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"prestidigitation"
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Harry Houdini
From the best-selling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, this book profiles the life of Harry Houdini, from his humble beginnings as a child living in poverty, to his transformation into history's most famous magician and escape artist. When Ehrich emigrated to the US, his family couldn't afford to send him to school. That didn't stop him from learning-- he became a genius with cards, and even a trapeze artist! But while working as a locksmith, he realized his talent for picking locks... and the great Harry Houdini was born. He became one of the greatest escape artists of all time, and performed incredible stunts that keep us guessing today. This inspiring story of the legendary entertainer features a fact and photo section at the back.
Book
Trade of the tricks
From risqué cabaret performances to engrossing after-hours shop talk, Trade of the Tricks offers an unprecedented look inside the secretive subculture of modern magicians. Entering the flourishing Paris magic scene as an apprentice, Graham M. Jones gives a firsthand account of how magicians learn to perform their astonishing deceptions. He follows the day-to-day lives of some of France's most renowned performers, revealing not only how secrets are created and shared, but also how they are stolen and destroyed. In a book brimming with humor and surprise, Jones shows how today's magicians marshal creativity and passion in striving to elevate their amazing skill into high art. The book's lively cast of characters includes female and queer performers whose work is changing the face of a historically masculine genre.
eBook
Mister Miracle : the great escape
Scott Free, a student at the Goodness Academy on the planet Apokolips, wants to escape to Earth but falls in love with the head of the Female Furies--the one person tasked with ensuring he never escapes.
Book
Scientific Study of Magic: Binet’s Pioneering Approach Based on Observations and Chronophotography
In 1894, French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911) published an article titled “The Psychology of Prestidigitation” that reported the results of a study conducted in collaboration with two of the best magicians of that period. By using a new method and new observation techniques, Binet was able to reveal some of the psychological mechanisms involved in magic tricks. Our article begins by presenting Binet's method and the principal professional magicians who participated in his studies. Next, we present the main psychological tools of magicians described by Binet and look at some recent studies dealing with those mechanisms. Finally, we take a look at the innovative technique used by Binet for his study on magic: the chronophotograph.
Journal Article
Social Misdirection Fails to Enhance a Magic Illusion
Visual, multisensory and cognitive illusions in magic performances provide new windows into the psychological and neural principles of perception, attention, and cognition. We investigated a magic effect consisting of a coin \"vanish\" (i.e., the perceptual disappearance of a coin after a simulated toss from hand to hand). Previous research has shown that magicians can use joint attention cues such as their own gaze direction to strengthen the observers' perception of magic. Here we presented naïve observers with videos including real and simulated coin tosses to determine if joint attention might enhance the illusory perception of simulated coin tosses. The observers' eye positions were measured, and their perceptual responses simultaneously recorded via button press. To control for the magician's use of joint attention cues, we occluded his head in half of the trials. We found that subjects did not direct their gaze at the magician's face at the time of the coin toss, whether the face was visible or occluded, and that the presence of the magician's face did not enhance the illusion. Thus, our results show that joint attention is not necessary for the perception of this effect. We conclude that social misdirection is redundant and possibly detracting to this very robust sleight-of-hand illusion. We further determined that subjects required multiple trials to effectively distinguish real from simulated tosses; thus the illusion was resilient to repeated viewing.
Journal Article
La rhétorique comme misdirection : l’art du bien parler et les tours de magie
Cette contribution porte sur la métaphore du prestidigitateur appliquée à la rhétorique. L’art de l’illusion n’était pas transmis par écrit ; on peut donc le reconstituer seulement par voie indirecte, à travers d’occasionnelles citations ou des métaphores. En latin, les principaux mots qui indiquent le magicien sont : magus, circulator et praestigiator. Circulator et praestigiator sont employés pour des métaphores négatives de l’orateur. Bien qu’ils soient synonymes, ils couvrent cependant des domaines sémantiques un peu différents. Sur le circulator, la condamne est esthétique ; dans le cas des praestigia, les implications sont surtout éthiques.
Journal Article
Magical mathematics
Magical Mathematicsreveals the secrets of amazing, fun-to-perform card tricks--and the profound mathematical ideas behind them--that will astound even the most accomplished magician. Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham provide easy, step-by-step instructions for each trick, explaining how to set up the effect and offering tips on what to say and do while performing it. Each card trick introduces a new mathematical idea, and varying the tricks in turn takes readers to the very threshold of today's mathematical knowledge. For example, the Gilbreath Principle--a fantastic effect where the cards remain in control despite being shuffled--is found to share an intimate connection with the Mandelbrot set. Other card tricks link to the mathematical secrets of combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, topology, the Riemann hypothesis, and even Fermat's last theorem.
Diaconis and Graham are mathematicians as well as skilled performers with decades of professional experience between them. In this book they share a wealth of conjuring lore, including some closely guarded secrets of legendary magicians.Magical Mathematicscovers the mathematics of juggling and shows how theI Chingconnects to the history of probability and magic tricks both old and new. It tells the stories--and reveals the best tricks--of the eccentric and brilliant inventors of mathematical magic.Magical Mathematicsexposes old gambling secrets through the mathematics of shuffling cards, explains the classic street-gambling scam of three-card monte, traces the history of mathematical magic back to the thirteenth century and the oldest mathematical trick--and much more.
eBook
How to become a professional magician
Howcast - Learn how to develop an angle or routine that will differentiate you from other magicians with advice from magician Jason Suran in this Howcast video.
Streaming Video
Modern Enchantments
Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture.
Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's
superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the
aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How
can the most ordinary arts--and by \"magic,\" During means not the
supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic
shows--affect people? Modern Enchantments takes us deeply
into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the
legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in
nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the
emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During
shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous
audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and
extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes
introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate
skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing
argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic
entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture
and helped define modern society's image of itself.
eBook