The Art of Impossibility, pt. 4

[Lyle Borders]

You can find parts 1-3 around here somewhere, just search. Part 3 will be very helpful for you to understand this part.


The Art of Impossibility, pt. 4

When we as humans see anything we don’t understand, we immediately begin to look for explanations. We try to settle our minds as to the cause of the unexplained before we come to an unsettling conclusion. For instance, picture a dark, clear night. You gaze skyward to the stars and you see a light. Your brain, as soon as it recognizes the light as something other than a star, something foreign, something unexplained, immediately begins to search out an answer. Like a well-oiled machine, your brain automatically gives itself a list of common ideas to consider. Fireworks, a plane, a satellite, a shooting star, a planet, etc. One by one, as quickly as possible, your brain crosses each possibility out as it finds evidence against each certain conclusion. The light remained in the sky longer than a moment; it’s not a firework or a shooting star. It is very bright, it’s not a satellite. It is moving, it’s not a planet. The light is fiery red, it can’t be a plane. Once all normal and logical ideas have been eliminated, your brain will stop and forget the incident all together, or it will begin to ponder the less normal, more unsettling options. A UFO? A Spirit? Though you may refuse to believe it, your brain arrives at simple conclusion that puts a knot in your stomach and will be long engraved in your thoughts.
The way we manipulate a spectator into believing that an illusion is much more than an illusion is by discovering all possible explanations that may be reached by a spectator and one by one eliminating them by simple psychological subtleties. If we want our spectators to believe that our hands are empty, we need to act, very boldly but very casually, like our hands are empty. The way we hold our hands, the way we gesture with them, the way we look at them, and the way manipulate other objects with them must be completely natural, just as if they were, in reality, completely empty. This is the easy part. The hard part is dissecting a trick so thoroughly from a spectator’s point of view that we can cover every possible explanation of the feat we wish to perform. We need to be able to take ourselves out of our magician’s point of view and see things from the points of view of all kinds of spectators. We need to know what a person who has never seen a magic trick will think when they see our illusion. We need to know what a very magic-curious person will think. We need to know what a person who has dabbled around with sleight of hand will think. The same goes for the YouTube magician, the professional magician, the psychologist, the teacher, the actor, and every other kind of spectator there is. We need to know what will distract each kind of spectator so efficiently that they will not recognize being distracted as we perform a certain sleight. We need to know the patter and style of acting that will be convincing to our spectators. In short, we need to KNOW our illusions. We need to understand the workings of our art. As we come to be extremely familiar with the illusions we use and how to make them truly impossible, we no longer do magic tricks, we perform miracles.
We have discussed in depth in previous articles the process of short-circuiting an individual thought process of a spectator, however rarely will there be an illusion that requires a simple, one track application of this process. Most illusions will require multiple sleights, subtleties and distractions, which may render the application of the short circuiting process infinitely more complicated then the simplest situations we have discussed. The larger, more complicated illusions will require a thorough understanding of all the sleights, subtleties, and distractions contained in the illusion and the general thought processes arrived at by a general audience viewing your performance.

We will look at an ACR, or Ambitious Card Routine, for a simple study. We will be taking the moves and sleights we use, trying to discover what a spectator will be thinking, and working out a way to short circuit these thoughts.
Marlo Tilt
A card is selected from the deck and signed. While the spectator is distracted, the deck is prepared for a two-card Marlo Tilt. The card is inserted into the “middle” of the deck. In a quick series of events, the top card is turned over, apparently the signed selection, then re-inserted into the deck, only to rise to the top once more. This is repeated again. Twice the card is inserted into the deck, and twice it comes to the top.
The spectator watched you insert the card first into the deck. It looks like the middle of the deck from the front, and they are shocked and thrown off balance when it ends up on top. They begin to watch closer. The card is turned over and re-inserted into the deck. With no funny movements it is on top again. What? How? The exact same movement takes place. With no effort, the card is turned over to reveal, once again, the signed selection.
What is the spectator thinking? First time they didn’t know what was happening. They had no ground to stand on. They immediately begin to try to come up with a method in their own mind, but have to see things again to finish the trick in their imagination. They clearly see the next two cards inserted into the front of the deck and pushed in. This changes how they think about your trick. By the time the three rapid rises have occurred, they begin to take the idea that you are somehow fooling them by not putting their card into the center. They are planning on watching their card very closely to ensure that it goes in the deck. Time to short circuit their thoughts. While their mind is still in the process of creating a strategy to catch your sleight, you must do something that counteracts their idea before they can finish it.
Several strategies exist, but my personal choice is the LePaul Spread Pass.
The LePaul Spread Pass
This is not a series of rises, but a single one. The spectator is looking for evidence that the signed card is not going into the deck, but rather staying on top. You spread the cards between your hands. Breaking the spread in half, you put the signed card on top of the squared deck in your left hand, face up. The selection is clearly flipped over and then lost as the spread is squared on top of the rest of the deck. The top card is turned over to reveal the selection.
The spectator is once again caught off guard. Firstly, the performer is changing the routine. Secondly, the spectator clearly sees the signed card enter the middle of the deck. The same result occurred. What you as a performer just accomplished was to shoot out of the sky the possibility that you are using a “dummy” card and the real card is indeed entering the deck each time. The spectator comes to this conclusion “on their own.” In reality, you spoon fed them this suggestion.
Next, the spectator knows that their card went into the deck. They are looking for an explanation of how their card traveled from the center of the deck to the top. What better way to mislead them than with a false explanation of a true idea?

