Magician
Marco Tempest
<p co Tempest works on hand motions to integrate into his augmented-reality card trick. <em>o: Jonathan Snyder/Wired</em
NYORK — Marco Tempest is about to demonstrate his latest trick. It’s a card ruse, but instead of grabbing one of four decks scattered about his SoHo studio, he turns on one of his seven Macs. He begins waving his hand, causing five cards on the screen to move.</p>
Psome pixels. Any pixels.</p>
Ttrick is simple enough: His subject considers five cards, chooses one and memorizes it. Then Tempest, using movement tracking from a web cam, swipes his hand to shuffle them, draws a card of his own and then lines up the remaining four to reveal that the card he chose is the card his subject just picked. Ta-da!</p>
Iets them every time.</p>
Ttrick is, of course, a modern riff on <a hcess card</a>r Prince’s card, depending upon whom you ask — and it’s been around since 1905. But the psychological principle behind it is something science is still working on understanding. As Tempest begins explaining its machinations, it becomes clear why he’s known as the “virtual magician” and not “That guy your grandma saw last week in Vegas.”</p>
“re are two interesting things about this: One is that it’s based on a principle that has just recently been discovered as a research subject in psychology, which is <a hge blindness</a>empest says. “But the trick is based on a trick that was invented over 100 years ago. So basically this kind of shows that magicians were exploring weakness in human perception 100 years before science caught on to it.”</p>
Ttrick also is an extension of Tempest’s Microsoft Kinect-enabled augmented reality rig, which uses his gestures to incorporate him into an AR world the audience sees on supplementary screens. It’s something teachers ask Tempest if they can incorporate into class presentation tools. To find out, Tempest found an academic paper by researchers at Intel and MIT <a homputer motion-recognition</a> – thanks to the new card trick – is studying whether he and the coder he’s been working with to make some software that could be used for education. Then he’ll probably give it away for free.</p>
Ihis isn’t what you’d imagine is a typical day for a magician, that’s because it’s not. Tempest is an outlier in his field. Whereas many magicians jealously guard their tricks, Tempest considers himself an open-source illusionist. (He gave Wired part of the source code to his new card trick.) Where some magicians might consider using the latest technology to jazz up a show by taking out some of the, well, magic, Tempest is all for it. His forward-thinking approach to magic has even led to him being named a <a hctor’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab</a>mpest’s field was, he notes, once ahead of science, and he sees magic as a way of envisioning where new technologies might take us.</p>
cs guy invented the future by using magic – that’s kind of my theme right now,” Tempest says.</p>
“torically, magicians have been right on top of cutting-edge technology, and in the older days they used that,” says Stan Allen, the founding editor of <em>c</emazine. “What Marco’s done is just use today’s technology. What he brings to the magic society is that he’s pulling us forward into a whole new world, where sometimes magicians get caught up in the classics and they’re pulling rabbits out of hats still, in some cases.”</p>
Fthe record, Tempest has a rabbit. It lives in his apartment in Chinatown, where it is followed by a Roomba and is never pulled from a hat. Tempest’s magic emporium (aka the loft nearby where he keeps his tools) is filled with other wonders. In addition to four MacBook Pros, a MacBook Air, an iMac and a tower, there’s an iPad, the Kinect hooked up to his augmented-reality kit, two sets of speakers, stacks of external hard drives (for a total of 150 terabytes), a MakerBot Replicator 2 and a robotic arm holding the flag of Tempest’s native Switzerland. In other words, he works in the magician’s lair of the future. But his style actually comes from the past.</p>
JEugène Robert-Houdin was born in 1805 in Blois, France. The son of a watchmaker, he was known for wowing crowds with fantastical illusions. He was an incredible magician, but what helped him earn the title “father of modern conjuring” was his understanding of science. In the mid-19th century when the people of Algeria — inspired by the miracles performed by religious leaders — were rebelling against French colonization, Napoleon III sent Robert-Houdin to, as one account puts it, “<a hholy the holy men</a>e performed many tricks, but the most memorable was his making the strongest man in the crowd so weak that he couldn’t lift the same chest a child had hoisted moments before. The trick? The chest contained iron, and the magic was nothing more than electromagnetism.</p>
“sort of took magic off of the streets, where it was a conjuror’s diversion, and brought it into theaters and he brought it into modern dress,” says Allen.</p>
Materials</h2
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cthe last few months Marco Tempest has been working on a card trick that integrates a magic technique that dates back to 1905 with 21st century technology like augmented reality. Above is some of the source code for this latest illusion.</p>
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cest jokes around in the Manhattan loft where he makes his magic. <em>o: Jonathan Snyder/Wired</em
crt-Houdin is, without question, the magician whose work Tempest strives to emulate. (He’s not the only one – in the late-19th century a young man named Ehrich Weiss <a hed himself Houdini</a>homage to his forbear.)</p>
cs guy invented the future by using magic – that’s kind of my theme right now,” Tempest says. “This idea that as a magician I’m like an inventor, but not limited by what’s really possible – I can go a little further. I can have a robot on stage that does things which robots actually cannot do. I can give you a feeling of how it might be that is possible. The same I can do with augmented reality or projection. I can make my version of the future sound and solid, like you can experience it right now.”</p>
