Awe and Astonishment: Wonder in the Age of Democratized Magic by Josh Corn

Josh Corn

Copyright © 2017 by Joshua Corn All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. School of Visual Arts MFA Products of Design New York, NY May 2017 For inquiries, contact josh@joshcorn.com

Josh Corn Author and Designer Zoe Goldstein Editor Allan Chochinov Chair, MFA Products of Design

Awe and Astonishment

Table of Contents

Author’s Note �� 6 Introduction �� 8 Lexicon ��14 Goals and Objectives ��18 Audiences �� 20 Methods �� 26 Interviewees �� 30 Early Prototypes �� 32 Cross-Fertilization Generator �� 38 Secret Letter �� 40 Shoeprint Security Device �� 42 Wonder �� 44 Surprise �� 46 Surprising Prototypes �� 48 Startle! �� 50 Tacit �� 56 QRchestra �� 66 Magic �� 76 Magic for Magicians �� 80 Magical Prototypes �� 84 Dupe �� 86 Tasia �� 92 We Can Do It ��108 Magic Trick Trailers ��118 Brief Magic History ��122 Contemporary Magic Prototypes �� 124 Co-creation Workshop ��126 Close-Up ��144 Metanarratives of Magic ��154 Pierce Gradone Interview ��158 Postmodern Prototype ��160 Torn Yet Unharmed ��162 Claudia Chagüi Interview ��166 Elia Chesnoff Interview ��168 Immersive Theater ��170

Table of Contents

Future of Storytelling ��174 Speculative Prototypes ��178 Speculative Future ��180 Newspaper ��186 Speculative Accessory ��190 Awe ��196 Christopher Brown Interview �� 200 Wonderful Prototypes �� 202 Orbis �� 204 Orbis App �� 232 Unexpected Experience �� 240 Looking Forward ��276 Bibliography ��278 Acknowledgements �� 290

Awe and Astonishment

Author’s Note

Dear Reader, I’d like to set some expectations before you invest the time to look through the pages of this book. Though the title of this thesis includes the word magic, you won’t find many magic secrets contained within. Magicians rarely share secrets outside of their own community, as they feel that by giving them away they would be giving away the key to their livelihood, not to mention ruining the ‘magical’ feeling. But while I don’t share the secrets to any magic tricks, I do share my research process and all the thoughts behind my work. I have found a great deal of overlap between the secrets that lie behind the curtain of design and those of performance magic, however design has a propensity for larger scale impacts and consequences. I invite you to share in the world I have found between magic and design, and hopefully you will find it as fascinating as I do. Josh Corn New York City 2017

Author’s Note

Magic, in its highest manifestations, should rouse and keep alive the sense of wonder – the essence of religion – which is often deadened by reason, stabbed by cynicism, and shriveled up by the sneers of the disillusioned and frustrated. S.H. Sharpe

Awe and Astonishment

Introduction

When I was 12 years old, I began studying magic and was thrown into the world surrounding the art. It’s incredibly easy to get sucked in, with the available books, DVDs, gimmicks, conventions, instant downloads, and magic clubs all around the country. I followed a similar path as most and spent hundreds (read thousands) of dollars on everything that fooled me as I became addicted to wanting to create that same feeling in others. The problem is that I rarely mastered any of it and I was always looking for the next best effect. Magicians easily fall into this cycle and eventually find themselves chasing tricks, in the belief that “If I just knew this one more method, I would be the best magician ever.” Unfortunately, many magicians never escape this loop and eventually they lose momentum. After six years of being in this daze, a series of events occurred that finally allowed me to take a step back from the fray and realize that I was missing the point of magic: entertaining audiences. Instead of focusing on the latest and greatest, I began teaching magic to children at Camp Cigma, a summer camp that my friend and I built up together. At the camp, we used magic as a tool to teach kids self-confidence as well as magical principles. By showing kids how psychology, science, and theater combine to create the magic, we were able to help them understand why the tricks worked. In other words, it was not just about a small plastic latch or other gimmick. When teaching magic, it became clear to my friend and I that we could ‘figure out’ most magic methods because we understood the principles that make them function. When I had this realization, it began to dull the feelings I used to get from watching magic. I no longer felt that magical feeling when watching a performance. Instead, I would just recognize the craft or skill of the performer. One of the most famous performers and teachers in the magic community, Dai Vernon, was asked just before he died if he wished for anything. His response was “I wish somebody could fool me one more time.”1 1

Stone, Fooling Houdini. 291.

Introduction

Awe and Astonishment

Introduction

The bittersweet achievement of becoming a master in the field of magic is that you rarely experience the feeling that pulled you into the art to begin with. I began to recognize this feeling disappearing while I was at camp, but luckily I was struck with a moment that changed everything for me. One of our campers, let’s call him Ryan, was a small, shy kid who rarely played with the other kids. He had severe separation anxiety from his mother, and would cry each day that he had to go to camp. We worked with him over the course of the session to help him gain more confidence, and eventually we cast him as the lead in a grand-scale illusion performance at the end of summer show. Without giving away any specific secrets, Ryan was supposed to ‘disappear’ on stage and end up backstage for a switch. My role was to secretly pull Ryan offstage, under cover of another prop. After pulling the set piece offstage, Ryan would pop out of the secret box and switch with another person. We had rehearsed this switch countless times the week prior, so my expectations were that everything would work smoothly. On the evening of the performance, everything went as planned. Ryan did his bit on stage, I came on stage to assist, and left the stage with the secret prop. Once backstage, however, I opened the box to find it completely empty. Ryan had disappeared. For real. There was a split second in which I looked up at my partner and we both had the same expression on our faces. We had done it, it had actually worked this time: Ryan was gone. Somewhere in the air above the stage, he was floating about as a billion particles of matter, but we could no longer see him. The illusion was over. The camp was over. We had lost a kid and we were going to be in newspapers all over the world. We would either be the most famous magicians ever or be put in jail for murder. Of course, this wasn’t what had happened. Ryan was still on stage cramped in a tiny box. Because he was so scared of being in front of an audience, he hadn’t wanted to get into the secret compartment to finish his role. I ended up awkwardly walking back on

Awe and Astonishment

stage as the audience watched me speak into a box to calm the terrified performer’s fears. In that brief moment of perplexity, however, I had felt once again that elusive, fleeting feeling that magic is real. That there are inexplicable things in the world and that some people have power over them. That numb feeling was gone in that second and the only thing I could do was stand there with my mouth open in wonderment. That is the feeling I am after. For myself and for others. After we shuttered the camp in 2010, I took a break from magic. The magic item on my resume has always stuck out and has spurred many interesting conversations as a result of people’s assumptions. When people hear that you are a magician, they immediately ask to see a trick or want to be impressed. Upon entering graduate school, magic popped back into my life and I was expected by those around me to use it in my work. Contained in the following pages are a series of explorations into and around magic to see how I could combine it with my background in design to produce wonder- and awe-filled experiences and products. Many of the projects would not be considered magical in the strict sense, in that they can’t be performed on stage in front of an audience in a magic show format. But I’m looking to expand the art with a different general definition. This book is subtitled “wonder in the age of democratized magic” because magic has become accessible to most through the technology we hold in our pockets. With virtual, augmented, and mixed reality devices coming to our homes soon, we will be able to create whole new worlds in front of us, place fantastical characters in our bedroom, and transform everything into a digital surface. Magic will be everywhere and available to all. But where does wonder, in reality, fit in? Do we need incentives to remain in the real world or will analog experiences become novel? What is the role of the magician in this new reality – when a child

Introduction

can make things levitate and appear in front of herself instantly? How do we create rare experiences and rekindle our sense of wonder in the world for ourselves? This book is laid out with research and interviews spread throughout in order to show how the related findings and insights relate to the projects they inspired. As opposed to providing all the research up front, I feel that as a reader, in this way, you will get more of a sense of the wandering approach I took to the topics at hand. I’ve worked to expand my understanding of magic as well as many other art forms and philosophies throughout my research process, and I’m excited to share all my findings and work with you.

I am not objecting to the statement that the science of the modern world is wonderful; I am only objecting to the modern world because it does not wonder at it. G. K. Chesterton

Awe and Astonishment

Lexicon

Below you will find a list of controlled vocabulary for words that I use throughout my writing. These represent the linguistic decisions I have made and they may clarify some topics as I discuss them. Experience n. an encountered event. Philip Fisher in Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences writes that “the ordinary is what is there when there are no experiences going on.”2 Surprise n. a feeling we have when something happens unexpectedly. Wonder n. Descartes’s definition from Philip Fisher: “the act of noticing with pleasure something new and unprecedented.” The next level up from surprise, but usually tied to a rare experience. Awe n. I use the definition of awe as laid out in Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger’s book Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected: “Awe is surprise that’s stirred by something unfathomably vast or complex.”3 Enchantment n. as Jane Bennett says: “entailing a state of wonder… [a] temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement.”4 Spellbound. Philip Fisher calls this a “moment of pure presence.”5 Magic n, adj. by magic, I could use the Merriam-Webster dictionary and say “having or apparently having supernatural powers.”6 Or I could follow Beth Corbin, who says “if you know what magic is then it is not magic. Magic is magic.”7 Magic can be a feeling, a type of performance art, or even a card game. The definition that I feel is the most fitting comes from psychologists Rensink and Kuhn: magic is “the experience of wonder that results from 2 3 4 5 6 7

Fisher, Wonder. 20. Luna and Renninger, Surprise. 196. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life. 5. Fisher, Wonder. 5. “Definition of MAGIC.” London, “What Is Magic?” 483.

Lexicon

encountering an apparently impossible event.”8 This encompasses the performing art of magic but also when you witness something that you feel is impossible for humans to do. The following magic terms have engendered some debate amongst magic theorists, but I will outline how I plan to use them: Illusion n. a magic effect performed by a magician (in most glossaries, illusion is tied to a performance on a stage in front of a large audience, but in my use I don’t distinguish a difference in venue). Effect n. how a magic illusion is perceived by a spectator. If the spectators were to go home and write about what they saw, this would be their description. Gimmick n. secret part or object used to make the illusion possible. Prop n. any item used in the performance of an illusion. Routine n. a sequence of effects. Venue n. category of location where the illusion is performed (e.g. close-up, parlor, stage, TV). Method n. the technique the magician uses to achieve the desired effect. Sleight n. a secret move or technique Trick v. this word has been debated the most. Some use the word to describe the method or secret workings of an illusion, while sometimes it is synonymous with what a magician performs, or the illusion itself (‘a magic trick’). Some also feel, as Chris GotoJones writes in Conjuring Asia, that the word is “subtly derogatory about the activities of magicians because its implication is of 8

Rensink and Kuhn, “The Possibility of a Science of Magic.” 1.

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triviality.”9 When I do use the word, I mean it as a smaller close-up illusion that typically uses cards, coins, or other small props. Spectator n. an audience member watching a magic show or effect. Participant n. I am working to shift magic from being a spectator activity to an interactive one, so this is the new word I use for the partaking individual.

Goto-Jones, Conjuring Asia. 97.

Lexicon

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Goals and Objectives

I have many goals for this project, ranging from personal to professional to academic. From the beginning of the process in the summer of 2016, I knew that I wanted my work to allow me to build skills I hadn’t developed yet. I positioned this thesis in such a way that I would be able to learn more about experience design, designing apps, programming, electrical engineering, animation, and motion graphics works; while developing meaningful products that aligned with this thesis was also a large consideration in my work. By returning to a topic I always felt I had figured out, but this time looking at it through a different lens, I hoped to uncover deeper meanings of magic for myself. I knew there were many books I hadn’t read, performances I hadn’t seen, and people I hadn’t spoken with, and I was keen to jump into the area to explore the depths of the subject further. I’d also like to redefine what magic means and how it is considered by the public. Magic has seen a resurgence in popularity through films, books, and television in the past decade10, but magic performances have largely remained unchanged since the 1980s. In Michael Mangan’s book Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring, he asserts that modern magic is considered “low culture.”11 This means that magic isn’t held in high esteem, but instead could be seen as meant for the masses or the less educated. This is fascinating if we look at Rensink and Kuhn’s definition of magic, as “the experience of wonder that results from encountering an apparently impossible event.”12 If magic creates an experience of wonder, this sounds like some other fields that are more closely aligned with the arts or high culture. Why can’t we redefine magic for the public as a way of encountering unanswerable questions and getting in touch with our irrational minds again? We have so few opportunities to stop and experience wonder and awe in our everyday lives that magic seems ripe for use. As Darwin Ortiz says in his book Strong Magic, “if magic has any 10 11 12

“With ‘Now You See Me 2’ and ‘Harry Potter,’ Magic Is Having Its Moment in Pop Culture.” Mangan, Performing Dark Arts. Rensink and Kuhn, “The Possibility of a Science of Magic.” 1.

Goals and Objectives

claim to being an art it, lives in its unique ability to make a spectator confront the impossible, along with the exhilarating feeling this entails as a trapdoor opens under everything he thinks he knows about reality and his mind goes into freefall.”13 The biggest goal I have for this work is to inspire wonder in others, through the use of magic or other mediums. Along with Max Weber’s The Disenchantment of Modern Life,14 we have seen that scientific progress and innovation have diminished the value we place on the unknown and mysteries. We fill our time by looking at our phones – during social settings, meals, and even when by ourselves – instead of allowing our imaginations to fill the silence. The resulting numbness we can feel stems from technology, as it allows for easily accessible information instead of the pursuit of knowledge, something that generally results in overstimulation. “Virtual reality [has replaced] the existential ‘realness’ of their situation” Graham Collier writes of a family who don’t speak to each other at a restaurant, but instead focus on their individual devices – an image that has already become quite ubiquitous.15 How can we create products that have, for instance, the sole purpose of slowing us down to allow room for wonder, that inspire awe – something that has become difficult to find in modern societies16 – or that make room for analog experiences to maintain their relevancy in a digital age? To this end, through the research process I’ve recognized that the products and experiences in the world that bring wonder and awe to my life may also do the same for others. Thus in designing for myself, in many cases I was able to design for others in my targeted user group.

13 14 15 16

Ortiz, Strong Magic. 19. Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Collier, “Lack of Wonder.” Dewar, “A Chronic Lack of Awe.”

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Audiences

When I first began my work on this thesis, I wanted to distance myself from magic because of the problems I had with the field. I didn’t want to rehash the same issues I had come across when I was younger and I definitely didn’t want to try to design for magicians, because I didn’t want to fall into the trap of designing tricks. I tried to break down the problems I had with magic in general, to decide where I could fit in and how I could do a thesis around magic without designing tricks, illusions or designing for magicians. At the risk of alienating and potentially stereotyping magicians, I’m going to outline some of the problems that I have noted with this user group. I feel as though I can write this because I once thought in many of the same ways and because these points have been validated through many of my readings and research avenues. I must stress of course that what follows does not apply to all magicians; they are simply some observations. - Many magicians copy other magicians – from single effects to entire acts, characters, scripts, and secrets. There isn’t much recourse other than self-policing within the community, so copying is rampant. Some say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I think in magic it goes way beyond this. There is a serious lack of creativity amongst many performing magicians, amateur and professional. Because watching a magician perform is still a rare experience, the chances that you will see one magician perform the same effect as another magician is so low that there is little concern about being caught. David Copperfield, in the final issue of MAGIC magazine, wrote an editorial piece about just this, and implored magicians to begin to ‘listen’ to everything around them for inspiration. As he put it: “please, never, copy anybody’s work. But do tap into the universal emotions that inspired those creations.”17 - Many magicians don’t consider their audiences. Magic is a strange art in that you can’t really ask the audience what they would like to see on stage. In paraphrasing illusion designer Jim 17

Copperfield, “Relevance.”

Audiences

Steinmeyer, if you had a chef cook someone a fancy five course meal, they may absolutely love it, but if you asked them what meal they would prefer, they might just say pizza. Magic is about creating the impossible, so magicians feel that audiences may have a difficult time imagining these impossible scenarios. This is actually quite similar to Apple’s design approach of not doing user testing and instead designing features that users couldn’t even dream of.18 When this becomes the job of the magician, in order to rehearse or ideate they turn to practicing with other magicians. What Paul Ekman calls ‘duping delight’ takes over, as magicians begin working to fool each other, and thus lose track of their intended audience. In Copperfield’s editorial post mentioned earlier, he writes, “Walt Disney once said, ‘Comedy, to be effective, has to relate to the audience … When the comedy loses that relationship with the audience, it becomes meaningless and just silly.’ The same could be said about magic.” - Many magicians fear magic. In Eugene Burger and Robert Neale’s book Magic and Meaning, there is a great conversation about just this. This fear becomes evident when magicians perform a miracle and immediately follow it up with a joke or hokey line to break the tension. Why can’t magicians let the feeling linger, and really hit the audience? As Burger says, “it is as if these magicians are embarrassed by the whole idea of magic. And so they transform conjuring into something silly and cute.”19 But if audiences pay to see a magician, why ruin the entertainment with ridiculous patter? - Much of magic lacks meaning. This goes along with the last point, as Eugene Burger urges that “we need to understand that our goal is to link our magic with meanings, with life experiences that express our common humanity.” Derren Brown, a British mentalist, says in his book Absolute Magic, that “magic is not inherently anything. It is what you sell it as.”20 If this is true, then we certainly need to imbue our magic with meaning, as most performances are devoid of this apart from a superficial level of having 18 19 20

Tuesday et al., “Apple.” Burger and Neale, Magic and Meaning. 3. Brown, Absolute Magic. 50.

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some power that the audience doesn’t have. There are other points to make with all of this, but by focusing on the second point above in this thesis – magicians’ lack of consideration for their audience – I have decided to focus directly on two particular user groups: ‘audiences’ or people who experience magic for one reason or another, and the next generation of magicians. Instead of trying to shift existing magicians away from their approach towards ‘modern magic,’ I have worked to design magical experiences for my users in order to produce an alternative to magic stage performances. For those who are looking to get into magic as a performer, I hope that this thesis is able to illuminate the ways in which magic principles and design thinking can combine to create a potential new direction for your work. In developing the personas for my primary user group, I found that three different types of users arose. The first would be people who already engage in the performing arts but in a participatory way. Immersive theater, karaoke, magic shows, are all things that they have engaged with in the past, but they are open to new experiences. These are sensation-seeking individuals. The second type of person consists of those who need an experience or product to bring some mystery and wonder back into their lives. They are possibly bored or disenchanted with the world and open to more. The third are people who are actively searching for meaning – I call them explorers. These are world travelers, foodies, and yoga enthusiasts (not necessarily all together). People who enjoy life but are actively looking for more meaning through travel and experiencing new things. There is some overlap with the first group with this type.

