All grownup craft depends on sustaining a frozen moment from childhood: scientists, it’s said, are forever four years old, wide-eyed and self-centered; writers are forever eight, over-aware and indignant. The magician is a permanent pre-adolescent. At least, all lives of magicians begin with a 12-year-old…—Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has a great article in the March 17th New Yorker called “The Real Work: Modern magic and the meaning of life.” It examines the intellectual side of magic: what magic is and what it’s about. No doubt because Gopnik is a writer and former art critic, I found that things he writes about magic have great relevance to the other arts, especially writing.

Quoting Jamy Ian Swiss on distractions:

Magic only ‘happens’ in a spectator’s mind….Everything else is a distraction. Magic talk on the Internet is a distraction. Magic contests are a distraction. Magic organizations are a distraction. The latest advertisement, the latest trick—distractions. Methods for their own sake are a distraction. You cannot cross over into the world of magic until you put everything else aside and behind you—including your own desires and needs—and focus on bringing an experience to the audience. This is magic. Nothing else.

On technique & transparency:

…the magician is one of the few true artists left on earth, for whom the mastery of technique means more than anything that might be gained by it. He center-deals but makes no money—doesn’t even win prestige points—because nobody knows he’s doing it.

…a magician’s technique must be invisible; if it became visible, we would be insulted by its obviousness. Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they’re smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility. The magician awakens us from the dogmatic slumbers of our daily life…

Quoting Teller on irony:

Magic is the most intrinsically ironic of all the arts…I don’t know what your definition of irony is, but mine is something where, when you are seeing it, you see it in two different and even contradictory ways at the same time. And with magic what you see collides with what you know. That’s why magic, even when merely executed, ends up having intellectual content. It’s intrinsic to the form.

Quoting Teller on illusion:

There’s a moment in your life when you realize the difference between illusion and reality and that you’re being lied to….Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. After my mother told me that there was no Santa Claus, I made up an entirely fictitious girl in my classroom and told my mother stories about her….If you’re sufficiently preoccupied with the power of a lie, a falsehood, an illusion, you remain interested in magic tricks.

It’s a long piece, and there are lots of other great bits. The article isn’t online, but you can listen to a good 15-minute podcast where he discusses it on the New Yorker site.

Related links:

• Jamy Ian Swiss
• Shattering Illusions: Essays on the Ethics, History, and Presentation of Magic, by Jamy Ian Swiss
• The Expert At The Card Table by S.W. Erdnase

[Teller's] definition of magic: “The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.”

The Science Times ran a great article on magic, perception and consciousness today, and with it came this cool photo set of Teller demonstrating a coin trick. It reminded me of the wonderful third chapter in Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations — co-written with professional magician Jamy Ian Swiss — “Explaining Magic: Pictorial Instuctions and Disinformation Design,” that examines illustrations like this:

Page 60:

In a difficult manipulation, the magician’s hands quickly exchange a silver coin for a copper one. Timing is crucial in magic, and the complex and rapid performance required for deft conjuring is not easy to illustrate. For this sleight, the author notes that the swift moves “must be done in a one-two-three up and down wave of your hand.” Depicting the action at a rate of two frames per beat, the multiple images flow over time and through space, just as a statistical graph records a time-series… Heavy arrows conduct the rhythm of images, while streamers in frames 382 and 384 indicate finer movements of fingers and coins. In this trick, like many others, small maneuvers of fingers are masked by larger hand movements. To expose the method, these drawings depict the hand tipped at varying angles toward the reader. Yet a slightly different angle of adjustment will assure that the audience sees only a silver coin magically transformed into a copper coin. Magicians are preoccupied with such viewing angles, which make the difference between a successful deception and a disastrous exposure. And so for illustrators: Are readers to see the produced effect or how to produce the effect, or both, and by means of what angles?

Speaking of Tufte, I was trolling one of my favorite sites, Peter Durand’s Center for Graphic Facilitation, and came across his notes from one of Tufte’s seminars:

Regular blog readers know how fond I am of mind-mapping Tufte: see Beautiful Evidence, Envisioning Information, and my thoughts on the relationship between comics and information design.