Ethics in Magic

Magic is a craft.

Part of the definition of a craft is that it is handed down from master to student. Every craft comes not just with a set of skills, but with a social context that includes a set of ethics about how to use those skills to the benefit and not detriment of society at large.

Sadly, we seem to be living in an era when crafts are dying and, with them, the ethics they embody. Journalism is effectively dead and, as the son of Journalists who were the last generation who understood the idea of "Journalism ethics" I may well write about that at another time. Today, however, my attention is focused on one of the crafts I practice-- that of stage magic.

As I was "brought up" in the art there are a number of rules of ethical magic. . In this generation of magicians I see a lot of them as being endangered.

I'd like to discuss them below and the good reasons they exist:

(1) NO magician should ever claim that their stunts are anything other then a performance. This doesn't mean that I can't say in my patter that I have some kind of paranormal ability, but it must be clear to the audience that this is patter. Part of the performance. Not a claim of actual reality.

We do this by clearly identifying ourselves as magicians before we perform, just as an actor makes it clear that their performance is part of a play. there for the enjoyment of the audience but not to be taken as an actual real-life experience.

This rule is very important and protects our audience from the harm our craft might otherwise do them. There is a long and ugly history of people using the skills and techniques of our craft to dupe other people for their own persoanl gain. Con-men (or women) posing as "spirtualists" or "mediums" can have profund effects on the lives of their victims that go well beyond just financial loss.

Even if we do not intend to take advantage of our audience members ourselves, hen we make them believe in things that do not exists we set them up to be harmed by other less scrupulous individuals.

The act of declaring our act to be a magic act warns that audiance that what they are about to see or hear is no more real then a play. That's the line between performer and con-man.

Today, we have a new crop of con-men showing up places like YouTube. They make the same claims as the "spirtualists" of the 1800s and are just as dangerous.

(2) TV Magic may NOT employ any "camera tricks."

This is a rule that was created by the first TV magician. A brilliant man by the name of Mark Williams. This rule protects the craft from irellevancy. If a magician is willing to employ TV tricks then the entire art of magic on TV is pointless. TV tricks have always been able to do more then we can. The very first TV technicians quickly figured out how to shrink people befoer your eyes and do all sorts of amazing things. Today, 3D animators can make dinosaurs appear out of thin air.

TV magic is only of interest if the TV is reporting what a live audiance could see. If it is only employed as a telepresnace device its a great boom to magicians, bringing their acts simultaneously into the living rooms of millions of audience mambers. Break that convenant though and you might as well not appear on TV at all.

Sadly, many modern "TV Magiciains" have broken this rule. Im my opinion they are killing their own market. Im just hopeful that after they've done so, and the audience has had time to forget them, that a new crop of ethical magicians will arise to reclaim that territory by re-forging that comittment to the viewer that Mr. Williams so rightly deemed necessary.

(3) Magicians don't reveal methods outside of the craft

Often immature magicians don't realize why this rule exists. Its not toprotect some "great secret brotherhood." In fact, it is to protect our audiance's enjoyment. The afct of the matter is that most of the methods employed by magicians to create our illusions are as old as the hills and fundementally dull and uninteresting. The audiance doen't come to see our cleverness. They come to be transported to another place. A place in their minds where the impossible is possible, if only for a little while. This sense of wonder is the gift we give our audiances.

Just as the Great and Powerful OZ was much more inetresting then the man behind the curtain, so too our effects are much more interesting then the mechanics that produce them. When you tell the audiance how it works, your no longer helping them to feel wonder-- rather you are just bvasically telling them they were fools to feel wonder in the first place.

Thats a nasty and mean spirited thing to do to our audiance and it diminishes our art to a point of trivial irrelvancy.

There have always been those who,being unable to master the illusions themselves, produced 10 minutes of attention for themselves by instead revelaing the methods. Those people ultimately disrespect both the audiance and the craft and serve nothign but their own terribly insecure egos. With YouTube and televisionm, the exposores have far more reach and the damage they cna do is that much greater.