Audiences

I created two different personas that align with aspects of these groups to help me outline the characteristics of my potential users: Greg is a 29-year-old ‘tech dude’ from the Upper East Side. He is single, a bit egotistical, and loves to socialize with his friends and coworkers. He spends lots of his disposable income on gadgets but is secretly bored by everything he owns and most conversations he has with others. He needs to keep up-to-date on technology so that he can contribute to conversations with the latest information. He longs for more meaning in his life, some sort of change or real excitement. He feels as though he has seen everything, but would love to feel wonder again. Another persona is that of Beatrice. Beatrice is a 45-year-old ‘homebody’ living in rural Pennsylvania. She is married, with three children, and typically sticks to a daily routine. She just tries to get through the day’s activities and always puts her family first, rarely thinking of herself. She needs to find some time for herself and is also looking for some other meaning for her life. She wouldn’t actively look for transformative experiences or adventure but would love some escape if she found the right opportunity. For each of these users, I find that this particular quote from Einstein is inspiring for their needs: The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery —even if mixed with fear— that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms— it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.21 21

Einstein, The World As I See It. 7.

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On the other side of the spectrum we find the skeptics and debunkers. These are the people who find no place in life for nonrational thought or imagination. James Randi, a magician and a head of the debunking community, writes: We live in a society that is enlarging the boundaries of knowledge at an unprecedented rate, and we cannot keep up with much more than a small portion of what is made available to us. To mix our data input with childish notions of magic and fantasy is to cripple our perception of the world around us.We must reach for the truth, not for the ghosts of dead absurdities.22 Randi’s argument for purely rational thought is countered by magic theorist Eugene Burger in his book Magic and Meaning: Accessing the nonrational, I insist, is important. Wonder, enchantment and magic are not simply things of childhood but are important for the health and sanity of adults as well. Our human ability to experience wonder and awe at the very fact of the world’s – and our own – existence is one of the astonishing achievements of consciousness on this planet. Unlike the ants, we are not task-bound, forever moving along genetic and chemical paths. We can look beyond all of our tasks and follies and question the mystery of the world’s existence.We can get the same feelings from the immensity of this question.23 This is my goal: to bring this sense of mystery into people’s lives and inspire wonder and awe, which may or may not be missing. This thesis attempts to insert unique moments into the everyday – rare experiences and interactions that motivate people to question things just a bit more.

22 23

Randi et al., “Help Stamp Out Absurd Beliefs.” Burger and Neale, Magic and Meaning. 19.

Audiences

Our task is amazement, not amusement. Always amazement first. René Lavand

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Methods

By methods, I am not referring to the secret methods by which illusions are created, but instead to the approach I took to develop this thesis project. My design method took a rather open form, and I researched through a combination of books, articles, and videos, as well as primary interviews with subject matter experts. In the creation of the products for this work, I’ve tried to remain open about the processes involved and to collaborate with my peers to develop my ideas further. Although I still believe in the power of surprise and magical effects with hidden secret workings, this thesis is more in line with Maskelyne and Devant’s concept for magic, as written in Our Magic. They believed that by exposing the craft behind the illusions, audiences would further appreciate the magic as art. Thus by sharing the psychology and thoughts behind my ideas with my users and peers, I feel their perception of magic may be able to change. Beginning in the summer of 2016, I looked broadly at an area of inquiry surrounding the ‘unexpected.’ I started this openly – I was looking for opportunities to create a framework to help me develop experiences that evoke emotions around surprise such as wonder and awe. I read about the psychology of surprise, superstitions, belief, randomness, and even physiological effects like piloerection (goosebumps). Although this exploration began as research for ideas for my thesis, I soon found myself on a journey to rekindle my own sense of wonder in the world. To supplement my research, I needed to fully experience the emotions I was looking to design for, so I placed myself in as many unexpected situations as possible. This included immersive theater shows without prior knowledge of the content, dinners with strangers, walks through the city with no particular destination, and even travel to other countries where I didn’t know the language and was clearly out of place. Through these approaches, I began to understand that in order to feel wonder, you need to remove yourself from the ‘everyday’ and bring about some change through an unordinary experience. To further understand how others work in this area, I spoke with

Methods

over 24 diverse subject matter experts, who included magicians, educators, authors, a variety of artists, AI researchers, and a Blue Man. These people pushed and pulled my thesis in a variety of directions and provided provoking insights into their professions and lives, which I have used to form connections between them all. These connections eventually led me back to my background in magic, because of the power the art has to create the feelings I wanted from my work. To reexamine magic from a design perspective, I returned to magic books looking for writings about magic’s potential and cultural relevance throughout history. Using others’ thoughts as inspiration, I developed an understanding that traditional magic performances aren’t the only way to create ‘magical’ experiences for people. How can we usher a new form of magic into the world that combines traditional elements of the art with other allied fields? Is there even a separation anymore? In the Products of Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, we are taught that ‘products’ take many, if not countless, forms. Rather than focusing on industrial design or the design of solely physical objects, our products range from the digital to the physical and encompass services, platforms and apps, systems, and experiences. We develop minimum viable prototypes by using everything from Arduino to writing press releases. The projects developed through this thesis process are the result of looking at my topic through all these product lenses. This book outlines my research and thesis process further, not necessarily in order of production, but by showing the products that resulted from my journey into the world of wonder.

Initial Mental Model

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Interviewees

Ilan Magician & Educator

Abhrajeet Roy Cognitive Neuroscientist

Wyna Liu Gerry Fialka Mixed Media Sculptor Paramedia Ecologist

Holly Chesnoff Educator & Magician’s Wife

Winslow Turner Porter Director

Jess Rowland Sound Artist

Eric Redon Software Engineer

Pierce Gradone Post-modern Music Composer

Milica Zec Virtual Reality Film Director

Alex Stone Magician & Author

Cyril Chapellier Software Engineer

Interviewees

Beau Lotto Neuroscientist & Entrepreneur

Bruce Shapiro Tania Luna Motion Control Artist Author & Surprisologist

Zander Brimijoin Director: Red Paper Heart

Aditya Kalyanpur Educator & Magician’s Wife

Claudia Chagui Experience Designer

Philip Fisher Author & Harvard Professor

Johanna Koljonen CEO & Media Expert: Odysse

Christopher Brown Blue Man Group

Michael Chung Photographer & Filmmaker

Ethan Weiss Kevin O’Brien Clinical Social Worker Storyboard Artist: Pixar

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Early Prototypes Before jumping fully into the world of magic and wonder, I began my journey by looking more broadly at ‘the unexpected.’ Aligning myself with the concept that there are no bad ideas, I ideated as many unexpected concepts as I could over the course of a few days. Some of my favorites included a navigation app that would give you five minute detours along your path to add variety to your day, a ‘remote control experience,’ and sound reactive helmets that could be used for concussion awareness. I chose three of these ideas to quickly prototype, to see where I could take them.

Early Prototypes

Magic is mysterious; it is wonderful, it can never die, it is the very essence of the living, it is ever new and fresh, and that is why we are optimists. Servais LeRoy

Early Prototypes

Before jumping fully into the world of magic and wonder, I began my journey by looking more broadly at ‘the unexpected.’ Aligning myself with the concept that there are no bad ideas, I ideated as many unexpected concepts as I could over the course of just a few days. Some of my favorites included a navigation app that would give you 5 minute detours along your path to add variety to your day, a ‘remote control experience’, and sound reactive helmets that could be used for concussion awareness. I chose 3 of these ideas to quickly prototype to see where I could take them.

Awe and Astonishment

Cross-Fertilization Idea Generator Inspiration 1: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1264 Inspiration 2: Maria Wodzicka

Cross-Fertilization Idea Generator Inspiration 1: North Carolina Highway 148 Inspiration 2: Pacific High School (Port Orford, Oregon)

Cross-Fertilization Idea Generator Inspiration 1: Khimik Voskresensk (2005) Inspiration 2: Old Geelong

Early Prototypes

Cross-Fertilization Generator

As many of my concepts for this ideation session came from unexpected sources, I wanted to encapsulate this method for others to use. Cross-pollination24 or cross-fertilization of contexts within the design world is nothing new25, but sometimes the motivation for these unique combinations of ideas can be something that we simply stumble across rather than plan for. The cross-fertilization generator produces two random concepts and provides the designer with the opportunity to combine them in ways that could potentially be useful. There are already existing idea generators online, but most consist in linking two physical objects (such as https://www.randomlists.com/things). My generator looks more broadly at all Wikipedia articles, in English, and pulls out two random articles for use. This way we can not only combine a lawnmower and a toothbrush, but also larger concepts like genomics and fiscal policy. My initial prototype’s article base was far too broad, however, and it gave quite difficult concepts to combine, like ‘Brantford Transit’ and the ‘1925 USC Trojans football team.’

24 25

Seelig, “5 Ways To Innovate By Cross-Pollinating Ideas.” Wilson, “The Key to Innovative Business Ideas.”

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Secret Letter

I wanted to use a method from magic that utilizes thermochromic ink – a special formula of ink that changes color according to temperature fluctuations – in order to create a surprising outcome. I imagined a printer that could lay down both standard ink as well as thermochromic ink in order to easily create hidden messages on paper. The simple prototype for this involved writing some letters in standard ink and others in thermochromic ink, so that when the page was heated with a flame, the thermochromic ink would disappear revealing the true intent of the message.

Early Prototypes

Awe and Astonishment

Early Prototypes

Shoeprint Security Device

Our body parts are used to identify us every day: our faces can be detected by security cameras, our fingerprints and irises unlock devices, and our hair can be used to trace our DNA if we commit a crime. The footprint security device imagines a speculative future where we can be identified by the bottoms of our shoes. Because we each place our weight uniquely on our feet and we each have different gaits as we walk, I imagined a future where these differences can be detected to identify us as we walk through physical space. I envisioned an experience design where attendees would walk through an art gallery unaware that they were being tracked. At the end of the exhibit, a monitor would be able to correctly identify them, and would reveal how it had been possible to gain this information based on how they had walked through the space. For a proof-of-concept prototype, I began work on a device that would weigh a person upon entry to a room, and then, when they reached the exit, would compare their weight to the database to determine which person they were. In creating this alternate version of my concept, I uncovered a different method of tracking people – their weight. I did not finish this prototype, but I look forward to exploring this area further.

Awe and Astonishment

Wonder

The word wonder can be used in two different ways: as a verb in the sense of being curious about something, or as a noun to refer to the feeling we have when we experience something vast, beautiful, or unexpected. In Philip Fisher’s Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, he discusses the emotion of wonder and the types of experiences that are able to evoke this specific feeling. He begins his writing with wonder’s roots, and notes how French philosopher René Descartes spoke on wonder as “the act of noticing with pleasure something new and unprecedented… [however,] the act of being able to notice something requires that it be unexpected, not part of the ordinary.”26 Descartes went even further and wrote that in order to even experience something at all, that moment can’t be ordinary and must be “separable from what came before and after.” This philosophical understanding of experiences illustrates the importance of the unexpected in creating memorable moments. An interesting section of Fisher’s book focuses on the story of the Greek goddess Iris and her father Thaumas, the god of wonder.27 The term thaumatology – the study of miracles and wonders – is derived from his name. Fisher makes the quick statement that a thaumaturge is “a producer of wonders.”28 This simple association, in contemporary times, that the wonder producer is a magician is an interesting one. Is this truly the role that magicians play in our world? Are they the only ones who are able to make us feel this emotion and create wonder? One dichotomy that arises from Fisher’s book is between children and adults. The child experiences new things and feels curious about everything, while the adult who requires wonder in her life has instead been dulled by so many experiences that she is less susceptible to such feelings. Fisher writes that Stevinus, a Dutch mathematician from the 1500s, had a motto that “wonder is the enemy of wonder.”29 When we experience wonder, we immediately seek an explanation, or wonder about how it came about, 26 27 28 29

Fisher, Wonder. 20. Fisher, Wonder. 11. Fisher, Wonder. 14. Fisher, Wonder. 60.

Wonder

how it works, or how we can create it ourselves. This explanation process “renormalizes temporary or apparently extra-ordinary anomalies, bringing them back into the ordinary world.” This search for explanation or answers, this rationalizing of mysteries, is human nature. Paul Harris, a magician, author, and magic consultant to many of the well-known magician stars, wrote in his book The Art of Astonishment that a common reaction from audiences of shows is that it makes them feel like kids again. The metaphor he presents is that of a child’s blank mind. As this child begins to learn, she files all the information she takes in into ‘thought boxes.’ As we grow up, we have boxes for everything, rationalizing everything we see. When we encounter something we’ve never seen before, or a piece of impossibility, we immediately try to find the box to place it in. When we can’t find the right box, we feel like a child again and we feel a pure “moment of astonishment.”30 Harris goes on to say that a magician’s job is to be an ‘astonishment guide,’ and instead of watering down experiences with jokes and a lack of meaning, magicians should recognize that “the astonishment is real. It’s a brief flash of our natural state of mind. A place we should all experience more often.” In Marian Bantjes’s book I Wonder, one of the chapters showcases a cipher that she designed, a secret code that hides some writing within it. When looking through the book, the cipher jumped out at me as a perfect example of wonder, because it immediately made me curious about the content of the message. Was it something that would be worth the time required to decipher it, or was it just a visual gimmick that would turn out to be gibberish? I decided to spend the next five hours of my night deciphering the chapter. I won’t reveal the content of the passage, because by this point you too should be wondering what it could be.31 30 Harris, Mead, and Hagen, The Art of Astonishment. 31 If you are interested in deciphering the code in her book, I would recommend looking at the pages and recognizing the distinct patterns of spaces between the symbols. Once you see these, you can find the single letter words and extrapolate that these are likely to symbolize the letters I or A. Continue on from there with two letter and three letter words. Have fun!

Awe and Astonishment

Surprise

In Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger’s book Surprise: Embrace the Unexpected and Engineer the Unexpected, the authors make the distinction that “while curiosity pushes us to look for answers, wonder allows us to savor the questions.”32 In the book, Luna and Renninger illustrate that the underlying emotion or state of mind behind wonder – namely surprise – is one of the most primitive of feelings. Our ancestors found that their bodies’ mechanisms in relation to surprise served as protection from dangers that could potentially eat them in the woods. The physical reactions that occurred when coming face to face with a saber-toothed tiger helped them to escape enough times that they could evolve. Surprise is thus vital to our survival. Luna and Renninger outline what they call “the surprise sequence.” This represents the stages that our brain and body go through when we encounter something unexpected. 1. The freeze: This is the phase where we stop whatever we were doing and attend to the surprise. Our face usually has a bit of a deer-in-headlights expression and we shift our focus to the unexpected moment. 2. Find: After we freeze, our brains try to place the surprise into a ‘thought box,’ such as that which Paul Harris spoke of. This can take a mere instant as the realization of the event settles, or it can take a little longer for us to reconcile what we are witnessing. 3. Shift: Once we have found the right box – or schema/mental model – for the context of the surprise, we can either rationalize it or shift our schema. If there is a schema discrepancy, or a difference between our box and what we are witnessing, we have to decide whether we are willing to allow this box to change. We have to shift our understanding of the world in order to accept what we are encountering. This is where our confirmation bias comes into play, as we tend to look for answers that support our current mental models. In the book, Luna and Renninger reiterate that the schema of children are quite flexible, while adults are far more 32

Luna and Renninger, Surprise. 193.

Surprise

stubborn to allow this shift: “We keep the surprise out.”33 4. Share: The cognitive burden of going through a schema shift is so great that we tend to ease the load by sharing it with other people. This is why people love to share surprising stories of things that have happened to them. The more surprising, the more frequently the story is shared. I also liken this to a child who has just learned that when she pokes a frog with a stick, the frog jumps. The next thing the child does is to immediately run to her parents to share this newly acquired information. Author Tania Luna began a company with her sister Kat Dudina called Surprise Industries, through which they work to educate people on the value of surprises, as well as host the ‘surprise experiment,’ where for $3 they pledge to surprise you at some point in your life. These surprises range from the small to the large and extravagant. The concept is brilliant. Can we get people not only to accept surprise, but also to seek it out enough to pay for it? When I interviewed Tania, she stated that the experiment had a little over 400 people in it and that they had been doing small surprises for people since they began, mainly one-on-one. The plan is to work on the list more in 2017 by beginning to provide group surprises. To return to the earlier assertion of Luna and Renninger that “wonder allows us to savor the questions,” we can see that the authors are suggesting that we stay in the ‘find’ phase for longer, perhaps sometimes without even reaching a conclusion for a shift. This means accepting the lack of answers, accepting mystery, rather than searching for an answer. To explore how surprises and schema shifts can lead to more powerful wonder-inducing experiences, I created some explorations around surprise itself.

Luna and Renninger, Surprise. 10.

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Surprising Prototypes

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Surprising Prototypes

Startle!

People tend to move through life with an aversion to the unexpected and can become stuck in boring loops. When something is new, it first stirs feelings of surprise and excitement, but it can quickly become dull. Psychologists call this the ‘hedonic treadmill’: we always return back to our base level of happiness even after a shift.34 How can we allow people to bring surprise into their lives and overcome the typical hedonic treadmill? Startle! is a service with an app pairing that allows users to be active in introducing unexpected moments into their lives to achieve a balance between predictability and surprise.

“The Hedonic Treadmill - Are We Forever Chasing Rainbows?”

Awe and Astonishment

Surprising Prototypes

There are three parts to the platform: 1. A surprise planning section, where friends can scheme together, invite others, and get inspiration. Weekly Startle! suggestions are also delivered to members to stir up ideas. 2. A premium surprise service with multiple tiers: Subscription Startle! packs Coupons. 3. Social media for sharing Startle! outcomes. The first step is to fill out a brief surprise survey, to learn what your limits are and in what areas you would like to be pushed. This survey asks things such as “When do you feel happiest?” “How often do you feel wonder?” “Are you afraid of heights?” and “How would you describe your comfort zone?”

