What will magic look like in the future?

WitchDocIsIn

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Sep 13, 2008
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3. The Bleeding Edge - Immersive magic is the next big thing. I think it's the most interesting thing out there and I think most magicians have no idea what it entails. Brent Braun, Andy Jerxman, Paul Harris and Michael Carbonaro are at the front of this movement and I think it will take another 15 to 20 years before any large group of the magic community will notice. This is magic that has huge setups (think days, weeks, or months) the effect may take the course of days to witness and it is only performed for small groups of people. These are presentations and effects that are almost impossible to film, but leave a lasting impression on the audience.

Interesting thoughts.

So you're talking more like when the audience doesn't even know they're seeing a magic performance at first? As in the Carbonaro Effect?

I know Derren Brown had a whole section of his career where that's essentially what he was doing with Hero at 30,000 Feet, Apocalypse, etc, and some bizarre magicians/seance artists have been doing this for some time now. Some of the material in Garden of Strange or Art Vanderlay's 'Elemental Manipulation' work would fall into this immersive category too.
 

Josh Burch

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Interesting thoughts.

So you're talking more like when the audience doesn't even know they're seeing a magic performance at first? As in the Carbonaro Effect?

I know Derren Brown had a whole section of his career where that's essentially what he was doing with Hero at 30,000 Feet, Apocalypse, etc, and some bizarre magicians/seance artists have been doing this for some time now. Some of the material in Garden of Strange or Art Vanderlay's 'Elemental Manipulation' work would fall into this immersive category too.

Yeah, more or less.

Here are 2 examples, neither of these are my own creations but they illustrate the point pretty well. They are both ideas by Andy Jerxman.

You challenge someone to a game of connect four. You play as normal until you finish. You then go to put the game away and look at the box.

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You act shocked as you realize that the game you just played matches the box perfectly... your opponent then realizes that your shirt perfectly matches the kid in the picture.


Another presentation that I love was that you go camping with a group of friends. You go to pull out a deck of cards to play with and realize that all of them are blank. You get the great idea to write the faces on the cards yourself. So you and your friends spend much of the day creating the deck by hand. At some point, you then take the completed deck and turn it into a regulation deck of playing cards. You play games on your camping trip and have a great time. At the end of the trip, you turn the deck back into the hand made deck and give it to your friends as a souvenir.

The method? Get a blank deck, a nudist deck, and a regulation deck. Add a couple of easy to accomplish deck switches and you have an amazing piece of strange that took an entire trip to perform.


One piece I have experimented with is a time prediction. At the beginning of a party, I have a card selected via the cross-cut force and placed under a bowl with my cellphone. I then say that I not only have predicted the card cut to but the time I would reveal it. Sometime during the night, someone will ding the doorbell at a time they think is random. When they do we will all meet back here with my phone and the deck of cards. They ding the doorbell, and the current time happens to be the passcode to the phone, and of course, the card cut to is correctly predicted as the background of the phone.

It takes an entire night to perform.


The goal of the magic isn't to just do a quick trick, it's to completely immerse the audience in the magic. At the end of it all it's less like watching a trick and more like staring in an episode of the twilight zone. Lot's of bizarre magic could be presented like this for sure.
 
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WitchDocIsIn

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I think I'd rather play with the hand-made deck, and do readings based off the drawings. Like Luke Jermay's hand drawn cartomancy deck.

Paul Brook's version of Out Of This World is another good example. Takes about half an hour to perform (this would be for a hired gig, not a social event) and involves the entire audience. Method is irrelevant, just that his presentation makes it all about connecting to one's intuition and to the rest of the crowd.
 

Josh Burch

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I think I'd rather play with the hand-made deck, and do readings based off the drawings. Like Luke Jermay's hand drawn cartomancy deck.

From what I know about you this doesn't surprise me.

Paul Brook's version of Out Of This World is another good example. Takes about half an hour to perform (this would be for a hired gig, not a social event) and involves the entire audience. Method is irrelevant, just that his presentation makes it all about connecting to one's intuition and to the rest of the crowd.

Yeah, the level of immersion in the magic effect is what sets these presentations apart. Much of the time the method is so small and insignificant when compared to the presentation that it almost disappears completely.
 
Sep 29, 2018
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"Moves that many today consider to be 'simple' are the moves that the masters of the previous generation built their careers on. Berglas' card work can be summed up with a good memory, a perfect fan, and the Glide (and the ability to jazz his way through a situation)."

The above was written by @ChristopherT recently in answer to a question of mine. It got me thinking though -- What will the career of a magician today and in the future be built on?
Obviously many things stay the same, such as an ability to connect with the audience, to direct their attention etc.
But I believe that many things will change as well. Take the internet as an example: All it takes nowadays is to search for "most important card magic moves" on YouTube and you know how double lifts, passes and forces work and any layman who spends 5 minutes with researching this can tell how most simple card tricks work.
Oftentimes it isn't enough to change a card before the spectators eyes, they need something far more spectacular. Why? Because they have the greatest magicians and most amazing performances literally at their fingertips.
Another problem: The attention span seems to have grown pretty short. If a trick doesn't grab (and hold!) somebody's attention immediately at the beginning they will turn it somewhere else pretty quickly.
I have the feeling that it also takes a lot more to really impress and astound people. To say it in Simon Aronson's words: “There is a world of difference between a spectator’s not knowing how something’s done versus his knowing that it can’t be done.” Especially nowadays, with science on the march and nearly everybody thinking that there is a rational explanation for everything, this has become increasingly difficult. The magician's goal should be to create the "natural state of wonder", as Paul Harris calls it, and he can only do this by making the spectator think that not only does he not know how to do a trick, but he must think that there is no way to possibly do it. And, if you look around: How many would really give in to their sense of wonder and how many would simply shrug and say "Nice, but in the end it's just some trick."?

Looking back I've noticed that I've been rambling a bit, but I think I made my point. Now, to get back to the question: What will the success of this generation be built on? Magic in combination with technology? Gimmicks that practically do the work for the magician? Or do you think that it won't actually change too much?

I'm really looking forward to your thoughts on this matter!
As with most things undergoing shifts, we ultimately see the older versions making a comeback.

I can guarantee there's at least somewhat of a chance that in the future, media will get oversaturated with super-visual magic to the point where they might start craving something more of a longer, high-impact experience than seeing a card appear out of thin air, along with smoke.

I have this incessant feeling that 50, or say even 100 years down the line (provided we don't utterly destroy earth by then) magicians will again be building entire careers around the glide.
 
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Sep 29, 2018
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It's not 50 years away, it's not even 10 years I bet.
That will indeed be an amazing change, at least for those who hold magic in a higher, beautiful regard (almost romanticising it, but in a positive way).

But then, hopefully Instagram and other social media platforms increase their video time limit, and You Tube stops discriminating against longer videos. Because social media is here to stay, so for the future magician, promoting their magic is going to become a pain in the posterior end.

And those whose style of magic naturally IS something flashy, well, I'm pretty sure they'll find a certain audience as well. There's a place for almost everything in this world. But which style will be more successful, that remains to see.
 
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