that there should be a distinction between the method and the delivery in magic. Access to the secrets of illusion is no new thing; a book was published at the end of the 19th Century that revealed the mechanisms behind all the illusions of the time. The story a magician tells is so important. For the audience member, magic is about the suspension of disbelief and becoming immersed in a performance. Perhaps the problem facing magic at the moment is that there is too much focus on the secret.

Over the next few months in the studio, there will certainly be no secrets kept while magicians and technologists alike share their knowledge and expertise in order to develop some truly innovative magic. They will be sharing everything they make and learn here on their blog.