cest was born in 1964 in Zurich. His family didn’t have a lot of money, but when he was “7 or 8 years old” he got a used magic set – a few balls and half-shell bowls with instructions – at a flea market. He would practice in front of the mirror for hours. At 10 he met a magician named Calindo at a street fair and became his protégé.</p>
cway he taught magic to me was very proper,” Tempest says. “I wouldn’t get a new trick every time.”</p>
cndo, a schoolteacher by day, taped Tempest’s fingers together so he would hold his hands properly and taught him how and when to smile.</p>
creally taught me showmanship,” Tempest says.</p>
ideo: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZX8MBBohX3s]<br>
Tlessons struck, and to this day Tempest’s hand gestures are precise and elegant. Even when he’s discussing the driest of topics, it’s hard not to feel like he’ll pull a coin from your ear — if that were a trick he’d even do, which, of course, it isn’t.</p>
Bhe time he was 12 Tempest had joined the circus, a state-funded outfit that allowed kids to practice their routines on weekends before taking them around Switzerland for the summers. A smart kid who still considered school a “nightmare,” he left at 16 to hitchhike around Europe doing street magic. This led, interestingly, to an interest in breakdancing – ask him what his favorite old-school trick is and he’ll bust out a mean “robot” – and to a breakdancing magic act with a partner named Martin Cottet (it still <a hs on YouTube</a>at eventually opened doors for them to play venues all over Europe and places like Monte Carlo and basically do “the thing you do if you have <em>ct</emp>
Tsuccess of that routine prompted Tempest to go solo. A constant tinkerer, he began to wonder if PCs – still relatively new in the late 1980s – might make magic. So he did what anybody would do: He contacted Steve Jobs’ new company NeXT and asked for a computer. “I contacted them through a Swiss distributor and [said], ‘I need an NeXT cube and a NeXT dimension port, and two monitors and I can do the next wave of magic, and I can do it for you too.’ … It was very naïve.”</p>
Srisingly, they sent one. It was an impressive bit of hardware, but wasn’t nearly sophisticated enough to make the magic he envisioned. But he learned that if he needed something, he could ask for it and offer a performance in exchange – a gambit that led to lucrative corporate gigs. In 1997, after a long run performing mostly in Europe and running a company that made broadcast computer graphics, he left for New York to start over. He thought it would take at least five years to get off the ground.</p>
Iook about three months.</p>
Iurns out that, if you’re a magician who knows a little something about tech, there are companies that will pay you handsomely to perform for them. He took videos of his gigs in Europe to corporate event production companies, which used his skills in presentations for conferences for companies like IBM and Cisco.</p>
“as on a roll with innovating my stuff and creating new material,” Tempest says. “Every gig I had, I sold something which I had never done before. Like, ‘Oh, I can shrink your CEO or teleport your CEO from here to there.’ It was the greatest platform for experimentation.”</p>
2>## 2
- trtions & Answers</stcentury before Google and Siri, theater audiences would put questions to magicians and a magical device would answer them. Tables rapped, bells rang and teakettles spoke. This version of artificial intelligence was truly artificial but also incredibly baffling. But perhaps the most remarkable was a mechanical skull created by Joseffy. Without threads, electricity, remote control, radio or outside connections of any kind, the Skull of Balsamo clicked its jaws to answer a variety of questions from the audience. It was never wrong.”</li
- trportation</st20s illusionist P. T. Selbit invented Sawing a Woman in Half. But one of his lesser-known illusions was called Broadcasting a Woman. Before you could say, ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ a seated woman slowly disappeared from one chair and materialized on another chair set some several feet away.”</li
- trt</stspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s science fiction book <em>Coming Race</eme dramatically dressed illusionist Ramesses exhibited a pseudo-robot in Vril. The robot appeared to be under some kind of remote control. His eyes flashed, his limbs moved in mechanical jerks and Vril was able to do things no human could do, including standing at gravity-defying angles in a way that Michael Jackson did 80 years later.”</li
- trractive Movies</stgicians like George Méliès were instrumental in the invention of cinema. It’s not surprising then that they sought to take the invention into the realm of impossibility. In the 1920s Horace Goldin produced the ultimate in 3-D when he interacted with a film image of his assistant projected onto a screen. In a marvel of synchronized movements objects were passed back and forth between Goldin and the image of the assistant. Finally the woman stepped off the screen and onto the stage.”</li
- trsibility</ste May 1934 issue of <em>lar Mechanics</emailed a demonstration of invisibility given in London by scientists. A man wearing protective clothing and headgear stepped into an open-fronted cabinet and slowly became invisible. Most likely inspired by H. G. Wells’ <em>Invisible Man</emich appeared only one year earlier, the demonstration was an illusion created by magician Herbert Winck.”</li
- trless Power</stkola Tesla’s dream was to create wireless power. In 1950 British magician Bobby Voltaire showed what wireless power would look like by lighting electric bulbs up at his fingertips. Or even when submerged in a tumbler full of water. No cords or wires. Just magic.”</li l
