medium [ mee-dee-uhm ]
/Fine Arts.
the material or technique with which an artist works
If magic is an art, what is the medium? It’s a question that I find fairly easy to answer with most any other artistic endeavor. In painting it’s… well, paint. Sculpture, maybe clay or something. In dance the medium is the movement of the human body.
A lot of people who perform magic are looking to generate belief. They want people to believe they can truly read their thoughts or move something with their mind or whatever the case may be.
But in my opinion, generating the strongest “magical” experience is not about getting people to believe something. Belief is not the goal. Belief is the medium that is manipulated to create magic.
If someone believes in mind-reading, and you perform a demonstration of mind-reading that they think is real, no magic has occurred, because no one’s belief has been agitated.
If someone doesn’t believe in psychokinesis, but you perform a demonstration that is so strong that it gets them to believe in it, then you have performed a very strong trick, but not really a strong “magical” moment. All you’ve done is flip them from non-belief to belief.
The strongest magical experiences I’ve been able to give people happen when their minds get pulled back and forth, between the fiction of the trick and what they know the reality must be. (Ideally this happens over and over.) Or when they’re momentarily in some hybrid state that exists where they feel both the reality and the fantasy simultaneously. It’s their belief that is getting stretched and squished, swirled and smeared.
If your goal is just to fool people or entertain them, they you don’t really need to worry about this. The purpose of this technique is for them to feel the very specific type of magical feeling that invokes a sense of enchantment and wonder. That type of magic feeling is the feeling of reality and fantasy being blurred. And the way to generate it is to use a clearly impossible premise and then to hack away at all potential answers, explanations, and alternative theories, so that the only option people have left is to vacillate between what they know to be true, and the crazy fantasy you’ve so carefully crafted. It’s in this state that their belief is most pliable, which can lead to truly magical seeming experiences.