Marco Tempest: A magical tale (with augmented reality)

http://www.ted.com Marco Tempest spins a beautiful story of what magic is, how it entertains us and how it highlights our humanity -- all while working extraordinary illusions with his hands and an augmented reality machine.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate

If you have questions or comments about this or other TED videos, please go to http://support.ted.com

---

Closed Caption:

Marco Tempest: What I'd like to show you today
is something in the way of an experiment.
Today's its debut.
It's a demonstration of augmented reality.
And the visuals you're about to see are not prerecorded.
They are live
and reacting to me in real time.
I like to think of it as a kind of technological magic.
So fingers crossed.
And keep your eyes on the big screen.
Augmented reality
is the melding of the real world
with computer-generated imagery.
It seems the perfect medium
to investigate magic
and ask, why, in a technological age,
we continue to have
this magical sense of wonder.
Magic is deception,
but it is a deception we enjoy.
To enjoy being deceived,
an audience must first
suspend its disbelief.
It was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
who first suggested this receptive state of mind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: I try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing
to produce for these shadows of the imagination
a willing suspension of disbelief
that, for a moment,
constitutes poetic faith.
MT: This faith in the fictional is essential
for any kind of theatrical experience.
Without it,
a script is just words.
Augmented reality
is just the latest technology.
And sleight of hand
is just an artful demonstration
of dexterity.
We are all very good at suspending our disbelief.
We do it every day,
while reading novels,
watching television
or going to the movies.
We willingly enter fictional worlds
where we cheer our heroes
and cry for friends we never had.
Without this ability
there is no magic.
It was Jean Robert-Houdin,
France's greatest illusionist,
who first recognized the role of the magician
as a storyteller.
He said something that I've posted on the wall of my studio.
Jean Robert-Houdin: A conjurer is not a juggler.
He is an actor playing the part of a magician.
MT: Which means magic is theater
and every trick
is a story.
The tricks of magic
follow the archetypes of narrative fiction.
There are tales of creation and loss,
death and resurrection,
and obstacles that must be overcome.
Now many of them are intensely dramatic.
Magicians play with fire and steel,
defy the fury of the buzzsaw,
dare to catch a bullet
or attempt a deadly escape.
But audiences don't come to see the magician die,
they come to see him live.
Because the best stories
always have a happy ending.
The tricks of magic have one special element.
They are stories with a twist.
Now Edward de Bono argued
that our brains are pattern matching machines.
He said that magicians deliberately exploit
the way their audiences think.
Edward de Bono: Stage magic relies almost wholly
on the momentum error.
The audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations
that are perfectly reasonable,
but do not, in fact, match
what is being done in front of them.
MT: In that respect,
magic tricks are like jokes.
Jokes lead us down a path
to an expected destination.
But when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips
into something entirely unexpected,
we laugh.
The same thing happens
when people watch magic tricks.
The finale
defies logic,
gives new insight into the problem,
and audiences express their amazement
with laughter.
It's fun to be fooled.
One of the key qualities of all stories
is that they're made to be shared.
We feel compelled to tell them.
When I do a trick at a party --
(Laughter)
that person will immediately pull their friend over
and ask me to do it again.
They want to share the experience.
That makes my job more difficult,
because, if I want to surprise them,
I need to tell a story that starts the same,
but ends differently --
a trick with a twist
on a twist.
It keeps me busy.
Now experts believe
that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained.
We think in narrative structures.
We connect events and emotions
and instinctively transform them
into a sequence that can be easily understood.
It's a uniquely human achievement.
We all want to share our stories,
whether it is the trick we saw at the party,
the bad day at the office
or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation.
Today, thanks to technology,
we can share those stories as never before,
by email, Facebook,
blogs, tweets,
on TED.com.
The tools of social networking,
these are the digital campfires
around which the audience gathers
to hear our story.
We turn facts into similes and metaphors,
and even fantasies.
We polish the rough edges of our lives
so that they feel whole.
Our stories make us the people we are
and, sometimes, the people we want to be.
They give us our identity
and a sense of community.
And if the story is a good one,
it might even make us smile.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)