Awe and Astonishment

Surprising Prototypes

Friends can also sign up for a more social experience. Users can purchase Startle! packs at a premium, where something unexpected will happen within the next three months. The service makes money in three ways: 1. We sell the app on the Apple App Store for a nominal fee. 2. We provide premium surprises for additional fees. 3. We offer surprise planning services. The ultimate vision for this service is to help our users overcome the boredom epidemic. By training people to be better surprise designers and uncertainty embracers, we feel we can reframe vulnerability from a weakness into a strength.

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Tacit

Magicians have an interesting relationship with their audiences. When you enter a magic show, you are willingly allowing, even encouraging, the performer on stage to lie to you. This kind of implicit agreement is, however, also entered into invisibly every day in a variety of contexts. In a movie theatre, for instance, we understand that when the lights go down, nobody will look at us or judge us if we begin crying. In a store, we are not expected to run around and break everything only to leave without offering any form of compensation. Oftentimes, one party simply assumes that the other understands the terms of the implicit contract. But what happens if the terms aren’t something you would normally agree to? As a speculative project, what if all of these agreements could be made visible? Tacit makes visible the invisible contracts we enter into as we move about the world. These unstated rules regarding how we are expected to interact change if we are in a park, a store, or a stadium. These agreements also differ depending on the culture and country.

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Tacit can help. Tacit tokens signal that a tacit agreement is in effect, and they can be placed in various establishments so that a user can notice them while walking around. They can be on the street, in stores, parks, theaters, or even in people’s houses. When a user sees a token, the Tacit app will push a notification, which outlines all the terms of the agreement. The person can then decide to explicitly agree to the terms, or to explicitly disagree and leave the space. Or they can recommend amendments.

Surprising Prototypes

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The service would make revenue in two ways: 1. We sell the Tacit tokens to businesses, local municipalities, and individuals. 2. We provide a service to draft the tacit agreements. Our ultimate vision is that the Tacit platform will begin a conversation around rights as members of society, and will help to either inform behavior or prompt rebellion if needed.

Surprising Prototypes

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Surprising Prototypes

QRchestra

Michael Mangan, in his book Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring, writes that “conjuring is all about power – of one sort or another.”35 The magician holds the power because she knows the secrets. This is ironic, however, because as illusion designer Jim Steinmeyer points out, “magicians guard an empty safe. They guard it so that people don’t know that it’s empty.”36 But how can we shift this power and enable audience members to actually become participants? Or better yet, how do we give them the power and control itself, and move magic from the stage towards experiences? I took this idea of shifting power and wanted to add another layer by playing with traditional expectations. When I interviewed Zander Brimijoin of experience design firm Red Paper Heart, he stated that he “loves people’s expectations of physical objects, so as much as possible I center interactions around objects that people have a lot of experience with… That combination of familiar and unfamiliar is really important in our work and we always look for these moments.” In thinking of technologies that people use every day with specific expectations, QR codes came to mind. QR codes are ubiquitous, but consumers generally disregard them because they can be a nuisance to scan and generally contain little useful information. They have multiple other uses for shipping, logistics, and ticketing, but at a ‘consumer’ level they’re typically used to trigger URLs and strings of text. This was a perfect expectation to disrupt, for the previous reasons. By giving QR codes a new function and reframing them as something different, I could push their potential. Using some crossfertilization (though not from my own generator), I came upon the idea of turning the codes into a musical instrument. This led me to build an app called QRchestra. 35 36

Mangan, Performing Dark Arts. 9. Steinmeyer, Technique and Understanding. 37.

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QRchestra is a standard QR code reader, but it uses some special codes to trigger sound effects. When played in succession, the codes are able to produce an orchestral piece. This app doesn’t use magic in the traditional sense, but instead, through innovative uses of technology, gives others the power to explore and create. You can give it a try by downloading the app from the Apple App Store and playing on the next page.

Intro

19, 21, 23, 25

20, 22, 24, 26

6, 8, 10, 12

7, 9, 11, 13

Surprising Prototypes

A magician should intensify one’s sensitivity to wonder. S.H. Sharpe

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Magic

Since first becoming interested in magic at the age of 12, I have read many books on the subject. In the beginning, I mainly focused on learning effects, as the theory behind the art was far less interesting than the instant gratification of the tricks themselves. There is nothing quite like reading about a trick, running out of your room to perform it for your parents, and seeing them scratch their heads in amazement at their trickster kid. After revisiting most of the books in my library and gleaning important details on how to lead audience members to the emotions and feelings that magicians strive to evoke, I expanded my research to include other directions from which to probe the subject. When I first decided to focus on the role of magic in the creation of the emotions of wonder and awe, I revisited many of these formative books to read the theoretical essays and see what I had been missing over the years. On opening the dusty pages of these tomes, I was excited to find whole new sections of writing I had skipped before. In looking at writings on magic theory, I found that most fell into four different categories: 1. Psychology/philosophy of why magic methods work. 2. Classifications of magical effects. 3. Performance tips akin to acting advice. 4. Creativity techniques. On the creativity topic, one exploration involved Dariel Fitzkee’s classic book set The Fitzkee Trilogy from 1944, which has always been held up as the basis of theoretical examinations of magic. Although many find Fitzkee’s approach to be overly opinionated and outdated, you have to appreciate his ability to scientifically study all aspects of the field, from showmanship to psychology. He even outlined a creative brainstorming method through which to produce effects yourself. From a designer’s perspective, Fitzkee’s The Trick Brain is a perfect example of how to create a taxonomy and information archi-

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tecture around magic. Fitzkee breaks magic down, not only into a classification of effects, but also as a method for cross-fertilization of ideas within the field. He outlines a structure for magicians to combine a list of basic effects, essential factors for these effects, a list of objects to choose from, and a list of basic methods. By utilizing his random approach, magicians could theoretically stumble upon innovative effects and new performances to bring to their audiences. Fitzkee felt that magic was not an art but rather a science, and that the true art came in performance. As he put it, “I rather choose to think of the skill in the performance of magic as entertaining.”37 Juan Tamariz, a contemporary card magician with a unique philosophy about the field, wrote in his book The Magic Way a completely different approach to magic theory.38 Tamariz proposes that a magician’s job is not only to fool the audience but to lead spectators down a path that leaves them in a state in which they are unable to even begin to figure out the method. He feels that they shouldn’t even want to try to discern the method.39 If one follows his framework, the audience should be left in Paul Harris’ “moment of astonishment,”40 or what Tamariz calls the “magic rainbow.” Each magician nevertheless has her own goals for the performance. Some feel that their role is to simply fool or deceive the audience. Others believe that magic is pure entertainment – in their minds, if you make the audience laugh or have fun, you have been successful in your endeavor. S.H. Sharpe, a prolific author on the theory of magic, has several books outlining thoughts he has collected over the years. In A Thousand Thoughts, he writes, “those who think that magic consists of doing tricks are strangers to magic. Tricks are only the crude 37 38 39 40

Fitzkee, The Trick Brain. You can watch Juan Tamariz perform an incredible card effect for two magicians here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EyIRJaCRz8 Tamariz, The Magic Way. Harris, Mead, and Hagen, The Art of Astonishment.

Magic

residue from which the lifeblood of magic has been drained.”41 The concept of magic being comprised of tricks is a difficult one to break. Many times, tricks are just the first layer, with additional layers of meaning placed on top to elevate the trick or illusion to art or wonder. As Sharpe writes, “the first aim is to create a complete illusion, the second to present it artistically so as to evoke wonder.” In the beginning of his book Words on Wonder, Sharpe writes, “the underlying purpose of magic in its many aspects is not to deceive people but to encourage them to approach life and [the] cosmos in a state of wonder.”42 Magic theorist Eugene Burger writes how a magician’s goals should align with creating what he calls “the magical experience.”43 He outlines the following design principles for creating this magical experience: “The magical experience is not the experience of a puzzle [or of] confusion.” “An audience ready to see magic is in the state of expecting something marvelous to happen.” “In a magical performance we come face to face with the unexpected and impossible in life.” “The magical experience prompts us to ask ourselves whether all mysteries are really puzzles waiting to be solved.” How can magicians develop their shows in order to guide audiences to have these feelings of wonder, rather than challenge them to figure out the puzzle of a trick or illusion? Later in this book, I will describe an experience that I designed and how I took these elements into consideration to create an environment more open to wonder.

41 42 43

Sharpe, Art and Magic. 34. Sharpe, Art and Magic. 183. Burger and Neale, Magic and Meaning. 13.

Magic for Magicians

Alex Stone is the author of Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind. After reading his book, I found many parallels between Alex’s life in magic and my own. Alex begins his book with the story of his act at FISM, or Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Magiques, the World Championship of Magic held in Stockholm every three years. FISM is incredibly difficult to get into as you must be sponsored by your country of origin and have competed at a high level prior to applying. Alex was disqualified while on stage as his hands dipped below the table too many times. His failure was so historic that he dropped into a depressed state wherein he questioned his abilities as a magician and ultimately left magic, if just for a brief period of time. While I didn’t fail at FISM, I did lose in a competition to a strip club magician manipulating a deck of cards, even after I had rented a truck to transport a grand scale illusion across the state of Florida and had brought along a whole team of assistants. It was the spectacular failure that showed me I needed a change if I was going to stay in the magic world at all. Alex eventually did return to find his own way, but only after spending an equivalent amount of money on a “Ducati 1198 superbike.”44 Many magicians go through this phase, as they constantly chase that bigger and better illusion to add to their show. They will see someone perform an effect and think to themselves: “If I only knew how to do that, my show would be so much better and everyone would think I am the greatest magician in the world.” This may be a slightly hyperbolic reaction, but I remember thinking along these lines when I was throwing my money at the magic dealers.

Stone, Fooling Houdini. 161.

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Alex eventually found his way off this path as he combined his passion for math and physics with magic to craft his own act, and has been touring giving lectures to audiences around the US ever since. When I interviewed Alex, he felt that magic has seen tremendous shifts in recent years due, in part, to the internet. Young, tech savvy kids have taken magic in new directions with their innovative methods, popular culture has seen a boost in magic movies, and online communities and magic shops have broadened the possibilities for people to get into the art. The latest intrigue for magic, in his eyes, is to turn the act of magicians fooling other magicians into a spectator sport. Magicians have competed against each other for years in order, in Alex’s eyes, to push and further the craft. But the turn from competing in secret, closed locations to doing so in public, on TV – as in Penn & Teller’s show Fool Us – is certainly a departure. One could argue that magicians performing for each other does nothing more than to distance magicians further from their true audiences. We can even point to some magicians whose career is built around only performing for magicians and not for laypeople. The Fool Us show is a bit of a paradigm shift, however, because the magicians on the show perform in order to fool magicians, but the audience is there for the ride. Who in this case is the true audience? Especially when the effect is in the magician using a well-known sleight of hand, yet presenting an alternate outcome than expected, to other magicians. In such a situation, does the non-magician audience get anything out of it? Magician Derek Delgaudio explores this concept in his show titled 184 Seconds, in which the intro shows him performing ‘second deals,’ a difficult magic sleight where instead of dealing the top card of the deck, as in a normal deal, you pull the second card from the top. The second deal is intended to be invisible to the lay eye.45 Alex Stone writes of a card routine performed by Spanish magician Rafael Benatar in which nothing magical happens. 45

Weiner, “The Magician Who Wants to Break Magic.”

Magic for Magicians

Benatar performs a double lift (pretending to show the top card but in fact showing the second card from the top) and then following it by a second deal. These two moves cancel each other out so the card you saw is the card that was dealt. Magic for magicians. Nothing magical happens and magicians love it. 46

Stone, Fooling Houdini. 137.

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Magical Prototypes

How vastly different now is everything in magic; gone is the true magician, here is the mere trickster, the man who unconsciously has adopted the modern style, which kills his own effects. Gone the true mystery, gone the startling wonderment of the audience, to be replaced by the cold query “How is it done?” S.H. Sharpe

Awe and Astonishment

Dupe

Paul Ekman, the world’s foremost expert on lying and deception, has named the pleasure we all derive from fooling others ‘duping delight.’47 This is basically the frisson of excitement that comes from pulling off a good lie. This is the reason why so many people brag about their crimes, only to end up being caught. According to Ekman, the amount of fun we feel in fooling another person depends on three factors: 1. The gullibility of the target. 2. The size of the lie. 3. The amount of respect we win by telling it. If we take each of these factors and break them down, we can see why magicians love to fool each other. The gullibility factor shows us that it is much harder to fool magicians because they are in the know of the methods behind the effects. The size of the lie directly relates to the skill level required to pull off a trick or illusion, and the amount of respect won is the reason why magicians have tournaments and share war stories from the magic battlefield. To this effect, there is actually an illusion titled “the trick that fooled Houdini.” On the flip side of this duping delight for magicians, we have what Alex Stone calls ‘duped delight’: “the maddening ecstasy of being a layperson again, a novice, if only for a moment.”48 With both duping and duped delight in mind, I created a concept for an application called Dupe.

47 48

Ekman, Telling Lies. 77. Stone, Fooling Houdini. 291.

Magical Prototypes

0:00 PM

DUPE TODAY’S ASSIGNMENT

“The Invisible Bug” Feed Avra G.

5:20 PM

Lakisha M.

5:20 PM

Manali T.

5:20 PM

Haejin Y.

5:20 PM

Arjun K.

5:20 PM

George W.

5:20 PM

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur rising elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

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Dupe allows you to compete against your friends at duping each other. It plays with the three aspects of duping delight, in that you are only duping people who are in on the game, the skill level for each dupe goes up as you learn them, and you share your duping wins with your friends so that they can all see the results of the game. The dupes themselves are missions that the app gives you each day with specific instructions on how to carry them out. Some range from the simple, like getting someone to look at where you are pointing, to the more performative, like pretending to squash a bug to see whether people believe you’ve done it. In the following pages you can see the first passes at a storyboarded user journey with the app, as well as first passes at wireframes to begin testing with users.

Magical Prototypes

The whole of life begins with a sense of wonder. Sir Laurens Van Der Post

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Tasia

When thinking about how to create a social change design intervention that embodied this thesis, I began with the following problem statement: Magic is a male dominated form of theater and by addressing the stereotypical male image of a magician, we can create more opportunities for women in the performing art. To tackle this problem, I began by focusing on bright spot programs that could be implemented and easily scaled. These are programs that bring attention to an issue by developing accessible programming.49 One idea here would be to create afterschool programs for younger children using magic as a tool to boost self-confidence as well as a way of challenging gender roles. Many boys get into performing magic to gain a feeling of control and power, so how could we reach young girls before social pressures take hold?

Hurst, “Five Levers.”

Magical Prototypes

Looking at some data, I found that only around 3-5% of members in magic social clubs are women. One of the reasons for this is because these clubs were male-only since their inception. The Magic Circle in the UK didn’t begin accepting women until 1991. Along this same idea, could we rename such organizations as the International Brotherhood of Magicians to the International Fellowship of Magicians?

Awe and Astonishment

Magical Prototypes

In thinking about shifting the public perception of magicians, I realized that most people have never seen a female perform magic. This is somewhat ironic if you look through history, because women have been performing with men from the beginning of written magic history. One of the biggest setbacks for female magicians however began in the fifteenth century, when women performing magic were associated with witchcraft. One particular instance wrote that a man could perform a torn-andrestored handkerchief effect and be labeled a magician, while a woman performing the same would be burned at the stake.

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Magical Prototypes

102

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The Royal Dynasty of Magic

Magical Prototypes

103

Now, before I introduce my final concept, I have to explain two things. The first is called the Royal Dynasty of Magic. This is an honor passed down from magician to magician that symbolizes to the public that the traditions are being carried forward through the generations. The dynasty began with the death of Alexander Herrmann in 1896, when he passed down the mantle to Harry Kellar, who held the title until passing it down in 1908 to Howard Thurston. Prior to Thurston’s death, he had pre-selected a magician named Harry August Jansen, or Dante. Dante retired in 1954 and chose Lee Grabel to be America’s premier magician, and he ultimately passed the mantle on to Lance Burton in 1994.50 This is interesting because Lance Burton retired from performing magic in 2010, so some feel it’s now time for him to pass the mantle on. The other part of the concept stems from an interview I had with Jim Steinmeyer in 2014. Steinmeyer is an illusion designer and consultant for magicians, attractions, and shows around the world. He has created illusions for David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy, and Lance Burton, as well as Broadway shows such as Aladdin and Mary Poppins. One of our discussion points was that magicians aren’t interested in new material anymore. They don’t want new illusions because they are “scared of material that may not work.”51 Steinmeyer also mentioned that although most magicians are pushing for card magic to be the prevailing form for performance magic due to its accessible nature and unlimited potential for sleights and shows of skill, that doesn’t necessarily mean that this is what audiences want to see. He found that in order to find new audiences for his work, instead of serving magicians he had to go directly to the public by producing a full magic show on his own. This meant finding a magician or casting an actor to play the role.

50 51

Burton, “Royal Dynasty of Magicians.” Steinmeyer, Throughlines Interviews Jim Steinmeyer.

104

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The concept of a cast magic show is not new. One quick example of this comes from Theo Bamberg in the late 1800s. Theo Bamberg never actually performed under his own name. He worked with directors, scriptwriters, and choreographers to come up with his performing character, Okito. Now this particular case is certainly dated, but the idea I want to take from it is that of a scripted magic show where an actor is cast in the role of the magician. What I propose is a cast magic show with a female lead. In order to bring more women to magic, I think people need to see a woman performing magic. This solution would appeal to the public by offering shows, but the McGuffin would be to ultimately inspire more women to take up the art. I can foresee some potential barriers that might be raised in relation to this idea: Disadvantages: We would need good exposure and the show could potentially not draw any crowds. Areas of incompatibility: There are not many. The community needs a female role model and I think they are ready for it. Difficult areas: Funding for the project would be the most difficult part to secure. The only real barriers to testing would be that we would need to put on a show. It could start small, however, so this isn’t much of a concern. How to make the progress observable: The marketing wouldn’t just be to magicians as it would be public, so it would be easily seen.