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cdoor to Tempest’s magician’s lair. <em>o: Jonathan Snyder/Wired</em
cir goals are to write an academic paper. My goal is to tell a story with whatever we come up with,” Tempest says. “That’s kind of a new model for me, but it might be the next thing where my stuff can outlive the performance.”</p>
Corate events comprise about one-third of Tempest’s work and account for nearly all of his income. He won’t say how much he earns — “I’m not inexpensive” is all he’ll say about that — but he lives comfortably. Lately, though, he seems burned out on corporate work. He’s attending a lot of big-think conferences lately – TED, the World Economic Forum’s meeting at Davos, <a hle’s Zeitgeist events</a>nd it is inspiring him to go in a different direction.</p>
Odirection led him to academia, where he’s been working on augmented reality with Ken Perlin at New York University and was named to the MIT Media Lab’s nascent Director’s Fellows program. He’s among the first 12 people named a fellow, joining the likes of J.J. Abrams and chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley, hashing out just what the program will look like. Program director Joi Ito hopes Tempest will find ways to collaborate with faculty and students on his projects. Tempest was chosen, Ito says, because as a magician and a technologist he understands communications in a way that’s valuable. After all, illusion is all about entertaining people while deceiving them. But what he’ll do during his fellowship is, by design, undetermined.</p>
“interface and psychology [connections he could make] are interesting, but it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as if he started working with a synthetic molecular biologist,” Ito says. “It’s going to be less likely that I’m going to find that connection. It’s going to be the person who is working on the future of, say, printing genes on chips that says, ‘I think we have a connection here, let’s do something.’ … The best [connection] will be the one I can’t tell you right now.”</p>
Aemia is new for Tempest, who typically likes to start a project, hit a deadline and move on. Academics are notorious for working slowly and methodically, sometimes with intangible or uncertain results.</p>
“ir goals are to write an academic paper. My goal is to tell a story with whatever we come up with,” Tempest says. “That’s kind of a new model for me, but it might be the next thing where my stuff can outlive the performance.”</p>
Tto Tempest long enough, though, and you’ll sense that the kid who hated school doesn’t want his foray into academics to get too bookish. On a recent afternoon his friend Apollo Robbins – <a hunparalleled pickpocket</a>wn as “The Gentleman Thief” – stopped by Tempest’s loft to get a cell phone for a trick. His “act” (the props he uses in tricks) was, in a bit of delicious irony, stolen during a recent trip. Such things happen with surprising regularity for magicians, who tend to travel with a lot of cool gear. Tempest being Tempest, Robbins figured his friend would have exactly what he needed. Tempest did of course, and the conversation quickly turned to complex relationship magic has with scientific research.</p>
Ttopic enters the mainstream every time a book like <a hghts of Mind</empublished, but it’s something guys like Tempest and Robbins ponder all the time. On one hand, both fields can clearly learn from each other. But on the other, magicians and scientists speak vastly different languages. Science is all about investigating and unearthing truths, while magic is devoted to hiding and obfuscating them.</p>
Test strives to speak both languages and bridge both worlds. A few days after our meeting in New York I asked Robbins, who contributed to a paper <em>tiers of Human Neuroscience</emlished in 2011 about how illusions developed by magicians provide insight into cognition, about Tempest’s work. He and Tempest may be dabbling in academia, but as two of the least “magician”-like professionals in their field, they’re doing magic in a way that’s almost a science in and of itself.</p>
“co approaches the craft through his passion for innovation and technology,” he says. “I approach the craft through the study of applied deception. We both approach magic in very different ways.”</p>
Test’s next great trick might be shaking up the relationship between science and magic. He believes magicians have a lot to offer scientists like psychologist <a hard Wiseman</a>neuroscientist <a hna Martinez-Conde</a>t rather than trying to explain how magic works, which is the thrust of a lot of research on the topic, he’d like to see his craft used to develop new technologies we can’t even imagine yet. He hasn’t started his fellowship at MIT but he already knows what he wants to make there: “the world’s first laboratory with a program dedicated to illusion in all its aspects.” It’s a wildly ambitious idea, one Tempest believes could lead to finding new uses for mobile technologies, new entertainment experiences and augmented reality applications for for education. In Tempest’s mind, it’s better to learn what could be done than figure out what magicians already know (even if they’re just not telling). After all Robert-Houdin did find a way to manipulate electromagnetism when scientists still struggled to understand it.</p>
Bto do that, magic may need a few more people like Marco Tempest, and they’re in short supply.</p>
“ic just tends to resist change, somehow,” Tempest says. “It’s almost like magic forgot how it started. We are the early adopters. We’re supposed to be the ones who try out the new stuff a little bit ahead of everybody else.”</p>
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cest uses real cards in addition to virtual ones for his magic. <em>o: Jonathan Snyder/Wired</em
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