Interview Series on Magic & Misdirection
This interview series is the product of a collaborative effort between Anthony Barnhart (http://anthonybarnhart.com/), Sarah Tuchel, Gustav Kuhn (https://www.magicresearchlab.com/), and Daniel Simons (http://dansimons.com/).
Magicians are a rich source of insights about psychology, particularly in the areas of attention and awareness. However, much information is passed on informally between magicians rather than being documented formally in writing. In order to try to capture some of this socially-disseminated information, we carried out a series of interviews with acclaimed, expert magicians who think deeply about the techniques and meaning of their magic. We hope that these interviews will provide a source of new, testable hypotheses beyond those found in the magic theory literature.
The first qualitative analysis from these interviews was presented at the 2023 joint workshop of the British Society of Aesthetics and the Science of Magic Association. A version of that presentation can be viewed at https://youtu.be/-XrKE0X_xwY.