Magical Prototypes

Theo Bamberg

105

Okito

Magical Prototypes

107

I am excited to announce that the Dynasty of Magic is continuing with magic’s new rising star: Tasia (pronounced thaz-ya)! Because if we can’t have a female president, then we can at least have a woman as the next greatest magician. I envision Tasia as a cast role, so much like a Broadway show it could change over the seasons but always with a female lead. By doing live shows as well as TV specials, I feel that we could reframe the public’s – as well as magicians’ – perceptions of women in magic.

108

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109

We Can Do It

In order to focus on sustainability as a potential use case for magic, I decided to look at a problem in the non-profit world: financial donor retention rates are incredible low, with a bit less than half of donors only contributing once. I mapped out the fundraising landscape and found that the process breaks down into three parts: donor acquisition, donor retention, and upgrades to get existing donors to give more. I imagined that I could draw a connection between acquisition and retention if I pulled the right levers, utilizing face to face campaigns as a means to generate new donors and engage existing donors.

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LEVERAGE POINTS VOLUME

ROI

PORTFOLIO

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The leverage points I focused on were increasing the number of people that one volunteer could communicate with at a time (by gathering larger crowds), increasing the return on investments for non-profits by keeping costs low, and by taking a full portfolio approach (by not just focusing on acquisition but also retention with the same content). From this I was able to ask how we can acquire new donors more effectively, while creating original content to promote existing donor engagement, through performative street campaigns.

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My theory of change map for this approach feeds in low cost, recycled/recyclable props for performative street fundraising campaigns. Currently, face to face campaigns are capital intensive and the methods used can be harmful to brands as many people find the approach off-putting (I’m talking person-with-clipboard style here). If we introduce low cost products, we can reach more people to educate them and bring awareness, to push them to change. By changing street campaigns into performances, we can generate new content and ultimately be more effective towards the goals of the non-profits. And by filming the performances, they can be used for social media content with the potential to spread online more easily. To make this tangible, I chose a specific environmental issue to focus on and build a prototype: our current and future water crisis.

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Non-Profit Fundraising Theory of Change Map

Design Solution

User Analysis

Product Input Introduce low-cost, recyled/recyclable props for performative street fundraising campaigns.

Current State Face to face/street campaigns are costly, ineffective, potentially harmful to brand, and don’t deal with donor retention.

Assumption The volunteers will be able to perform and pull together audiences on the street.

Outcome By making street fundraising performative, we can use the campaigns to generate new content, reach more people to educate and bring awareness.

Assumption The products are low cost enough to have last impacts on non-profit budgets.

Impact Goal of non-profit is accomplished. In this case, reduced water consumption. Ultimate goal, solved water crisis problems.

Assumption People take action, or donate, after becoming aware of the issues.

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To make this tangible, I chose a specific environmental issue to focus on and build a prototype: our current and future water crisis. I imagined working with water.org to create a performance training video like the one that can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/195891161. The product encompasses the approach and the props themselves: cans! Eugene Burger, who was mentioned earlier, writes that “we need to understand that our goal is to link our magic with meanings, with life experiences that express our common humanity.”52 The concept of meaning is rarely expressed in magic books, as it requires magicians to think of routines and the relationship to their audiences on their own. This effect – “We Can Do It” – relates to our current water crisis by calling upon audiences’ imaginations as they view a symbolic demonstration of the issue. The bill of materials and process flow for this product are simplified due to its inherent sustainability focus and the fact that most of the sources for the materials are recycled goods. When creating an environmental opportunity assessment for the project, I found that the product fit into many categories. Mainly, it would utilize low-impact processes for manufacturing by taking advantage of recycled or recyclable goods. Furthermore, there is an inherent efficiency to the product due to its limited number of parts, and it takes advantage of a circular economy, again because it of its recycled and recyclable content.

Burger and Neale, Magic and Meaning. 139.

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BOM / Process Flow

Recycled Steel Can

Recycled Paper

Aluminum Sheet

Final Product

Silicone

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The author building the We Can Do It prototype

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Magical Prototypes

Remnants of secret materials

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Magic Trick Trailers

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Magic Trick Trailers

Along the way of my reading research, I took a few detours, and the first was to look at magic trick trailers. These are similar to movie trailers in that they give a small taste of the story that is to come. In the case of the magic trick trailers, however, they have an entirely different purpose. Some magicians don’t develop their own illusions and instead purchase them from illusion creators who sell them to performers. The market for new small tricks, unlike illusions, has exploded in recent years with the shift to online shops. Magicians now have access to so much content that they don’t know in which direction to turn. And this is especially true when you are starting out in the field. Magic is built on secrecy, so when you purchase a trick the only thing you know beforehand is the effect, not the method. You are taking it on faith that what you are purchasing is of real value and that you will subsequently be able to perform it on your own. Magicians have developed terminology to advertise to others the salient features of the method: it can be instantly reset so you can move quickly from table to table, you can perform it surrounded by your audience so you don’t have to worry about people looking over your shoulder, and there are no gimmicks so people can touch it afterwards and you don’t have to quickly put it away into your pocket in fear. There are no return policies because you can’t get upset after learning the secret and finding that it wasn’t what you were expecting; though this happens frequently because many magicians find that the secrets aren’t worth the price.

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Magic trick trailers make this prospect potentially even more deceitful, as they wrap up an effect in a beautiful video complete with magical powers, epic music, great cinematography, and reaction shots of women screaming in amazement. Patriarchal issues aside, why would you not want to buy the trick when the person in the video looks like a god? Especially if you are a pubescent boy with low self-esteem who only wants to look cooler. You too can be this amazing if you just spend $19.99 on an instant download. Magicians sell miracles, but not to whom you would anticipate. They sell them to other magicians. You can watch a compilation of magic trick trailers I put together here: https://vimeo.com/172429892.

The world is full of strange wonders, but the most wonderful of all is man. Sophocles

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Brief Magic History

The first recorded story of a magician in history comes from Egypt around 2500 BC. He was named Dedi. We don’t know for certain if Dedi was based on a real person or if he was purely fictional, but he was written about in the Westcar Papyrus. Dedi is a fascinating character as he was said to be 110 years old and to eat 500 loaves of bread and a shoulder of beef and to drink 100 jars of beer every day. Dedi was able to perform an effect where he resurrected decapitated beings. Specifically, he was known for an effect where he took a goose, ripped its head off, and placed the two parts on opposite sides of the room. The head would magically get up and make its way across the room. The body of the goose would also stand up and waddle across the room, and the two would meet and melt back together in the middle. The goose would then run from the hall cackling. This was the first written magic illusion, and it conjured up the image of immortality that was so strong in Egyptian beliefs. The legend of the god Osiris allowed Egyptians to believe that they had a place in the afterlife, and they used magic spells, mummification, and other rituals with the expectation of being able to be reborn in the next life. It’s no surprise that the magic of the time would relate to the prevailing culture of the time. In 1904, Harry Houdini (pictured top right) was known as the king of escapes. He could be chained up and locked in any box and escape. Buried alive and escape. Thrown in the river to drown, and escape. Packing crates, mail bags, milk cans, barrels. Anything. He would escape. This captured the attention of audiences, not just in the US but all over the world, because it was a metaphor for what they hoped for themselves: the ability to escape. If we look a bit later in history, in 1921 British magician P.T. Selbit invented the illusion of sawing through a woman (pictured bottom right). This was shortly after the end of World War I. He designed an illusion that showed a woman being cut in half and then restored at the same time that the world had become desensitized by war and needed a new, more shocking style of magic.

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Magic has the power to transform its audiences. Or at the very least to provide a brief release, a catharsis. How can we design magic effects for our time that have the same power that this magic had before? This is what I explored through my co-creation workshop.

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A conjurer is nothing if he only amuses and fails to inspire wonder. Thomas Sharpe

Contemporary Prototypes

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Contemporary Prototypes

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Co-creation Workshop

On October 22, 2016, I rented a space in Chelsea, NY and invited nine participants to help me design magic that people would not only like to see but that would also relate to our time. I placed some blank cards on the table and asked each of the participants to define the word magic. The answers ranged from getting away with it, when the hair raises on your neck, and being manipulated to believe the unbelievable, to something a bit like humor – unexpected results based on understandable premises, bewildering our senses, and when humans do superhuman things.

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From this point on, the participants knew that magic was on the agenda, but they didn’t know exactly where the session would take them. I gave a brief lecture, whose contents mainly covered what was in the previous section on magic history. I also provided definitions for commonly used magic terms, as are listed in the lexicon for this book, so that they could use this vocabulary when describing their work later in the day. I started with the concept that magic has the power to transform its audience. Or at the very least provide a brief release, a catharsis. So the question I wanted to ask was how we can design magic effects for our time that have this same power. This is what the participants explored that day.

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I had the participants break into groups, in which they had to come up with a list of the current zeitgeists, collective traumas, calamities, and issues of our time. Lively discussions broke out. Again, I was excited that the responses were so varied, ranging from disillusionment, numbness, conflicts in human migration, to dependency on technology, and environmental degradation. From these lists, each group had to choose one that they found most interesting. With each group’s chosen issue, they were told to develop a magic effect around it. Now, because none of them were magicians, they were given some magic effect classifications to help get them started. These included things such as production, vanish, animation, and thought transmission. They were let loose to work on this for a while and what they came up with was amazing. They created drawings, scripts, and even names with amazing puns – as all great magic routines have.

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Before letting them think any further, bags of dollar store materials were dumped in the corner of the room and they were told to dig in and build the props needed for their effects. They had very little time though, as after 5 minutes they were told they would have to perform their effects. They finished their cutting and gluing and then rearranged the room into a small theatre, complete with snacks of Oreos and popcorn. And this is when the real show began.

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Team Jetpack (disillusionment, numbness)

Audience members’ cell phones levitate and move to the stage, together forming a grid of messages. One interesting note for this group was that they asked whether or not the effect should be achievable. They also assumed that this act would happen in a traditional theatre with a traditional magician role. The fact that they used technology to create an image for a disillusioned audience is also interesting, as some would point to technology as the cause for disillusionment in the first place.

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JK (conflicts in human migration)

A Monday morning rush of travelers enters a subway car expecting to be completely crammed, but instead they are met with abundant room and everyone has enough space to spread out and relax. This idea messes with people’s expectations. When you enter a subway car, what do you expect to happen? Especially at a specific time of day. If we could take people by surprise by taking a usually annoying experience and making it more enjoyable, that would be magic. Can magic have a place in the everyday, where daily expectations place us in a loop?

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Mr. Robot (dependency on technology)

A person is walking outdoors and suddenly she ﬁnds herself in an ‘escape room’ type experience where she has to ﬁnd her destination without using technology because her phone has been hacked. This group came up with the brilliant idea of hackers as magicians. If magic is all about having power over another person, specifically by holding secrets that others don’t know, then hackers are a contemporary analog. The group developed their effect with a list of emotions and feelings that they wanted their participants to leave with: - Vulnerability - Self-reliance - Hacking is scary - Resourcefulness - Realizing our dependency on technology. How can the title of magician shift to others who have ‘powers’ or abilities?

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Shitstorm (environmental degradation)

A collective VR experience documenting the crisis in Aleppo. Participants actually feel the consequences in real time. This idea takes a privileged experience like VR to immerse a participant in a real situation. But how can the environment shift so that you feel this isn’t just a passive experience but one that you are really participating within?

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All the effects that the various groups created provoked countless questions for me and it was fascinating to see the magic effects they would like to see. The hand gestures, elaborate narratives, and ideas were all aligned with traditional magic effects. But while some of the typical magic tropes did come up, none of the groups defaulted to simple effects such as making a coffee cup disappear. One participant, Marianna Mezhibovskaya, said that she “loved the idea that magic isn’t always just a delightful wonderful thing but that it can be an experience that is not necessarily pleasant but can change your perspective.”

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Framing

magical and unexpected performances have the power to inspire audiences with images that tap into the collective mind.

Seeding

what are the zeitgeists, collective traumas, calamities, issues of our time?

Creating

working in groups, design a magic trick that could conjure up this particular image. then build something to represent the effect.

Capturing

photography and video of 'performance'

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Close-Up

In looking closer at a problem statement of this thesis – how to design products and experiences that bring about a sense of wonder and awe – I explored different ways of reframing the question before looking for other solutions and explorations. Some other frames for my work are included on the opposite page. Once I had settled upon a new framing – our access to knowledge has reduced our opportunities to feel wonder/awe – I moved forward to find a solution that involved creating a service. We can witness any content we desire on our devices, yet we are mainly left feeling removed from our own real life experiences due to distance and lack of interactivity. How can we foster a stronger feeling of wonder through live performances that are more personal and accessible?

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- There isn’t enough mystery in everyday life. - People are supposed to grow up. - People expect the expected. - People avoid confronting the impossible in life. - Every action must be caused by something. - People are rarely encouraged to wonder. - Society restricts the truth to the rational world. - We rarely stop and wonder at our own existence. - Mysteries must be solved. - We are afraid of the unknown. - People feel uncomfortable when confronted with the unknown. - Humans desire answers to the unknown. - There is a lack of value for awe. - In magic performances, adult audiences aren’t encouraged to wonder. - People don’t want to immerse themselves in the impossible, they want to rationalize it.

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Introducing Close-Up. Close-Up creates intimate live performances and brings them to locations near you. Here’s how it works: We have a network of performers, like magicians, dancers, musicians, and a variety of other acts, as well as a network of host partners. We pair them together to give the performers a space and to bring performers into host spaces. We then sell tickets to a small number of participants, and the results bring about intimate performances in spaces such as a local coffee shop, people’s homes, or even outdoors. Tickets are sold through a selective lottery system to promote scarcity and exclusivity. Two weeks before a performance, the lottery website is opened and people are given the chance to purchase a ticket. We believe that the experience should remain a secret before a person attends, so the exact performing act is unknown to the audience beforehand. Each audience member is also requested not to share any details of the performance, to maintain the mystery.

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Examples of types of performers and potential Close-Up show locations

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Variety of Genres

Private Event

Immersive Theater Expensive

Live Theater Show

Magic Castle

Single Genre

Street Performance

CLOSE-UP

Accessible

In terms of differentiation, this idea lies somewhere between Sofar Sounds and street performances. Both are accessible, though you have to stumble upon a street show and Sofar Sounds only partners with music acts. We feel, however, that there are far more types of performer that we can work with.

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Close-Up’s ultimate vision is to foster wonder and awe in our customers by providing the opportunity for rare experiences. Close-Up: bringing the magic to you.

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Metanarratives of Magic

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Metanarratives of Magic

In speaking with magician Alex Stone, he provided me with the insight, there is “a timeless underlying archetypal language to [magic], a primitive symbolism, a vanish is a metaphor for death.” This concept fascinated me and I began to investigate what other inherent stories or metanarratives are buried in magic’s history. One book to this effect surfaced entitled Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring by Michael Mangan. This book looks at how magic has been adapted over time and has even changed its meaning as needed. Here is where I first found the concept of ‘postmodern’ magic, the idea that magic can transcend the larger metanarratives that were imposed on it by Jean Eugène RobertHoudin at the birth of modern magic in the mid 1800s. Metanarratives is a term that philosopher Jean-François Lyotard made popular to refer to the larger stories that encompass many or all other narratives of the time. These metanarratives can include, for example, sociological, political, and economic perspectives like Christianity, Feminism, and Capitalism.53 Instead of these larger overarching narratives, Lyotard pushes for replacing them will small or local narratives – narratives that can break down the grand narratives by looking at specific events or smaller stories. The first example of this would be that magic itself “challenges the metanarrative of scientific rationality by allowing people to experience wonder and appreciate metaphysics and unsolved mysteries.”54 Meanwhile, some of the metanarratives that govern magic performances, as outlined below, have been cemented for centuries. First, Peter Lamont, historian and magician, and Richard Wiseman, a psychologist and researcher, write that all magic illusions follow roughly the same structure: a magician “employs a method (how the illusion works) to produce an effect (what the spectator perceives).” This structure only works if the spectator “experience[s] the effect while being unaware of the method.”55 53 54 55

Lyotard and Jameson, The Postmodern Condition. Miller and Zompetti, “After the Prestige.” Lamont and Wiseman, Magic in Theory. 1.

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Second would be the mantra “never show a trick twice,” which assumes that if you were to perform an effect again, an audience member would be able to look at the actions more closely.56 Some illusions actually take advantage of this, as in the Ambitious Card routine where the effect is constantly repeated but the method shifts each time to cover the actions. These structures rely on secrecy, one of the key foundations of the art. As mentioned earlier in the methods section, in 1911 Maskelyne and Devant felt that exposing the secrets of magic would elevate the performance genre to that of art. These two metanarratives – magic as secretive performance and magic as art – contradict one another, but ultimately the secrecy structure won out. Magician Jay Sankey states that “puzzles reek of a desire to control the experience, while mysteries only bloom in moments where the performer relinquishes just the right amount of control.”57 I think that in creating a form of postmodern magic, we can break one of the metanarratives inherent in modern magic, namely that a performer holds the power and performs to an audience. Now some might say that many magic acts involve audience participation and create the magic with the participants, but I feel that even the existence of a barrier or a stage can limit the potential power that magic has to affect an audience. How can we create experiences to enable users to hold the magical powers themselves or to see the magic around them, instead of only witnessing another individual with ‘magical’ abilities? Can we push magic into other typologies and utilize traditional experience design schemes to transform the magic performance into an interactive immersive environment?

56 57

Miller and Zompetti, “After the Prestige.” Sankey, Beyond Secrets.