 

[Lyle Borders]

Classis Pass
The signed selection is clearly displayed on top of the deck. The deck is cut, the signed card is clearly flipped on top of one of the packets, and the other packet is placed on top. With only the faintest idea of a movement, the signed card is once again on top. The idea of fast hands and clever sleights is introduced, and an idea that could pass as the method for the pass is shown slowly and explained. The pass is then again done, this time for real and at speed.
Your spectators are searching desperately for an explanation, and you are in the position, if your charisma allows, to spoon feed them a believable lie. Your “explanation” is false, and in no way tells how you accomplished your feats, but it seems real enough for spectators to cling to. This explanation is the downfall of your next sleight. Here you have not only short-circuited the tricks you have already performed, but you have also preemptively misled your spectator into a short circuit of the next sleight.
One Handed Pass (Double Lift)
Now that the spectator “knows” how the pass is done, you show them how to do the pass in an infinitely more complicated way. You speak of how many years it took to be able to do this move at all. The “selection” is inserted into the deck, out jogged, and in one hand it is pushed in. With just a twitch of the wrist, the card ends up on top.
The spectator expected to see an extremely complicated move. They saw something so simple they would hit themselves if they found out the secret. They don’t know the difference. You look like either a card shark or a real conjuror by this point. You want to continue to display this skill, but you need to do it in a more convincing way or you may get caught.
Cherry Control (Ricky Smith)
Their selection is CLEANLY out jogged into the center of the deck, displayed, and then pushed in. A nice looking fan is produced from the deck and then closed. The deck moves in a quick flick of the wrist, and the selection is found to be on top of the deck.
The spectator no longer knows what to think. You have begun to work the short circuit process in such a way that they can no longer follow logical methods. They have been lost by your planned efforts to confuse and lead the spectator away from the truth subliminally. They naturally look for similarities in your moves to find the common denominator, but there isn’t one. The closest thing is the flick of your wrist that you seem to do often. They is their only logical explanation, yet it has nothing to do with the real method.

Clip Shift
The selection is lost into the packet face up. With the shaking of the wrist it simply appears at the top of the deck, face up.
The visual nature of this change is a shock to the system of the already confused spectator. If they had been suspecting that you had been leaving cards on the top of the deck and using dummy cards, this blows that out of the water. A good alternative for this is a Cardini change. The instant change just shatters people.

Pop-Up
The selection is taken and a large crimp is placed in the center of the card. The card is then inserted into the center of the deck, the crimp displayed for all to see. At the snap of the magician’s fingers, the crimped selection simply “pops” to the top of the deck, the crimp still clearly visible.
The visual nature of this and the clipshift are very similar, but two VERY different moves are employed. The one contradicts the other, though it appears that the same thing is happening.

The spectator is destroyed. They may or may not believe what they just saw, but unless they already know the sleights involved, they don’t have a clue how the last string of impossible events have occurred. They do not make sense. The spectator has tried, from the beginning to figure out the trick to the rising card. They have failed. Not knowing that you had been changing the methods and have been intentionally misdirecting their thoughts leaves the spectators in a position that they cannot recover from.

This lengthy explanation of the formatting of a routine to short circuit the spectator’s train of thought is only given to show one way of going about this process. All short circuiting amounts to is the process of predicting the spectator’s silent, unmentioned reactions to your illusions and using deceptive methods to cause the spectator to contradict their own rational thoughts. The spectator very often is right about some of the methods used. Short circuiting is a very simple procedure to make a spectator think they are wrong when they in reality are correct. My methods here for the ACR are not perfect and may be argued by many, but the idea I teach will without a doubt help you take your magic to the next level.
Things to remember – EVERY SINGLE METHOD that you use to short circuit the thought process of a spectator must be clear but subtle. It has to be seen but not noticed. IN the ACR you want all of your sleights to have a common feel to them. You cannot make it apparent that you are intentionally varying your method to confuse your spectator, it needs to seem that you are simply giving the spectator alternate views of the same phenomenon. As in the third part of this series, the palm that produced a spectator’s reaction in Danny Garcia’s Greed was not intended to have such an effect on the spectator. It was subtle. It called no attention to itself. It was natural. Because of these things the spectator took my palm to mean that my hand was empty and convinced himself that he knew my hand was empty because he has seen it empty. The spectator needs to come to their “own” conclusions. Conclusions which, of course, were your thoughts to begin with.