management

Italian New Yorker Mario ‘The Maker Magician’ Marchese is known on social media for an anarchic mix of robotics, conjuring and punk style. Lucy Ribchester reckons he’s set to get Edinburgh kids raiding their recycling bins, thanks to his magical cyborgs made

Edinburgh from household trash

It sounds like a vision from the future: robots performing onstage tricks, making coins disappear or selecting the correct card from the deck, without any sleight of hand or misdirection patter. But according to New York-based magician Mario Marchese, robotics and conjuring have gone hand-inhand for over 150 years. ‘There is a famous magician named Robert-Houdin from France,’ notes Marchese. ‘He became famous for making these mechanical contraptions where the magic would happen on the table while he stepped away.’

Robert-Houdin’s heyday was the mid-19th century, and even after his death in 1871 he was celebrated enough to inspire legendary escapeartist Harry Houdini to take his name. But for Marchese, Robert-Houdin’s legacy is all about the robotics. One of the Frenchman’s most famous inventions was a miniature pastry shop, where an audience member would select a treat from a menu, and a miniature chef inside the tiny shop would make it and present it to them. ‘That concept just inspired me so much; the idea of walking away from your magic, and that the machine creates magic on its own.’

There’s a steampunk spirit that runs throughout Marchese’s approach to magic, from his Adam Ant-ish rock look (the result, he says, of playing in punk bands during his 20s) to his scientific ethos of discovery and limit-pushing. ‘The show has this kind of punk rock, never-grow-up kind of attitude,’ he says. ‘But how do we bring it with education? How do we bring it where we inspire kids to make stuff? We’re taking these principles of education, but then we’re putting that punk rock edge to it.’

Marchese was heading towards a career as an elementary school teacher when his magic performances started to take off. These days his whole family (wife/manager Katie and two children) travel together as a tight renegade band. Elevenyear-old Gigi is growing proficient with stage lighting, while eight-year-old Bear can strike a set at breakneck speed, and they all have input on the creation of the show. Their schedule can vary, from performing at school assemblies to theatre tours, to accompanying Marchese backstage at his TV appearances such as on Sesame Street

During the pandemic however, like all live performers, Marchese had to turn to online work, and that was when Automabot was born: a lo-fi cardboard-box robot whose TikTok tricks went viral. You may have caught its square-lined movements and permanently surprised expression on your phone screen over the past couple of years. While Automabot has stayed home this time, Marchese says its ‘spirit or ghost’ is infused into the Edinburgh show.

But you can expect to see other robots which he makes from all sorts of things; one of his most unusual being a cute Pixarstyle lamp created from a Campbell’s tomato-soup can. The most important thing to him is that the technology he builds is all open-source (another example of punk ethos), allowing audiences to access its code and hopefully build their own robots at home later. ‘Open-source philosophy is like a religion to me,’ Marchese says. ‘Everything I’ve learned is not from going to a traditional school; it’s because of the open-source community, the maker community. They took the time to help me learn the secrets of how to build robotics, and this is stuff that’s accessible to everybody.’

Marchese believes that art ‘always comes from the ground up; it never starts at the top.’ Innovation too, he says, ‘happens from the bottom’. The legacy of his approach was no better exemplified than after one of his shows when he overheard a kid asking his mum if he could raid the recycling. ‘We were selling merch and this child ran up to his mom and was like, “ma, when I go home I want to go through the trash and make a magic show like Mario”.’ He laughs but he’s perfectly serious about his philosophy. ‘It is super important to me that there is a minimal amount of hurdles when the audience sees the show. It excites me when kids see the fact that it is so homemade. Pizza boxes, cardboard, straws . . . but robots.’