Metanarratives of Magic

John Nevil Maskelyne

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David Devant

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Pierce Gradone Interview

I read an article about the effects of appoggiatura, a particular musical note played before a melody that tends to have a spinetingling effect on listeners. It is used in both classical and popular music with great results. In an article by Michaeleen Doucleff in the Wall Street Journal, she writes about Adele’s music and how it this special formula of the appoggiatura that creates the ‘tearjerker’ effect.58 I wanted to speak with a composer to learn more about the tools they have in music to create such effects and to see how unexpected moments are used in their work. Pierce Gradone is a postmodern music composer, which in this case means that his music isn’t formed using typical tonal patterns. He feels that in his work, every moment is unexpected. As he put it, “when you listen to the music of Mozart, you have very clear expectations of what a harmonic progression would do. It is 95% likely you will have a chord after another chord. This structure affords lots of unexpected behavior and Beethoven is known for that. You can set up the expectations and then subvert that.” When discussing appoggiatura and other techniques, Pierce mentioned that the note is great for creating a leaping feeling, a sense of risk. But his work tends to push towards other emotions. “I like to create a sense of pathos interrupted by strange humor. I create this with a specific kind of chord – resonant chords that are based on harmonic series with sustained textures.” When Pierce creates music, due to its atonal nature, he has no patterns to work with. He builds up each piece by either creating his own patterns, or using randomness. This world-building approach means that listeners have to actively build up their understandings of the composer’s song as they listen. Ultimately, Pierce introduced me up to an incredibly technical world where there are specific techniques to induce particular emotions. I’m interested in diving further into other art forms that have such established tools to work with. 58

Doucleff, “Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker.”

Pierce Gradone Interview

Pierce Gradone

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Postmodern Prototype

In wondering, we shall reach the kingdom. Goethe

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Torn Yet Unharmed

Arthur C. Clarke famously stated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”59 This quote has many interpretations, but I feel that he means that any new technology, without an understanding of how it works, is like magic. Technology itself has always been used in magic performances, with magicians using electromagnets, complex clockwork, mirrors, and electricity before their audiences fully understood how they worked. As technology has become more advanced, as well as more ubiquitous, however, the ‘understanding’ portion of the innovations has lowered. There is a black box effect, as people generally know enough to get their devices to work, but don’t fully comprehend their inner workings. Yet even though the ‘methods’ of technology aren’t known, it doesn’t feel like magic because people use these technological items every day. Magicians have tried to infuse contemporary technology into their magic by breaking the expectations around them. To me, however, this comes across as either complex choreography or as magicians just using some special application. Cyber illusionist Marco Tempest has been blending technology with magic for years and I would leave it to you as a reader to decide whether you feel it is magic or not.60 I have found that when audiences can point to something and say that it was accomplished through ‘technology,’ they accept that as a possible solution and don’t appreciate it as magic, even if they don’t actually understand how it works. Max Weber asked: “how was the world robbed of gods and rendered meaningless? Modern science is the main culprit. It strips meaning from the world by reducing it to pure immanence or materiality, and matter is the antithesis of spirit and meaning. The logic of progress is a second way that science denudes the world.”61 How then can we utilize modern technology in ways that push how people understand it to work in order to create magical effects? 59 Clarke, Profiles of the Future. 60 https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_tempest_the_magic_of_truth_and_ lies_on_ipods 61 Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life. 60.

Postmodern Prototype

Marco Tempest

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Postmodern Prototype

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I took a USB hard drive and plugged it into the computer to show that it worked as expected: it popped up in the Finder for use. I unplugged it, plugged it in again, to show that it worked normally. Then, while it was plugged into the computer, I had someone come up and snip the wire leading to the computer with wire cutters. Unlike the expected reaction – an error message – the hard drive continued to be connected to the computer, without a wire leading to the USB plug. I could unplug it and re-plug the cut USB wire and the hard drive would still be connected and work as intended. The nice part of this illusion is that there is hardly any misdirection needed. I had a justified action – plugging and unplugging the hard drive – and that is what the audience attended to. The interesting effect, however, comes from me breaking a typical metanarrative inherent in magic: if you cut something in half, you have to restore it. Recalling Alex Stone’s quote from earlier, I realized that this was in fact a metaphor for death. If you make something vanish, you have to make it reappear. If you make something float in the air, it must come back down. And if you don’t complete this cycle, people will feel anxious. There is a popular effect in magic called the torn and restored newspaper. Many magicians have their own method or version of performing this effect and it has become a classic. There would be no point in presenting simply a torn newspaper and ending the effect there – that would be ridiculous. In the effect with the hard drive, however, we don’t see torn and restored. Instead, we see torn yet unharmed. With this effect, I am not looking to provoke anxiety, but it is interesting to see whether this effect can indeed create this result.

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Claudia Chagüi Interview

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Claudia Chagüi Interview

Claudia Chagüi is an experience designer at Sid Lee, where she is developing an internal design team. We discussed the word ‘magic’ in her work and how she feels that nowadays the term has too large of a connotation. “[My work] uses magic principles, but I don’t describe it as magic because it pulls it down to a performance. You want the response of the gasp, so much more concentrated when people do it themselves, they didn’t know they were capable of that. I made that happen. That agency is a lot more than performance.” Here again we see the aversion to magic because of how it is considered ‘low culture.’ We also discussed the future of VR and Claudia felt it is “just an evolution of the medium. I don’t think it’s life changing or anything.” She did believe that it will develop her work in a different way, making some interactions more natural, but in the end, it simply enables different work. She also mentioned that though technology enables things, it also disables a lot. People interact much differently than before technology, when they could only use the physical. “Now you can see what it looks like to interact with a created world, but in a way, that’s just normal. With just your voice or movement, because we have the sensors now.”

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Elia Chesnoff Interview

Elia Chesnoff, Ilan if you use his stage name, is a professional magician and an educator. Traveling all around the country, Elia trains teachers on a variety of structures they can use in their classrooms to be more effective. When speaking about human needs, he said “we need a balance between predictability and novelty. Predictability provides safety. If we never knew what was going to happen when we walk out the door, we would be lost.” He also has a 3-year-old daughter and was able to discuss surprise through the way she develops her cognitive schema: “[She] is figuring out that the world is predictable. She is terrified everyday she has a cognitive growth spurt. Wonder is so precious to watch.” Elia feels that a magician’s job is to bring adults back to this childlike feeling of wonder. He doesn’t necessarily feel that magic is the only way of doing this, however, as other forms of theatrical performances also have the same goal. He mentioned Blue Man Group as going against the status quo and questioning everything: “Blue Man Group is so fresh and different and philosophical that their ideas make us question… I leave with the feeling that we can change the world.”

Elia Chesnoff Interview

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Then She Fell

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Immersive Theater

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Immersive Theater

In order to fully experience as many unexpected situations as possible, I went to several immersive theater performances over the course of the year. I was recommended to go and see Then She Fell, a show based on the writings of Lewis Carroll produced by Third Rail Projects. As Philip Fisher wrote, “for the full experience of wonder there must be no description beforehand that will lead us to compare what we actually experience with what we are told, or even with the level of expectation raised by the one who told us to close our eyes.”62 Therefore I specifically did not look up any information, read any reviews, or see any photos of the performance before I went. Not knowing what I was about to experience was a departure from the way I normally operate, as I usually like to know what I’m getting into. But as Luna and Renninger note, “surprise intensifies emotions by at least 400 percent,”63 and I wanted to experience this for myself. I found lots of inspiration in attending these types of performances, because the connection that audience members have with the performers is inherently different from traditional shows. The fourth wall that is typically found in proscenium type theatres is immediately broken when you walk through the door and find yourself speaking with a character. Furthermore, interacting with the characters shifts their lines and the direction of the story. Felix Barrett from the immersive theater company Punchdrunk calls this the “illusion of agency,”64 where as a participant in a scripted storyline, you feel as though you have the freedom to drive the performance in a different course, but ultimately this is just an illusion.

62 63 64

Fisher, Wonder. 17. Luna and Renninger, Surprise. 16. Barrett, Stories That Surround You.

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In the middle of the thesis process, I attended a performance of White Rabbit Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour, where the entire premise of the show is that even the actor on stage doesn’t know the script beforehand. The audience and actor hear the words at the same time, and although it is scripted, each performance is different due to the actor’s decisions, the audience’s participation, and ultimately the choices they make together. Sometimes such types of shows may seem to be abstract merely for the sake of it, but when there are larger messages at hand they can be extremely powerful mediums. I also went to The Object Lesson, a one-man show by actor and illusionist Geoff Sobelle, in which he explored the stuff we hold on to and the stories that surround them. Throughout the show, he had some brilliant moments where he led the audience along, setting expectations for the next segment, and then shattering them with witty and comedic elements. One example comes from the opening of the show, where he begins by recording a message into a tape recorder as he walks around the space. His thoughts are a bit odd and it seems like he is playing a strange character, but we are in a strange space so we move with him. Later in the show, he receives a phone call, and we hear his conversation with the voice on the other end of the line. It turns out to be himself, and we hear the recording he created from the beginning of the show as the other side of the conversation. The banter is hilarious and fits so well that it results in an amazing encounter. I enjoyed attending these inspirational performances because I think they are a perfect analog for the type of experience I am looking to create. Participatory in nature, they involve pulling people out of their everyday world and putting them into an environment where they can do nothing but be immersed in the moment. I purposefully did not solely attend magic shows, since, as Elia Chesnoff mentioned earlier, they are not the only type of performance that can create the wondrous feeling I am after.

Immersive Theater

White Rabbit Red Rabbit

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Future of Storytelling

In October 2016, I heard about the Future of Storytelling festival being held in New York City and I decided it was important for me to learn about the most contemporary tools and techniques of the field. The panels I attended were titled “Stories That Surround You” and “World Building and Storytelling.” Both talks illustrated the potential for immersive theater and live-action role playing in crafting new mediums for stories. The biggest buzzwords, however – as expected – were virtual and augmented reality. Having only ever had one virtual reality experience, I decided to go to the playground they had downstairs, which showcased over forty VR, AR, and MR (mixed reality) experiences. I was excited to try everything and be blown away. Unfortunately, I found that the stories themselves were disappointing. Furthermore, the science fair format of the exhibition did not allow people to become immersed in each interaction. The predominantly used head-mounted displays (HMDs) were Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Samsung Gear, and I found each one disorienting. It wasn’t that the head-tracking was bad; rather, it was more that I couldn’t see my hands or, if I did, they looked like I had become Mickey Mouse. After about five minutes of being in virtual space, I had a headache. In the VR theatre, I was disassociated from every other member of the audience as I went into my own world. What is the point of a theatre if there is no interaction or collective sense of feeling? The best moment during the playground was when I was unexpectedly pulled into an immersive theatre performance. It was a one-on-one experience complete with eye contact and the illusion of agency. It began as a conversation with another festival goer – ‘Frederick’ – who had his left arm in a sling and in his right hand was holding a mirror by a wire. Before I knew it, I found myself walking up five flights of stairs to a balcony where I sat with my new friend. After a bit of a chat about Central Park, I was thrust into a paranoia-inducing moment when a bright red light began blinking at me from across the park. Decoding these lights using Morse Code, I translated the message as R-U-N.

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Was that reality or virtual reality? Are these experiences just for gamers or also for people interested in a special brand of theater? With new technology like Magic Leap just around the corner, which can create a whole new world in front of us, place fantastical characters in our bedrooms, and transform everything into a digital surface, how will people cope with the normalcy of reality? Magic will be everywhere and will become accessible to all. Where will wonder fit into reality? Do we need incentives to remain in the real world, or will it itself become novel? Will we eventually get to the hedonic treadmill moment with this technology, and what will that look and feel like? What is the role of the magician in this new reality? When a child can make things levitate and appear in front of herself instantly, how do we create rare experiences?

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Wonder is the seed of knowledge. Plato

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Speculative Future

When trying to design for the present, sometimes it is best to design for the future we would like to occur. This practice is called futuring or speculative design. By not being held to current limitations of technology, policy, or in some cases even morals, designers can create fictitious products for imagined future scenarios, in order to eventually roll back to see how we can design to achieve this future. In Anthony Dunn and Fiona Raby’s book Speculative Everything, they write about how speculative design provides “alternatives that loosen the ties reality has on our ability to dream.”65 By dreaming, we can create a timeline to the future and work backwards to imagine what the first product would be to either avoid this potential future or to get us to that point. Working speculatively, I developed a dystopian future in which alternate realities (VR, MR, AR) have taken over our own context for the world. One the following pages you will find the text for my future narrative.

Dunne and Raby, Speculative Everything. 189.

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Mava continues work on the metal structure in front of her. The sparks fly in all directions as she precisely welds the two pieces of steel together. A few seconds later, she lifts up her helmet shield to inspect her work and breathes in some of the lingering fumes, but she isn’t worried about her health. Throwing her gloves to the side, Mava stretches her shoulders and back and decides to call it a day. She reaches over and presses a red button and immediately the power supply, protective equipment, and her metalwork vanish and the setting changes to a fine French restaurant. She looks down to see that she is now in a fine suit, but the red hue of her tie doesn’t quite work with her ensemble. She runs her hand down the length of the tie and it shifts to blue. Mava’s partner Enzo materializes in the chair opposite her and they begin to talk about their days. Everything from the food they eat, the light of the candles, even the words they speak are entirely virtual, or V. The current year is 2075R/54V. Though Mava seems to enjoy a nice life, ending work when she pleases and being able to spend time with her partner in nice restaurants, she is considered lower class. She hasn’t been able to motivate herself to save up her earnings for an upgrade, because to her there is no need. She can travel as she wants, she is good at her job, and she has a loving family. She hasn’t yet recognized that something is missing. As Mava enjoys her life in V, keeper Shen cares for Mava’s R-body. Shen manages about 20 R-bodies at a time and ensures that they are all maintained properly. This entails emptying colostomy bags, washing the R-bodies, and putting them to sleep depending on what V-time they are using. All the essential R-functions are looked after, including eating, sleeping, urination, and defecation, while the senses such as hearing and vision are still fully utilized in V. Although on the surface this seems like a far worse situation to be in compared to Mava’s easygoing life, Shen has something important that Mava is missing: the ability to experience awe. Due to the lower price of virtual reality devices, the fact that alter-

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native technologies like augmented reality and mixed reality were still more expensive, and with the creation of the first universal V in 2021R, the proliferation of V-users has shifted humanity’s outlook on life. The ubiquity of V-devices was cemented in history when 90% of the world started spending the majority of their days in V around 2051R. This was mainly due to universal mandates to attempt to control R-overpopulation. By placing users in V, where they could still experience all the same senses as in R-life, human beings were able to reduce their dependence on R-resources by 95%. Around 2063R, however, some users found that something was lacking from their experiences in V. V-life was becoming stagnant and users started to feel unfulfilled. There was still V-entertainment, V-construction was booming, and the V-economy was at its highest point yet, but even though everyone had everything they needed, something was still missing. In the winter of 2063R, psychiatrist Efgar Rallington found that many of her patients were asking larger existential questions about meaning in their lives. After four studies, Rallington concluded that the lack of fulfillment stemmed from the lack of mystery and wonder in people’s V-lives: all knowledge was immediately accessible to users and anything that was considered impossible in R was possible. After the groundbreaking research was released, some users saved up their incomes and bought their way back to R in the search for more. Alise has just departed. She looks around as Shen and Makeeda hold her hands. She is in a dark room that is lit only by the fleeting light from her old V-headset and her keepers’ dim headlamps. Alise looks down at her hands in amazement to see that they are no longer disembodied but instead very much attached. In this moment, the feeling is too much for her to comprehend and she pulls a hand free from Makeeda in terror. Shen comforts her and tries to get her to remain calm. Alise hasn’t been alone in her R-body for almost 30 years. After a few deep breaths, Shen explains some elements of the new reality Alise has entered, while her vitals are checked by Makeeda. When departing was first introduced, the suicide rate for departers

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was near 80% because people no longer knew how to interact in R and because they had left everyone behind in V. To ease the transition, departers were fitted with mixed reality devices or M-devices to allow communication between the two worlds, and for some V-elements to slip into R. These M-devices were also used to re-educate departers in situ, and in the moments when they encountered a question about something in R. Recent departers were allowed 30 minutes per day to transfer out of M and be present solely in R. This time was reserved for contemplation and the fostering of wonder, one of the emotions that had been missing in V. As many departers work as keepers, among other positions, they are able to purchase upgraded wonder moments, which allow for larger allotments of R time. The wealthiest of departers are able to pay off their M-devices and have them removed permanently. It is in this state that the departers can finally experience all emotions, including the most rare and elusive of them all: awe. Shen is allowed two weeks off from her keeper duties each year, and for the past four years she has traveled from her current location in Taipei to the ruins of Las Vegas. She enjoys walking along the deserted strip and gaping at the monstrous constructions that humans built before. Entering her favorite casino, Paris Las Vegas, she wonders what activities occurred within the walls of each of the rooms. “Did families ever come to Vegas? Would children be allowed to participate in the Poker games? Maybe kids were the best at spinning the Roulette wheel.” Walking into the piano bar, she wonders what kind of music everyone listened to here, and whether they just listened to piano or were there ever drums. Shen loves drums. Maybe the kids would hit the drums and the pianist would have to make up a song to the beat. Did Beethoven ever play here? He could have sat right at that table -- or maybe that one. Sometimes I wish I could still fly, she thinks, so I could easily get to the top of the stairs in the hotel. Was anyone ever murdered in one of the guest rooms? I heard Descartes’s skull is on display somewhere in Paris; one of these trips I’ll find out which room that’s in.” To Shen, the best part of the casino is the Eiffel Tower. She stands at the top and looks out at the Bellagio across the strip and imagines

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what an Italian warship looked like docked in the water. She stands in awe of everything in front of her and how humans were able to get to this level of creation and then throw it all away. The sheer scale of everything makes her feel small in the world, yet lucky that she is able to experience this sense of things. And as time seems to stop for Shen then, she takes a deep breath and thinks to herself: “It’s amazing that this place was the capital of France, even though it’s in the US.”

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Newspaper

From this dystopian world narrative, I imagined what a newspaper would look like and include in terms of articles for the people living in R. As these departers re-enter R, they would need to rehabilitate all aspects of their lives, including their imagination. Instead of living in other worlds, they would be back on their own and would need to flex their imaginative muscles. The newspaper would purposefully not include any images, instead forcing its readers to conjure up their own ideas of the aesthetics of the stories. The advertisement on the back of the paper is from the Institute of Departure Health (IDH), a mixed research organization that does studies on the health effects of being in M and V for prolonged periods of time, and it also creates products for departers to rehabilitate their senses and motor functions in R. This particular advertisement shows a woman being freed from the bonds of a V-device, and how she is now ‘awake’ and should live like it. IDH creates products to help people live in this awakened state.

PHANTASMAGORICAL TIMES. VOL. IVCCLVI.