The first two ethical issues above, we can do something abotu as magicians and I want to call on those who love our craft to do so. Social pressure is the best way to maintain ethics within a community and we can and should disdain the actiosn of those who break them. In thec ase of con-men, that is the one and only palce a magciain SHOULD expose methods, in order to show them for the frauds they truly are.

The last one, however, we cannot do as much about. That takes YOU the audiance to fix. Don't feed the revealers by giving them the attention they so desperately crave. Turn off the TV when the guy who is going to "show you how its done" comes on. Don't play the videos of those who reveal the workings of illusions on you tube.

If they cannot get the attention, they will give up and go find some other form of misbehavior to try.

A little magic

I've put up a video of an original routine I'm rather proud of on you tube. I have to acknowledge and thank Gary Cutbill for helping me with the early development of it.

You can play it small here or go to YouTube and play it full-screen.

The Elvi (Magic Bar 1)

So now I'm an animal trainer.....

Yes, i have too many hobbies.

But getting back into magic made me start to consider using Pickles, my millitary Macaw in the act.

I bought a set of 3 training DVDs from the Womach brothers who are pretty much the acknowledged experts in magical use of birds these days. The are *great* videos that I highly recommend. They shot them starting from scratch with new birds so you can see all the steps and progress for real.

I'm going to start Blogging pickles progress. For fun, I think I'll do it from his point of view, as best I can figure it out.

You can read the first entry at Pickles' Blog.

My first flash app

I just got my first little Flash app working.

There is a lot more going on beneath the surface here as this is more then a cute little toy. It in fact is backed by a flash game engine I've been evolving similar in concept to the Slick engine for Java. This app tests all the basics of a game in that it has a menu, an update loop that does time-controlled animation and raw keyboard input.

I'll be writing more about my unnamed little engine soon and showing some code form it, but for now, here's the little demo:

DEMO

Miracles of modern technology?

Miracles of Modern Technology?
A short essay in modern magical ethics.

Many, many years ago, the art of magic faced a fundamental threat. That threat was the birth of Television. Magic as an art exists to do one thing-- to help people believe the impossible is possible. That awe and wonder is the joy which we as magicians delight in bringing to our audience's lives. While we are on stage performing, the audience gets to take their minds back a more innocent place and time in their lives when magic was all around them and anything was possible-- at least in their heads.

Television was a real and credible threat to that because Television innately made people believe the impossible. As soon as they turned on their set, in fact, their minds started telling they were watching people that didn't exist do things in places that didn't exist. About two minutes after the first TV show was broadcast, the first “camera trick” was discovered, though in point of fact the principles were already known from the film industry. How then could a magician preserve a sense of wonder when the wonderful had become easy and common place with the flick of a switch??

This conundrum was solved by a brilliant magician by the name of Mark Wilson. Wilson made many contributions to our art but I would argue that the most important one was devising the cardinal ethics of TV magic:
1.TV magic must be performed live, without editing and in front of uncoached cameramen. This is summed up in the phrase “No camera tricks.”
2.TV magic must be performed before a live studio audience. This is a “proover” that it is really happening.

These two rules saved Magic from the threat of television and turned TV into a valuable allay instead of an adversary to the art. (Recently, some very big name magicians have broken these rules and IMHO have caused the sub-art of televised magic serious damage in the process.)

Putting aside the idea of TV magic now, I'd like you to entertain a hypothetical situation with me. Something I had to consider not long ago in some fiction I was writing. Imagine, for a moment, that your are a stage magician in the world of the comic books. This is a world where it is clearly and obviously possible for certain special people to do seemingly impossible things like fly or read minds. The average person sees demonstrations of such abilities on the news every-day. How do you preserve the wonder of an art that is based in making the impossible seem possible when anything already IS possible?

The conclusion I came to was that the fraternity of magicians would have to agree to rules similar to those that Mark Wilson created. To whit, that any magical performance may not call itself a magical performance unless it uses no super-powers. That a magician, by definition, is going to show you apparent miracles done by someone just like you. Much like the answer to TV, this returns the wonder and maybe even magnifies it as it allows the audience to imagine that they could do the things the super heroes do.