TAIPEI CITY, TAIWAN, FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 2075R/54V.

XG7ER2MP.

NOTES FROM EXPEDITIONS. Influenza outbreak. Suicide rates. PHANSTASMAGORICAL TIMES. IDH plans on releasing the Refocus device Temporary HeadquarTers - 105 Songshan District, later this quarter at the DES (departer’s A moderately intense influenza outbreak The official R-suicide rates for 2074R/2053V Shen Xun has just completed her annual exAlley 3, Lane 55, Section 4, Mingsheng E Rd. electronics show) in Las Vegas, Nevada. in Dalías, Spain has affected 23 departers. have been released by the World Health Or- pedition to Las Vegas for the 4th time. She They are taking presales for $50 and plan on Vera Negrescu of Cluj-Napoca, Romania is ganization. The rates have decreased from enjoyed walking along the deserted strip BY MAIL: Daily, 1 year, in advance .................................. 15 00 raising the price to $60 at the time of launch. on route in her blue and white Cessna 172 80% of new departers in 2065R/44V to just and gaped at the monstrous constructions Daily, 1 month, in advance .............................. 5 00 For more information, please visit IDH.rco. Skyhawk to help Isaure Romilly of Lyon, over 3% in the past year. Much of the cause humans built in the past. Upon entering Weekly, 1 year, in advance .............................. 2 00 France with her medical efforts. Leading for the lower rates can be attributed to the her favorite casino, Paris Las Vegas, she Pipeline cleanup. Weekly, 6 months, in advance ........................ 1 25 Weekly and Sunday, 1 year, in advance........ 3 50 EcoClean has completed about 25% of its infectious disease physician Luigina Albrici creation of rehabilitation M-devices from wondered what activities occurred within dismantling of the Keystone XL pipeline has been studying the recent return of in- companies like the Institute for Departure the walls of each of the rooms. “Did famiBY CARRIER (in the city.) lies ever come to Vegas? Would children be Daily, per week ............................................. 25 cents and restoration of the land around the proj- fluenza and preliminary findings point to a Health and even Oculus. allowed to participate in the Poker games? ect. Spokesperson Nóra Raynerson stated particular type of tick that has traveled from Fatal car crash kills five. TAIPEI, FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 2075R/54V “we are proud of the work we have accom- the United States. The lone star tick, usually In Bogotá, Colombia a fatal car crash kills Maybe kids were the best at spinning the recognized by a star shaped silvery-white 5 people as they went over the railing of Roulette wheel”. Walking into the piano plished so far and look forward to the next NEW DEPARTERS. spot on the arachnid’s back, is thought to a bridge. Ximena Gladwin, Margarita Al- bar, she wondered “what kind of music evmilestone.” The project entails pipe removal 53 new departers have returned to from the earth and cleanup of the residual have been introduced to Europe in the ‘Noah brecht, Oluchi Green, Wioleta Mishra, and eryone listened to here. Did they just listen R yesterday. We welcome back: Ziynet Aarden were on an expedition North to piano or were there ever drums? Shen oil within the pipe itself. The majority of the exchange’ of 2034R/13V. Mac Cába, Wilburh Abe, Tomiko waste from the project is transported to the In a particular shipment of new V-equip- to see the Panama Canal in a refurbished loves drums. Maybe the kids would hit the MacIntyre, Margaux Abiodun, Beracha Bonneville Salt Flats in northwestern Utah ment from the US to France, the storage original Tesla Model S from 2014R. They had drums and the pianist would have to make Maki, Yin Abiodun, Ganizani container was swapped for an animal study switched off the auto-pilot control in order up a song to the beat. Did Beethoven ever for disposal. Scientists have kept a close Matsushita, Hanako Amjad, Sabah Metharom, Kulap Astrauskas, Ugne watch on the flats to ensure that the oil does box including many specimen intended to to navigate the wet roads in the mountains. play here? He could have sat right at that Metharom, Hanako Aue, Jana not negatively affect the environment in ad- be used for testing in Chicago. When the an- In looking at the driving logs, it seemed that table -- or maybe that one. Sometimes I wish Molnár, Helga Baart, Inès dition to checking that the salt crust thick- imals escaped in Paris, they spread all over the auto-pilot would have corrected for the I could still fly, so I could easily get to the top Nagi, Shahd Bousaid, Surayya Europe. One particular species of mouse has driver’s mistake if it was placed in semi-auto of the stairs in the hotel. Was anyone ever ness has not changed. Nillson, Vardo Boyle, Zhen been found in as far places as Tehran, Iran. mode. A vigil will be held in front of Museo murdered in one of the guest rooms? I heard Opeyemi, Adebowale Cahyra, Acerbi The return of the car. Papadopoulos, Efimia The Ford Motor Company, which closed its Albrici analyzed the blood of the tick and del Oro on Sunday if you would like to pay Descartes’s skull is in display somewhere in Chong, Haruna found a particular sugar that was also found Paris; one of these trips I’ll find out which Pontecorvo, Rani De Rege, Zhong doors in 2060R/39V due to lack of custom- in all patients with the influenza symptoms. your respects. room that’s in”. Quigg, Gerlinde Demir, Taonga Elah norup takes first steps in r. ers and workers willing to remain in R, is in For now, a thick bluish-green antidote is beRivero, Dugyo Dohman, Lexie To Shen, the best part of the casino was talks with other defunct automobile manu- ing developed using the materials Albrici Comedian Elah Norup departed just last the Eiffel Tower. She stood at the top and Sala, Luise Everill, Isabella facturers to create a new corporation for de- has at her disposal. If you have any informa- week and she is already recovered enough looked out at the Bellagio across the strip Siddall, Vellamo Fortunato, Akiko Smolák, Sousanna Hoedemaker, Rut parters. Among the talks are Changan, Cit- tion regarding this situation, please R-mail to take her first steps in R, with the help of and imagine what an Italian warship looked Sobol, Bashe Jeffers, Nefertari roën, Datsun, Fiat Chrysler, Prevost, Toyota, to info@phantatimes.rcom. her M-devices. Elah is one of only a hand- like docked in the water. She stood in awe of Suzuki, Mika Jennifer, Michel and Van Hool. A meeting is scheduled for The affected include: Marianela Durante, ful of celebrities who have given up their everything in front of her and how humans Svendsen, Gweneth Joó, Rosalnia February 7th in Portland, Oregon to discuss Renata Lobo, Inés Orellana, Apikalia, Gi- V-careers to depart. Before she left, she pro- were able to get to this level of creation and Tanzer, Seong-Hyeon Karimi, Sahar options for how the new company could op- anna Demetriou, Miriam Gorman, Viole- duced one last benefit show to raise money then throw it all away. The sheer scale of evToset, Kanchana Kayode, Cyneburga erate. Initial reports of conversations state ta Moles, Karen Morales, Anfisa Paredes, for users whose family members had previ- erything made her feel small in the world, Vavra, Morwenna Kim, Tsubasa Vera, Assink Kobayashi, Ashraqat that one possibility would be to rejuvenate Yolanda Mendoza, Akilina Franco, Liliya Ro- ously departed and couldn’t pay to depart yet lucky that she was able to experience Wolters, Rati Kovac, Theresa Detroit, Michigan as an automobile center driguez, Deborah Spini, Hannah Fuhrmann, with them. Norup’s show was able to raise that sense of things. And as time seemed to Wong, Momoko Kuang, Rin for manufacturing and service. Pratibha Peters, Meri Adam, Pene Carlyle, enough funds to bring 3 others back to R. stop for Shen then, she took in a deep breath Louise, Ellis Yeong-Ja böhme Deceased. Jacobine Pelletier, Érica Vargas, Solveig Van Eibhlín Fuhrmann from the Tallahassee sta- and thought to herself “it’s amazing that this 10TH ANNIVERSARY. Yeong-Ja Böhme of Daegu Korea passed Baarle, Freja De Cloet, Lilian Salomon, and tion as well as Margarida Balogh and Ella place was the capital of France even though As we come upon the 10th anniversary of away early yesterday morning at the age Dubravka Turati. Dohman, both from the Liverpool station are it’s in the US.” the Rallington Awakening, festivities are of 87. Böhme was known for her interactive traveling to meet with Elah in Berlin as she Grand assembly. being planned around the world. Wonder artwork, both in V and R, and for opening begins her new life. They all plan on taking Lotta Lagounov rented a condo in Ottowa, walks, firework shows, parades and expedi- the first art gallery in V in 2024R/3V, aVt. The Grand Assembly was in session all day an expedition together in May across Eu- Ontario and looked out from her balcony tions are all part of the schedule of events. Many renowned artists have shown their yesterday at Departer’s Hall, an old 4-story rope to visit Dohman’s hometown of Gros- unit. She imagined the trees covered in barnhouse with ages greyish wood paneling, green leaves, unlike their dead, missing If you would like to extend an invitation to work in aVt including Banksy, Myrgjöl, Jeff seto, Italy. an event you are hosting, please R-mail us Koons, Caroline Carran, and Yayoi Kusama. in Oslo, Norway. An election of officers took We caught up with Norup earlier in the week state currently. Lotta was unsure of travelat anniversary@phantatimes.rco to inform Böhme is remembered by her children Jun place with the following result: J. V. Meecker and she mentioned that she is interested in ing to Ottawa in the middle of January but of Pollyallup, G.M.; O. C. White of Dayton, decided that she enjoyed skiing and the us of the details. Böhme and Sung-Min Böhme in V. There Deputy G.M; T.J. Thompson of Tacoma, developing a new comedy act for R and will announce her plans later this year when she cold enough to give it a try. “Next time” she will be a funeral procession at 성서공동묘지 thought to herself, “I’ll bring a warmer coat.” For a current list of events, you can visit our cemetery on January 27th at 10 am. Please G.W.; LeF. A. Shaw of Berlin, G.S.; G. W. Hall has recovered a bit more. of Lima, G.T.; A. H. Tusker of Valdez, G.B. Lotta had traveled from Havana, Cuba beanniversary site at RallingtonFest.rco. Midway airport. direct all condolences to Sung-Min through The appointed officials will be announced In Chicago, Illinois plans have been set to cause she had heard about the Rideau Canal, V-mail at RTI86733. today. The Grand Expedition held another The Rallington Awakening is named after dismantle Midway airport and replace it the longest skating rink in the world. She Sentencing of caelina tosi. session last night with a gala including a famed psychiatrist Efgar Rallington for with a new stadium. Because Chicago has had heard about the rink from an old travher research in the existential questions In Kimberley, British Columbia, Caelina solo dueling piano act and retro dance mu- two airports, Midway and O’hare, the city el book and always imagined it as covered V-users were asking during the Winter of Tosi has been V-sentenced for 20 years sic from the 2020s. This evening, work of the has decided that the space is too precious with adults and children skating around all for her crimes. On the night of March 23rd order will be performed at Departer’s Hall 2063R/42V. After 4 studies, she concluded to lay dormant, even though the city is at day and night. When she arrived, she was that the lack of fulfillment stemmed from 2074R/53V, Caelina murdered her partner by members of the Grand Assembly. The re- 40 percent occupancy. The city states that a upset to find that despite the cold weather, the lack of mystery and wonder in people’s Krista. Krista and Caelina had been togeth- ception, as stated, will take place tomorrow stadium is more important in order to pre- the river hadn’t frozen over in over 25 years. V lives. All of knowledge was immediately er for 13 years but witnesses state that they evening. pare for the upcoming Olympics bid even She wondered if there was a way to freeze Collections for hong kong. accessible to users and anything that was had been struggling towards the end. A though there hasn’t been a formal Olympic the river unnaturally but discarded the considered impossible in R was possible. neighbor said that she would hear loud nois- Kei Kurofiji and Machiko Hira yesterday games in 12 years. A petition has been cre- thought when she remembered the energy es of breaking glass and screaming some No imagination was needed as immersive appointed themselves a committee to solicit ated to save the historic Midway airport, credit usage. evenings. The coroner’s report notes that The next day Lotta visited the Canadian storytelling was so evolved that a user could subscriptions from departers of Yokohama, constructed in 1927R. Museum of Civilization looking for somefully engage in any designed world. After Krista was killed in their king size Egyptian Japan on behalf of Hong Kong tsunami surDomestic cat ranch. thing fun to spend her time doing. She didn’t Rallington’s groundbreaking research was style 4 poster canopy bed by suffocation by vivors. Over $300 was collected. A domestic cat ranch has been found outside know much about Canadian history and so released, some users began the migration a feather and down pillow. Prosecutor Asha Station flooded. of Bern, Switzerland by Kassandra Lucas- she found it fascinating to learn all about back to R in the search for more in March Xun was pushing for a life sentence but A station in Wuhan holding over 40,000 V-ussen while on her expedition. She was explor- the mines, natives, and politics that formed Judge Sashi Alescio ultimately served 20 of 2065R/44V. ers flooded today because of intense rainfall ing an abandoned farm when she heard a the country. As she left the museum to grab Since 2065, the rate of voluntary departures years per Canadian laws for second-degree contributing to the overflow of the Yangtze faint noise coming from the direction of an has risen from just 20 a year to over 50,000 murder. river. Station chief Sascha Rettig said “our old and decrepit shed. As she approached a bite of food, she thought to herself that it Mark zuckerberg sick. departers. New industries have developed staff managed the situation will extreme ef- the shed, painted red but peeling from years was interesting she hadn’t heard anyone speak French to her. and old ones have been revived. With de- Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 90, ficiency and we were able to purge the water of neglect, she could hear that the sounds parters searching for more meaning to their has been diagnosed with pneumonia and his from the upper floors within 2 hours.” With were cries of what sounded like a cat. She Chidiegwu Sorge was driving her car lives, expeditions have mounted to the fur- R-body has been transferred to urgent-care. 6 more lower floors still flooded, the staff found a large hatched around the back of along route 40 in Israel on her way to the Although illness and disease in R-bodies has thest reaches of the world and although on has been working around the clock to shift the shed and ran back to the door. With one Makhtesh Ramon crater. She only had 2 the surface it may seem to be broken, we un- decreased to less than 5% of the rates 50 R-bodies to a series of storage warehouses big whack, she smashed off the lock and the days off for this expedition but decided to derstand that we only have one planet and it years ago, some cases do still occur. Head across the town. Rettig predicts that the opdoor burst open to reveal nearly 300 cats. leave her Tel Aviv apartment and make her physician Athina Tót expects that the illness is our task to care for it. eration will all R-bodies will be relocated in All the cats seemed to be well-fed so Luway towards the South for an outdoor trek. We owe Efgar Rallington for her inspiration- came from Zuckerberg’s caretaker who is the next 24 hours. We will be monitoring this cassen assumed that the owner of the shed She had never been to the crater before but al research and how it has affected all of our now in isolation. Zuckerberg is currently situation closely as we could have another must have been there fairly recently. After knew that it was the largest national park in in stable condition but is being monitored lives. potential Awaken Day on our hands. The contacting Animal Services, they retrieved the country. Chidiegwu is a history aficionacarefully. first Awaken Day was in 2043R/22V when a all the cats and moved them to a refuge. The Refocus. do and is particularly interested in ancient Unique footprint found. power outage in Wichita forced 5,000 V-us- owner of the farm has been in V for the past A new study out of São Paulo, Brazil by trade routes so this site was a perfect choice Annabel Król was walking her golden reers from V. Luckily the departure happened 21 years so the person responsible for the because of its location along the Incense the Institute for Departure Health shows more of the health effects of being in V for triever Alex in the woods by her house out- during a sleep cycle, but some Wichita de- cats and the shed is still at large. If you have Route that stretched from the Mediterraprolonged periods of time. Most departers side of Silkeborg, Denmark when she came parters did struggle with shock induced psy- any information that may help this case, nean to India. She always enjoyed standing please send a R-mail to info@phantatimes. in places with rich history and imagining leave V and find that their vision quality upon a footprint of a shape and size she had chological issues following. Solar panel maintenance. rco. has reduced dramatically due to the use of never seen before. It was about twice the what it would feel like to there 2000 years near-focus headsets. While most departers size of Alex’s paw with 7 toe pads. When an- Elena Mendes of Richmond, Virginia has children’s party. ago. Would there be horses and camels all alyzed by Marion Schreier, the chief veteribeen on an expedition across the Unit- On Sunday January 20th, Kalyani and Ko- around her or just tied up to the ruins of the need near-sighted prescription glasses to mediate the issue, the new study shows that narian in Copenhagen, they found that it did ed States to clean and maintain all of the lab Duke were throwing a birthday party in way station in the bottom of the crater? She the symptoms may be reversible. Yesterday, not match any animal they had seen before. non-Oculus owned solar panels. Please refer Kabul, Afghanistan at their house for their could hear the sounds of the travelers tradto the following list of dates and locations if 3 year old daughter, and invited over her ing stories and drinks with each other. What the IDH announced a new product to their Further investigation is ongoing. you would like to assist her in the task: BeiJing pollution reduced. already full line of M-rehabilitation devices school friends to participate. For entertain- would it smell like? Would it just be a dusty for recent departers, Refocus. At first use, Pollution levels over the city of Beijing are Alexandria, Virginia – February 5th ment, they decided to hire a clown for the desert smell or would all the unwashed men Refocus works just like prescription glasses at the lowest they have been since 2009R, Ellicott City, Maryland – February 23rd children. Kalyani had received a recommen- and animals create a different odor? but with further use the headset automati- 600ug/mg3. With the reduction of manufac- Pottstown, Pennsylvania – March 14th dation for a clown from another parent at Chidiegwu drove on through the desert and cally tu nes the focus further and further turing in the Northern China area and the Longhill, New Jersey – March 30th the school after she heard about how amaz- wondered what other ruins or yet to find arover time. shift to Thailand, China is finally seeing the Africa cup of nations. ing the clown’s act was. Unfortunately, the cheological relics were hiding beneath the After IDH’s extensive 3 year study, they benefits of their policy changes. 99.8 percent Italian leader Hekate Carboni will be in Ba- clown, Radhika Fierro, had eaten too many sand around her. When people constructed found that patients utilizing the Refocus de- of the population in China lives in V, howev- mako, Mali tomorrow to give the opening Cheetos the evening before and then drank this highway, did they dig all around to envice were able to successfully train their vi- er, so the .2 percent of the population living address at the 2075R Africa Cup of Nations just enough Coke to set her stomach on the sure there was nothing here? The old maps sion back to perfect 20-20 results. The auto- in R are getting closer to being able to travel at Stade du 26 Mars in Bamako. This year, verge of catastrophe. When Radhika arrived showed the Makhtesh station but nothing matic tuning feature means that some users to the Beijing area without breathing pro- Egypt, Ghana, Sudan, Guinea, Libya, Tuni- at the party, she had a bit of a stomach ache else in the area so how far was it to the next may need as few as 6 months to as many as tection. Scientists have determined that in sia, Mali, South Africa, Congo and Nigeria but thought it was related to the fact that her station? How long would it take a traveler to 2 years to regain their full vision. Head sci- order for the PM2.5 measure to be healthy are participating. Representatives from clown suit was fitting a bit too tightly for her trek between stations? She imagined herself entists Mitra Berg and Bojana Knopf state enough, it needs to stay under 100ug/mg3 Cameroon were planning on participating growing figure. When it came time for her to as an dancer for the men as they rested from “we are amazed at the results.” They con- for about a month. With the current clean- in the games this year but were unable to do the Coke spitting bit where she “acciden- their journey. What kind of dance would she tinue “this approach has been tried before up processes in place, all estimates point to find a seventh team mate. They have begun tally” spits out the drink as a joke, the extra do? She didn’t know many moves but she but the automatic tuning is the innovation the possibility of this around 2216R/195V. If training for the next tournament in 2077R Coke reacted unfavorably to the Cheetos tried to choreograph a small number in her here.” Knopf explains “by allowing the head- China’s new legislation goes through next where they have declared they will “win already in her stomach causing a chemical mind. As her mind wandered more as she set to make micro-adjustments in real-time, month, as expected, the clean-up process back the trophy.” In the previous Africa Cup reaction that resulted in Radhika exploding. drove, Chidiegwu figured that even though we can push the eyes further than through will be scaled back and will ultimately push of Nations in 2073R, Egypt narrowly beat The children screamed in terror and Kalyani she knew much about the route, there was monthly changes in an optometrist’s office.” estimates further into the future. Ghana in two games 1-0 and 3-2. always more to learn and explore. and Kolab had to end the party early.

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Speculative Accessory

I created a speculative product for this future dystopia: a rehabilitation device intended for recent departers. The device is shaped like a current VR game controller by Oculus, but it has a mechanical claw on the end, as its only function is to pick up items. People living in V are used to clicking controllers to pick up items, and when they return to R they have forgotten how to use their fingers to actually grasp things. Departers can use devices like the one I designed to regain control of their bodies and function normally again in their environment. This particular model was made out of carved balsa foam, which was then covered in Aquaresin and finished with matte black spray paint to look similar to other current Oculus controllers. With current virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, everything is so new that we are in constant wonder of what the next interaction, gesture, or environment will be. When these technologies become commonplace and integrated into our normal lives, however, where will we go to find wonder? Will we return to reality and look to the places where we used to find these feelings? Will something as simple as using your hand again, the sensation of your five fingers working in concert to accomplish a task, be enough to make you forget where you are and marvel at humanity?

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Awe

In Philip Fisher’s book Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, he writes about the many reasons why we feel awe when we see a rainbow. I’ll focus on just two of them: 1. A rainbow is a rare experience. Rainbows don’t appear around us every day, unless we live in a very particular area. They only appear in very specific weather conditions and can only be seen when the viewer stands at 42 degrees between the sun and the refracted drops of rain. 2. A rainbow works because it has multiple scales of functioning at once. Fisher writes that “the aesthetic element of rapid change of scale from the celestial to the dust like raindrop as we skip all intermediate scales is an element of breathtaking focus and refocus.”66 Our brains shift from focusing on the two scales at play: the water droplets that create the prismatic effect and the rainbow all across the sky. Most of us understand the practicality of how a rainbow works, having taken the relevant elementary school science class, and yet we are still able to feel awe.

Fisher, Wonder. 119.

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In Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger’s book Surprise: Embrace the Unexpected and Engineer the Unexpected, they discuss how awe is different from surprise and wonder. They say “awe is surprise that’s stirred by something unfathomably vast or complex… nature is the most common awe trigger, but intricate design, extraordinary skill, admirable integrity, and remarkable ideas also inspire awe.”67 In this moment we feel an “extended-now,” a feeling whereby it seems as if we have more time available to us.68 Other effects of awe outlined in the paper include being less impatient, having a stronger preference for experiences over material products, and experiencing greater life satisfaction. Luna and Renninger write that “we have to actively seek awe because it is a rare emotion,” which also raises the question of how we can design for this emotion.69 In an interview I had with Philip Fisher, he claimed that we can certainly design for this emotion, and he gave the Eiffel Tower as an example. He said that if you were to see it for the very first time, without any prior knowledge of its existence, you would experience wonder. He mentioned, however, that “a photographer would ruin this though, because you would see a tiny image of the tower and it would give it away.” In order to allow someone to feel wonder, they need to be able to experience something without any reference to it beforehand.

67 Luna and Renninger, Surprise. 196. 68 Rudd, D.Vohs, and Aaker, “Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being.” 1130. 69 Luna and Renninger, Surprise. 196.

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Christopher Brown

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Christopher Brown Interview

I wanted to speak with an actor or actress who works directly in the realm of creating the feeling of wonder and I couldn’t think of a better example than a performer in the Blue Man Group (BMG) show. Christopher Brown has been with BMG for 11 years and has performed in a number of cities, so he has seen the company and show evolve over time. Chris shared his motivation that has kept him going for so many years: “I think the Blue Man Group’s goal is to shake down the narrow paradigm of use and function in the human world and make people stop for a moment and say ‘Look where we find ourselves.’ To light a fire under the look of amazement at the world.” He feels that he gets “to achieve that goal in a completely new way and see it affect new people in a different way each night.” His character was originally envisioned as a blob of paint that had dripped from a painting, so he is made of pure id, or just instincts and the unconscious. This total innocence allows the audience to relate what they see to the experiences they had when they were children. But the reason why there are 3 Blue Men is because “ego is so ready to be involved that you can’t do it alone.” Chris builds a connection with the audience by “building tensions between us, a curiosity about one another. When I start walking on people’s chairs, I’ve got them.”

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Appearance is the greatest illusion. Hermes

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Orbis

When thinking about creating a physical embodiment of this thesis, I began by creating a list of artifacts that fostered the feeling of wonder in me. I found that many of the examples included some form of beautiful choreography using multiple, complex elements: projection mapping, motors, lights, and sounds. I had been wanting to expand my abilities in these areas and so I focused on creating something that embodied some kinetic ability. By taking my speculative future and working backwards, I imagined what a device for today would feature in order to avoid my dystopian view of our future state. I remained speculative through my designs, and in designing according to Raymond Loewy’s MAYA (most advanced yet acceptable) principle,70 I imagined creating a device that would sit on a desk or bedside table and create constant wonder. It could change form, provide use for a variety of functions, and surprise the user in new ways every so often.

Thompson, “The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything.”

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I was also inspired by Jane Bennett’s book titled The Enchantment of Modern Life, where she offers a rebuttal to Max Weber’s philosophy of a disenchanted world. Nature enchants, but so do artifacts. Man-made complexities also can provoke wonder, surprise and disorientation. Take, for example, the exciting and slightly unnerving power that personal computers can wield over their owners, as when one finds it difficult to pull oneself away from the screen after playing around on the Internet too long. Chris Chesser suggests that the personal computer provides an outlet for the human desire for magic (i.e., for a means by which to transform wish into reality). He refers to this as the ‘invocational power’ of computer use. By typing in a word or string of words, one is able to invoke or conjure up one’s object of desire, to make it appear on the screen. Clicking on a link is a lot like saying ‘Open sesame!’ ‘The metaphor of invocation is useful,’ says Chesser, ‘because it stresses not the devices called computers, but the capacities with which they endow users… Invocation is a form of quasi-magical language act made possible by data infrastructures. Computer discourse conveys power: commands, entries, queries, searches, visualizations.’71 Allowing for this complicated nature of power relationships between humans and ‘computers,’ I created Orbis.

Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life. 171.

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Initial product sketches

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The name Orbis is Latin for circle or sphere, and it was chosen because of the main component of the design. Orbis consists of a bowl of colored water with multiple bright white balls hidden beneath the surface. When the bowl is called upon for a specific function – telling the time, showing a notification of some kind, producing mesmerizing patterns – the balls rise to the surface creating both beautiful movements of the water along with moments of surface tension. The primary form of interaction between the user and the bowl is through touch on the water’s surface. By utilizing a sophisticated sensor, Orbis can detect whether or not you are touching the water with a specific number of fingers or your whole hand.72 The process of creating Orbis itself provided many opportunities for learning new skills through the making of a variety of prototypes.

Sato, Poupyrev, and Harrison, “Touché.”

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I began with a small scale test to see if I was able to easily control the motion of the spheres. A single servo was connected to a fishing line, routed through a series of diverters, and finally glued to the sphere in the water. By controlling the rotation of the servo, I was able to get about 1” of travel with the ball, which was enough to have the ball be fully submerged and fully revealed at the ends of its movement trajectory.

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I then moved to the form of the bowl itself and prototyped several forms, both in cardboard and blue foam. The blue foam was turned on the lathe to determine the proper dimensions for it to sit comfortably on a desk.

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After realizing that the best dimensions were close to a 12” diameter circle, I decided to create the inner shell for the water out of thermoformed plastic, using a paint bucket as the form because of its similarity of dimensions. I created a plaster mold of the interior of the bucket to create the thermoform buck and then vacuum-formed a sheet of styrene to create the shell. I had great difficulty removing the plaster buck from the plastic form and had to destroy it in the removal process. Unfortunately the final plastic shape also had surface marring from the details of the plaster, so I decided to scrap the shell for a different material.

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Ironically, after all the prototyping work with the plastic, I found exactly the shape I was looking for, including the rolled edges, in the form of a metal cake tin from a cake supplier about two blocks from our studio. The tin was perfectly dimensioned for my needs and I began work blackening the aluminum using a Jax acidic solution.

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I modeled the entire assembly in Rhino and created some small 3D printed tests of a servo mount to ensure proper clearances and tolerances before printing the final mount in four parts. I glued the parts together, and installed all the servos to begin testing the electronics.

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The bottom of the bowl was a laser cut piece of acrylic with the specific locations and orientations of all the 3D printed diverters etched directly onto the surface.

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I glued all the diverters in place with waterproof 2 ton epoxy and created a base for the entire assembly out of other laser cut acrylic pieces to ensure alignment between all the different components. A ring for the servo mount to sit within was caulked around with silicone to provide a barrier between the electronics under the bowl and potential water splashes over the edge of the bowl.

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All the spheres had fishing line epoxied to the bottoms of them. They were then strung through the diverters on the bottom piece. The acrylic bottom was slowly lowered into the bowl and then connected to the servos with dabs of hot glue in order to not make removal too difficult if needed.

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I milled four circles out of MDF on our CNC shopbot and then created a jig around which to wrap some maple veneer to create a shell to go over the assembly when complete. The veneer sheets were glued and overlapped around each other to create a thick ring.

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Because I wanted to challenge myself to control the Orbis with JavaScript instead of Arduino, I utilized a combination of Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Without going into too many technical details, the 45 servos were connected to three 16-channel servo controllers, which went directly to an Adafruit Feather board. This Arduino-based board ran a library called Firmata, which allowed it to be controlled via the Raspberry Pi running Node.js and Johnny Five, which I was able to connect to via WiFi to program wirelessly. This combination gave me the ability to program animations and specific functions in JavaScript, in which I am most comfortable.

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The entire device was initially powered via one 5V 10A DC power adapter, but I encountered some power issues when running multiple servos, so I junctioned the power to allow for up to three 10A adapters. I considered the cables leading to the device and created three DC power cables using wire and braided sheathing.

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When the bowl was filled with water, to which a combination of food coloring and black ink had been added, the effect worked close to how I had imagined. However, because of time constraints, I didn’t have time to troubleshoot some programming issues like the servo cycles and timing, and fluid animations of the spheres. I also found that many of the people I showed it to thought it to be too advanced a concept, as they would never buy something for the sole purpose of wonderment. I may have to re-examine its use case and design an experience around it in order to showcase its power before convincing others to purchase one. This and the fact that its current iteration is far too expensive for someone to purchase in the first place. I look forward to continuing to work on the patterns and function for Orbis in the future in order to make it as beautiful as I imagine in my dreams.

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Orbis App

In developing Orbis, I found that if it were to become a consumer product, it would need a companion app so that users could program the device for specific functions. Before I reached this final decision for this particular lens, I explored other wondrous solutions that involved artificial intelligence and experience designs utilizing smart assistants. To develop these ideas, I began by developing the personas that were described in the opening section of this book through a protopersona activity. This entailed creating a 4-quadrant sketch. The top-left shows a sketch of the persona, the person’s name, and his/ her role. The top-right has behavioral demographic information, so we can begin to predict a specific type of behavior. The bottomleft shows this person’s current needs and frustrations with current products or pain points that you can use to begin solving with your product. Finally, the bottom-right shows potential solutions or features that could help alleviate this person’s pain points.

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With my two personas, I began developing an app that would serve their needs by creating scenario maps. These maps had two potential app solutions for these users and they illustrated all the steps a user would take to complete his or her specific tasks. Here, I captured ideas for features as well as questions that should be answered through user interviews or testing.

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It was at this point that I settled upon moving forward with my initial Orbis companion app concept, because it would be helpful in supporting the final concept of the Orbis product. In an early wireframe of the paired app, I allowed users to select the functionality they would like assigned to different hand gestures when touching the water. I also included an animation feature where advanced users could create their own animations in the app, if desired.

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After user testing the interactions, the feedback I received was that the app had too many options for users and not enough visuals, and didn’t teach them enough of the functions or interactions. I simplified the layout and imagined adding animations to illustrate the functionality, as well how the patterns and interactions were selected. Moving forward from these prototypes, I decided to simplify it even further with a more straightforward swiping behavior to make the selections.

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When the app opens for the first time, we see the bowl set to its default functionality: a clock. The outside sphere represents the hour with the line representing the minute, so we can see here it is 4:30. If we swipe to the side, we see another function of the bowl – as a notification device – and that we can get the bowl to this state by tapping the water with two fingers. Swiping further, we see that if we were to touch the water in the bowl with all five fingers, we would enable the pattern mode. Right now it is set to a spiral pattern, but we can change that by touching the bowl. Here we see other pattern options like pops or waves. Lastly, if we go into the settings, we can manipulate the technical aspects of the product, such as setting how high the spheres should move dependent on the amount of water present, connect the bowl to WiFi or IFTTT, and calibrate the servos that make the spheres move. The overall concept for the app is to allow users to peel back the curtain on the Orbis device and not only see its secret workings but feel as though they have the power to directly control it, as if they were the magicians themselves. I wanted, however, to maintain an air of mystery, as Orbis still has the power to surprise even the most advanced users.

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Unexpected Experience

Before developing an experience that would embody my thesis, I first had to determine what typology the event would fit within. I created a mind map of potential options around the feeling that I wanted to create: mystery. My first idea was called ‘Shadows’ and it involves people learning a variety of shadow puppet shapes before being put in front of a large screen to showcase what they have learned. The shadows they create on the screen behind them would then come to life and become animated characters. The concept aims to give people the power to create the magic themselves, directly. This way too, the participants can take home their new skill and be able to practice and potentially show their friends. To imagine what the event would feel like, I created a postcard addressed to my protopersona Greg.

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fog night sky / sky

death Aztecs

scuba diving

math

suitcases

blind

space

ball pit

natural location

cracking open geode clouds

old story orientalist

cave

opening package

forest Mysterious

shadows

museum

elements closet dance

ocean

science display / lab tents

the brain

built location masks

theatre

ruins

cemetery abandoned warehouse old books / library

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Another idea revolved around doing a magic show in three different acts, where the participant is the magician. It would be a oneon-one experience where the person is led from area to area and they would have the power to make the magic happen themselves. I created a prototype program to outline some potential ‘effects’ for the event.

Program WEEK BEGINNING MONDAY 13TH OF MARCH A unique magic experience in three acts

Scene

1. Being An object of particular value or meaning to a participant is borrowed and placed inside a dark opaque sphere. The sphere is closed and put up on a pedestal. The guide tells the participant to imagine a world where magic is real. And then to come up with a magic phrase. When the participant recites this phrase, the sphere slowly changes color and becomes gold. Scene

2. Doing The guide takes the sphere and the participant to another area. The participant stands to the side as the guide moves to the middle of the room, while holding the sphere in her outstretched hand. The guide tells the participant to focus on the sphere and after some concentration, the sphere floats into the air. When the participant pushes her hands to the side, the sphere floats that direction. Ultimately, the sphere lands back in the guide’s hand. Scene

3. Relating The guide takes the sphere and the participant to the final area. While the participant averts her eyes, the guide hides the sphere in one of one hundred paper bags. When the participants turns around, she uses her power of connection to the object to find its location by invoking a large gust of wind. All the empty bags blow away leaving the bag with her sphere and object, as she had intuited. An Awe and Astonishment Act

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Ultimately I moved away from both these ideas and returned to Philip Fisher’s thoughts on how to evoke awe. My design principles became: 1. Create something unexpected. 2. Shift between multiple scales. 3. Make it interactive. The first principle was easily met as I called my experience ‘Unexpected.’ I decided that since my thesis had moved away from generally exploring the unexpected, I would fully embrace this in this particular project. I found a parallel between the second principle – shifting between multiple scales – and animation, because animation consists of individual frames that together create the illusion of fluid motion. Finally, the last principle – interactivity – was covered by the focus on the participatory nature of the event. Philip Fisher wrote: [T]he experiential world in which wonder takes place cannot be made up of unordered, singular patches of experience.We wonder at that which is a momentary surprise within a pattern that we feel confident that we know. It is extra ordinary, the unexpected. For there to be anything that can be called “unexpected” there must first be the expected. In other words, years or even centuries of intellectual work must already have taken place in a certain direction before there can be a reality that is viewed as ordinary and expected. Only this makes possible the rare and privileged moment, against a normative frame, when the extra ordinary can take place and evoke wonder.73

Fisher, Wonder. 58.