Now not all super-heroes fly because they are from Krypton or read minds because they are a mutant. As seen in the recent movie Iron Man, thre are super-heroes who employ nothing more then “super-technology.” Geniuses capable of building devices based on scientific principles unknown to, and much more powerful then, those available to the every day man. Such technology is called “super-tech” or “weird science” in the parlance of comic book lovers and has the same problem in the end as a bases for magic that direct super-powers do. Super-tech, I would argue, would need to be excluded as effectively a “super-power” from any magical performance.

As much fun as it may be to play with the ideas of what would happen if the world of comic books was real, you're probably wondering what this has to do with magic ethics. And here I come to my final point.

Today we DO live in a world of super-technology. Not as flashy or impressive as iron man's repulsors perhaps, but we live with things that were miraculous a generation before. Imagine I was a magician in the 1800s. I sent my assistant 200 miles away to talk to your best friend. You tell me a question that only he and you would know. I turn my back, concentrate for 2 minutes “mentally communing” with my assistant and tell you the answer. That would be extraordinary magic. Today though, thats called a cell phone and its hardly mystifying at all.

We live in a world of technological miracles that most common people don't understand. I've recently seen a number of illusions pop up that are based completely and solely in that fact. I'm not going to name names or give away methods, but I'm sure some of you can think of some. I will use an example I just came up with to illustrate.

I recently read about an illusion someone is producing that allows a magician to get whatever someone writes on a piece of unprepared paper instantly as soon as they write it and without touching the paper or clip board it is on. Being a computer software engineer and curious, I did a bit of googgle searching and, on paper, designed my own version where, for about $300 worth of off th shelf components, a small bit of code and a computer, I could get anything a spectator wrote SMS messaged to me without my ever having to touch anything the spectator used to write it.

I thought about building this system but it occurs to me that this might cheapen mentalism to the point of being truly uninteresting. Where is the art in the magic if it is just based on the fact that you don't know that there is a pen sold by Iomega that tracks handwriting and sends it to the computer? One might say “in the presentation” but if all magic is about is presentation then all we are is actors. Its about more, I think. Its about the cleverness of the technique. Its about making use of the psychology of the audience to help them convince themselves that they are seeing the impossible. Its about misdirection, suggestion, and what the mind does with fragmentary information. Its about how the sense works and that common people don't ever think to question them.

But my pen? Its just a gadget. It may be a “super-gadget' at the moment because its technology most people don't realize exists, but is it magic? I don't really think so.

And this then comes to my point. In a world of technological everyday miracles we face the same threat that our forefathers did in Televsion. That we can cheapen the performance to the point where it is no longer interesting.

I think we need to think long and hard about a set of rules for computer and electronic technology like Mark Wilson came up for Television to prevent these modern miracles of technology from destroying the wonder of the art we magicians love.

Magical Websites

Well good Monday everyone.

One of my many passions reader's of this blog may not know about is magic. I've been performing on and off since my pre-teens and was a semi-pro street magician in high school.

I've recently gotten more seriously back into 'the art' as we magicians call it and have found some wonderful web resources.

First up is The Magic Cafe. This is an online forum that is chock full of serious professional magicians, amatures, and even the folks who invent the illusions we perform. A *great* resource

The second is an amazing performance of The Zombie that was captured and placed on YouTube. If you perform The Zombie, this will amaze you even more at what Niel Foster does with it. I promise. Its an old black and white telecine, but I've never seen this illusion done with such art and grace in my life.

Initial release of the DarkMMO source code

Its still not commented and its far from complete, but as many people wanted to peak at it Ive released most of the DarkMMO source code.

Its at http://code.google.com/p/darkmmo

The one thing I have not released yet are the Netbeans plugins. These are coming but as they are a fairly complex multi-level Netbeans project I need to do some hacking to get them properly into the new repository structure.