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I worked with the notion that there must be the expected before you can have the unexpected, and formed my base from previous animation devices that have been used throughout history. With typical filmstrip, we see 24 frames per second, and this is set by the speed of the reel moving through a projector. An earlier device called a phenakistoscope constituted a disc with 12-18 frames laid out around a circle, and when you peered through tiny slits while looking in a mirror the animation would come to life. You can do the same thing without slits and instead utilize a stroboscope. When you take a disc with frames on the top of it and light it with a strobe at a particular frequency, the animation becomes visible. I loved this idea but wanted to figure out how to make an animation that lasted longer than 18 frames.

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My idea was really simple. Instead of a disc with 18 frames, I extended the disc into a tube with the animation frames wrapping around it in spiral fashion. As the tube would spin, participants would hit it with a strobe light in order to match the rotational speed. When the strobe frequency matched exactly, the animation would come to life and be visible. If it was too slow or too fast, however, the animation wouldn’t quite work. To make it even more difficult, the tube would be constantly changing speed, because it would be spun by a person riding a bicycle. Thus you would need to constantly chase the wonder moment. To get the effect I was looking for, I wanted this tube to be as large as I could handle. So I planned on using a 12’ long x 2’ diameter Sonotube as a form, with it rotating 7’ up in the air. Sonotubes are cardboard tubes typically used as forms for concrete columns, but I had used them in the past to make columns for stage productions. This was the largest one I had used, but I was positive I could make it work.

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To make sure my idea was feasible, I enlisted the help of former PoD student and a good friend Jon Lung, to help me engineer the device. After a planning session, we decided that the project was feasible and I began the prototyping phase.

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I created an inspiration board of images of other zoetropes and stroboscopes, as well as ideas of what the content of the animation could potentially be. Because my initial idea had the tube 7’ in the air, the content was planned to be all about looking upwards at the sky within the city.

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My first prototype was a small cardboard tube attached to a stepper motor that I pulled from an older 3D printer. I created a simple test animation of a bouncing ball, and after printing it on adhesive-backed vinyl and applying it to the tube I tested it to see if we could in fact see an animation. I first tried an app on my phone that would use the camera at specific video frame rates to see if it could match the rotational speed. I found, however, that at each frame rate the tube was blurry. I then tried a strobe light app that allowed for fine-tuned strobe rates, and after chasing the rotational speed a bit the animation came into view. The problem, however, was that the animation direction was backwards, and the animation itself, of a bouncing ball, was completely obscured by the fact that the animation was moving upwards along the tube. The larger upward motion of the frames masked the animation content, so it just looked like a stationary circle. I learned from this prototype and redid the animation with a clip from E.T., the scene where a backlit Elliott flies across the sky on his bicycle. Because this animation moved sideways and was framed with the image of the moon, it worked out much better and was clearly visible. These two tests were enough of a proof-ofconcept to allow me to move forward with the project. One other interesting thing I learnt from the prototyping process was that in order for the animation to work, it required four people: one to hold the tube and motor, one to hold the strobing phone, one to plug in the motor, and one to observe and call out directions. I remembered this fact later when planning out the other key elements of my experience.

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First prototype of bouncing ball

Second prototype of E.T.

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The construction process for the stroboscope presented countless challenges along the way, beginning with acquiring the materials for the build in the first place. The 2’ diameter Sonotube proved more difficult to obtain than I had imagined because it was too large to keep in stock within the city. I found several distributors out of state who would have happily shipped me the tube, but the price of shipping often met or was over the cost of the tube itself. I ended up calling up local distributors of both cardboard shipping tubes and construction materials until I found a company in Queens with the tubes in stock. Jon and I hopped on the subway to take the hour long trip to Woodside to pick up the tube. The people at the shop were extremely helpful, even though they were quite confused that we didn’t have a truck with us and that we were planning on carrying the tube back to Chelsea, Manhattan on the subway. One of the men helped us by cutting the tube in half with a circular saw so that Jon and I could each carry a 6’ section. Even though the tubes were made of cardboard, they were awkward and proved to be difficult to carry along the 20 minute walk back to the subway. We were finally able to get the tubes to our shop, but not without many strange looks along the way.

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The first step for the project upon returning to the shop was to clean the tubes of their travel grime and to paint them. We then milled out some circles from MDF on the CNC shopbot to create end caps for the tubes. These circles had inlays and holes for t-nuts that we would use to connect the two halves of the tube together, as well as larger holes for a 1” pipe and connector to slide through. These end caps were then hammered into the tubes from both the inside and outside until they were flush with the edge of the tube. We glued them in place and secured them with brad nails.

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After placing the pipe together with the connectors, we secured the pipe to the tube with pipe flanges. Now, if we spun the pipe, the tube would spin along with it as it was directly attached. Here is where we ran into another challenge. The bearings we had purchased had a 1” bore diameter, not nominally but exactly. The 1” pipe was also not nominal and so when we tried to put the pipe into the bearings, they didn’t fit. Now, it was 2:00am at this point, so our decisions did not reflect our most thoughtful selves, but we decided to hammer on the bearings using a larger diameter pipe as a sleeve for a more even surface area on the bearing. After several hours of hitting the bearings with a 2 lb. drilling hammer, we had only made a few inches of progress with the bearing. We called it an evening and waited to re-examine our options in the morning.

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The other issue that was plaguing my mind at this point were the legs that would hold the tube 7’ in the air. Being so tall, there was no way for me to work at that height on my own. I decided to cut the legs down so that the tube would be at chest height and people would walk along it rather than underneath it. This was also far safer from the perspective that it couldn’t fall on someone during the event.

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The next day, I decided to take an orbital sander to the section of pipe between the bearing and the tube in order to attempt to take away enough material to make the bearing slide on more easily. Unfortunately, after a few more hours of banging, the larger diameter pipe I was hitting slipped over the collar of the bearing and went directly into the ball bearings themselves, thereby ruining the entire assembly as it would no longer spin freely. We took a step back and decided that we could either order more bearings online or find a local distributor. It was a challenge to find these specialty bearings in the city, but luckily I finally found a shop in Redhook that had two left. After a brief roundtrip, I returned to our studio with two new bearings and the task of getting the old bearings off the pipe. On one side, I took an angle-grinder to the pipe and cut off about 4” of length in addition to the bearing. The other bearing, however, was too far on the pipe to just cut off and so I needed to hammer it off. I sanded down the free end of the pipe, added lots of lubricant and then hammered down on the bearing from atop a ladder. After I finally got the bearing off the pipe, I took both pipes to the metal lathe and sanded and shaved off just a small amount of metal in order to get the new bearings to slide on more easily. Because the bearings had two set screws to firmly secure the internal pipe, I wasn’t too worried about taking away too much material. This resulted in a much easier process of mounting the bearings in place.

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Throughout this process, I was beginning to get worried about the speed of rotation of the tube. In the early test with the stepper motor, we were getting speeds of about 12 frames per second (fps). This meant that the small tube was spinning at about 720rpm, which would be way too fast for the larger pipe to spin and remain safe. In thinking about how the bicycle was going to attach to the pipe, the initial sprocket I had ordered had 29 teeth, which would mean that the gear ratio between that and the bike would be minimal. In other words, the bike rider would have to spin their legs very quickly to get the tube to spin. In a panicked state, I ordered another sprocket, this time with only 12 teeth to try to get the tube to spin as quickly as possible with minimal effort. After the bearings were mounted, we found that the tube spun slightly eccentrically. This could have been for a number of reasons, but it was likely because the tube end caps in the center weren’t truly parallel. If I were to do this build again, I would have ensured more precision at this particular stage of the process.

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It also proved difficult to figure out how to mount the bike. We weren’t entirely sure how best to get the pedals, and therefore the rear gears, to spin freely without having the rear wheel spin. We took apart the bike to see if it would give us any ideas, but found ourselves smothered in bike grease and with ball bearings all over the floor before we knew what had happened. Luckily, we were able to get the bike back together again and we realized that we could just lift the entire bike off the ground by utilizing some deep socket heads tensioned onto the rear wheel hub nuts. Because the sprocket was not designed for use with a bicycle chain, I had purchased a wider machine chain. The issue with this chain, however, was that it was too wide for the bike. After purchasing another standard bike chain to work with the bike, it obviously didn’t fit on the sprocket. We were lucky enough that the largest gear on the bike had enough clearance above the others to allow us to use the wider machine chain without hitting the other gears.

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The animation was created in Cinema 4D and was intentionally abstract and designed to use a variety of movements, since I didn’t have much time to prototype them. I knew that if the animations utilized morphing patterns, it would have a higher chance of being successfully legible on the stroboscope. Once all of the animation frames were printed and mounted onto the cylinder using spray mount, we tested a variety of strobe lights to see how they worked out. I found that even though the strobe rate was variable, the LED powered strobe lights I had purchased were too bright, and the LEDs stayed on too long during each flash. Because of this, the animation was always blurry. It was as if a camera had too long of a shutter speed and thus the photo had turned out blurred. In a desperate moment, I ordered several other strobe lights, including some that utilized a xenon bulb rather than LEDs.

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The space required for the event also caused some anxiety, as I had trouble finding a place that was within my budget and that fit my concept for the experience. Eventually, I found an apartment on the Lower East Side on Peerspace that fit my needs. I created an EventBrite ticket page for the event and subtitled the listing “a rare animation experience,” because I figured that nobody would attend something that was simply named Unexpected. In order to bring in as many members of my targeted user group as possible, I submitted my ticketing link to an immersive theater newsletter that listed upcoming New York shows.

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I was very lucky to have my event listed at the top of the next newsletter and I was able to book up nearly half of my open spots with the newsletter subscribers. The rest of the spots were filled with friends, colleagues, and professors, making it a sold-out affair a few days before the opening.

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I rented a truck, had a couple of my friends help out, and then broke down and transported everything to the space on the morning of Monday March 20th. Luckily, everything went back together again smoothly, and with some help we had the stroboscope up and running within about an hour. I set up a computer and speakers for the music and we opened the doors around 7:00 pm.

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The initial plan for the event was for each 15 minute session to have four people attending, with each person given a specific role in the activity. One person was going to be a pedaler riding the bike to spin the tube, one was a braker to slow down the tube if it spun too quickly, one was the strober who held the light and adjusted its strobe rate, and the fourth was the viewer who would be able to choreograph everyone and tell certain people to adjust their speeds. During the first session, however, only two participants showed up and they both wanted to view the tube. This was an obvious oversight, and so I adjusted the script to have one of my assistants ride the bicycle while the participants viewed the animation while holding the strobe fixture.

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Another unforeseen change to the experience happen during the first session, as the sun was still up. Although the curtains were drawn, the light from outside was drowning out the strobe lights. This, in addition to the fact that the new xenon bulb strobe lights wouldn’t flash quickly enough to show the animation effect, led us to resort back to using the cell phone strobe app from my first test prototype. The app worked perfectly and had the unintended effect of forcing people to get closer to the tube and more directly relate to the spinning object. I had my usher at the first door tell people to download the app on their phones before heading upstairs to the main space, so each individual could try to find the strobe rate themselves. There was a beautiful sharing moment as people would lock in the rate, tell everyone else around them the number, and then others would cheer as the animation also appeared before them. The night progressed without any real issues with the stroboscope device itself, but we did have to make small adjustments to the script in order to allow for as much exploration of the participants as possible. As soon as people were given the chance to play, interesting outcomes emerged, like people wanting to ride the bicycle themselves, wanting to stand on the opposite side of the spinning tube (such that if the tube were to fail, it would fly right into them), and some were even so adventurous as to lie underneath the tube to watch the animation above them. I knew that I shouldn’t plan every single aspect of the experience so that there would still be openings for the unexpected, but it was still immensely fun to see how the event evolved.

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Our professor for this class, Emilie Baltz, in talking about how to engage your audience, touts the four P’s of experience design: - People - Products - Processes - Place I had amazing people, both helping me to accomplish the build of this project and at the event to help facilitate the participation of the users. They each knew their role and were able to adapt to the needs of the event as necessary. The product in this case was the stroboscope itself and it was the artifact that enabled the whole experience. The process entailed participation from all users in the space as well as me and my helpers. We all had to work together in order to hit all the necessary marks for the animation to become visible. The magic was in everyone’s hands. And the place itself was quite interesting as it was a designer’s loft apartment. The building was under construction at the time so nobody else was inside. Construction mess, dust, plastic sheeting, and strange decor all added to the mystery of the event. It turned out to be just strange enough to work for the effect I wanted. All together, the four P’s matched up and contributed to the event’s success. The best part of the experience for me was hearing the audible cries of joy when the animation clicked into view. Some tried to capture the animation via video or photo on their phones, but due to the nature of the strobing, it was very difficult to get a clean image. This was part of the ephemeral nature of finding wonder in the moment, and for only a brief instant. It could not be shared with others outside the ‘magic circle’ of the room and it was nice to see that most people remained present in the moment and refrained from sharing their photos with others. Knowing how much work had gone into the event and how many times I had been told to scale it back or stop entirely made the result of the experience that much more incredible for me. I was able to see my work evoke the feelings I had been chasing throughout my thesis, as well as achieve my dream for the project.

Josh Corn

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Reality forever hides behind the veils of illusion. S.H. Sharpe

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Looking Forward

In the introduction to Stuart Vyse’s book Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, he writes: [M]any of us are looking for a sense of wonder. In a world that is increasingly frenetic and stressful, it is natural to seek something that will lift us up from the mundane and predictable nature of our days.Yet, if we want a sense of magic in our lives, we need look no further than the panorama provided by science itself. We need not invent an alternate reality. There is wonder enough in the beauty of the universe as it actually is. The world we have now has magic enough to warrant our deep appreciation, and we will have much more time to appreciate it if we avoid the temptation to believe in the reality of magic and embrace the magic of reality.74 About a week before finishing this thesis process, I attended a performance of Derek Delgaudio’s latest show In and Of Itself. I wanted to see his show for several reasons: Teller, of the duo Penn and Teller, after seeing Derek’s show in LA about a year ago, had posted on Twitter that it was amazing. Derek had just won the Academy of Magical Art’s Magician of the Year award for 2016. The New York Times had published an article titled The Magician Who Wants to Break Magic about Derek’s new show.75 I managed to get a ticket and the entire show was a surreal experience. In the audience were several magicians, including Jamy Ian Swiss and Asi Wind, and many other excited faces ready to witness the extremely hyped show. I can’t write much about the show’s contents, because I still believe in keeping some secrets, but I will say that it was the best magic show I have seen in years, if not ever. Derek has a clear understanding of how to infuse magic seamlessly with meaning and story. The script was wrapped around questions of identity and his own personal background, and still the five effects he presented never felt like just a trick layered on top. Everything was seamlessly integrated and the magic itself fooled me so badly that tears came to my eyes at the end. When thinking 74 75

Vyse, Believing in Magic. xii. Weiner, “The Magician Who Wants to Break Magic.”

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about potential methods, you can either try to think about all the hoops he would have had to jump through to accomplish the effects, or you can just give in and believe. Through the experience of Derek’s show, I was able to reflect on both the aspects of his show that worked, as well as the learning experiences from my own thesis. Wonder is not a simple feeling to create and everybody experiences it differently. I think that most of us are so far from being open to feeling wonder or awe in our everyday lives that it takes a huge jump to trigger it. For some, it can be provoked by the simple beauty of an analog object. For others, it takes a truly larger scale or rarer event to produce the effect. Magic performances themselves are so rare that I feel they can more easily push people towards wonder. As we’ve seen, however, magic isn’t the only type of experience that works to this end. This, in addition to the fact that I think magic is primed for reimagining and recapturing the attention of audiences in new and inventive ways. Derek’s show reminded me that there are others out there who are thinking about and pushing the art in new directions and I can’t wait to participate again in the drive. This thesis is far from over, and I am excited to continue chasing wonder until I can no longer run.

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Thank You Acknowledgements Interviewees:

Workshop Attendees:

Abhrajeet Roy

Marianna Mezhibovskaya

Wyna Liu

John Heida

Gerry Fialka

Jess Wright

Winslow Turner Porter

Lee Yanco

Jess Rowland

Rachel Brill

Eric Redon

Nour Malaeb

Milica Zec

Ziad Bizri

Cyril Chapellier

Theodore Ulhrich

Bruce Shapiro

Kohzy Koh

Johanna Koljonen

Sascha Mombartz

Pierce Gradone Aditya Kalyanpur

Special Thanks:

Philip Fisher

Allan Chochinov

Christopher Brown

Andrew Schloss

Zander Brimijoin

Alisha Wessler

Beau Lotto

Marko Manriquez

Felix Barrett

Nadia DeLane

Tania Luna

Krithi Rao

Michael Chung Claudia Chagui

Jon Lung

Alex Stone

Eden Lew

Kevin O’Brien

Calvin Szeto

David Al-Ibrahim

Judy Chi Jane Fujita

Acknowledgements

291

John Thackara

Bernice Wong

Andrea Cameron

Steve Hamilton

Louis Elwood Leach

Doug Fertig

Kyla Fullenwider

Smruti Adya

Alexa Forney

Pepin Gelardi

Andrew Schlesinger

Dayoung Hong

Brent Arnold

Manako Tamura

Arjun Kalyanpur

Janna Gilbert

Kuan Xu

Gahee Kang

Steven Dean

Will Crum

Michael Kenney

Emilie Baltz

Jingting He

Julia Lindpaintner

Sinclair Scott Smith

Kevin Cook

Will Lentz

Sebastian Harmsen

Xumeng Mou

Jiani Lin

Oscar Pipson

Chris Rand

Ailun Sai

Tak Cheung

Antriksh Nangia

Karen Vellensky

Bronwen Densmore

Alexia Cohen

Jenna Witzleben

Anna-Marie Lavigne

Juho Lee

Oya Kosebay

Lassor Feasley

Holly Chesnoff

John Heida

Sowmya Iyer

Elia Chesnoff

Teng Yu

Katie Weiss

Zoe Goldstein

Lydia Corn Jack Corn Marti Hurwitz Lee Hurwitz

Ethan Weiss