Techniques

Close up magic relies mostly on sleight of hand (pronounced "slite"), in which skilful manipulation of cards, coins and other props enables an effect to be created. For example, the appearance that an item has vanished (or been produced) can be achieved by a sleight in which the item is held in such a way that it is not visible to the audience and the hand appears empty (eg. palming a coin or card). There is a wide range of basic sleights described in the literature for vanishing, producing, and switching small items. Magicians today seldom resort to hiding things up their sleeves, which has become a cliche, although this technique can still be used on occasion. Sleights require a good deal of practice to perform convincingly, and so many beginners are attracted to close up tricks based on hardware gimmicks. However, most shop-bought gimmicks are usually obvious to the audience for what they are, even if the exact mechanism is not understood. Professional magicians do use hardware gimmicks, but tend to base their acts on skill with sleight of hand as the main foundation. Many magicians see gimmicks and sleight of hand as a means to an ends, and most uses a combination of both. Stage magic tends to revolve around large props, which are almost always gimmicks in that some kind of secret mechanism is involved. The performer's skill is then largely in timing, patter, panache, comedy value, and related acting skills. Common stage props include cabinets capable of concealing an assistant; boxes into which items can be vanished, or from which they can be produced; rings which can be linked and unlinked; and swords, knives or even guns which help create illusions of deadly danger. One principle that underlies virtually all magic tricks is misdirection, which is the act of drawing the audience's attention to one location while, in another location, the magician performs a crucial manipulation undetected. For example, by drawing attention to one hand by snapping the fingers, tossing and catching a prop, or saying "watch this hand", the performer can force the audience to look, however briefly, in a certain direction, and use this as cover for what the other hand is doing. This is the basic idea of misdirection, although it can become very sophisticated and subtle for an advanced magician. These are based on the natural insticts of a human being, relating to psychology. Misdirection can also mean to re-direct or re-structure the spectator's perception of the action taking place. For example, telling a person to "look into the empty box" when really a secret compartment hides something. The word 'empty' is used to restructure their perception of the box. Another example is when placing something from one hand into another accompanied by the appropriate phrase and expression when really the item is not placed where it is said to go. Many different techniques are used to create misdirection, and all require great amounts of practice to perfect. One technique is the use of natural-looking and confident movements, to disguise any surreptitious manipulations. Making a hand with a palmed coin move and behave like an empty hand is an acting skill used to misdirect the audience in coin magic. Another technique is the use of a confident flow of chatter from the magician, known as "patter". Patter may take the form of a story, or it may simply be the magician (selectively) narrating the actions being performed. Either way, it directs the attention of the audience wherever the magician wishes. Another technique of misdirection is the use of optical illusions to hide or displace the location or size of objects. When the sides of a box are painted with concentric rectangles, or a hollow tabletop is beveled so that it is thicker in the center than at the edges, such containers appear to be much thinner than they actually are. These are often used in stage illusions, since they allow an assistant to hide in a space that appears to be too small to fit in, or to turn sideways and assume different positions in a box when there appears be too little room to move. Misdirection, along with theatrical acting abilities and also NLP can help to improve how the magic is perceive by the audience, although the method is mostly based on gimmicks and manual dexterity with sleight of hand. These elements show the difference between an expert magician and a begginer, even while they perform the same effect.

Sleight of Hand

Sleight-of-hand, also known as legerdemain, is the technique used by a magician (or card sharks) to manupilate small objects such as cards and coins secretly. Sleight of hand not a branch of magic, but rather, the means in which a magician uses to achieve various aims. They are often difficult, and takes months to accomplish with proficiency and years to master. Mostly, these techniques are used for close-up magic, although also used for stage magic and other areas of magic. These techniques can also be used to deceivingly to cheat in gambling games, to steal, or, in some cases, to claim supernatural powers. It is because of this that the word mostly associates negatively with deceit.

Misdirection

Misdirection is a form of deception, where one feints in a particular course, and then exploits the misled pursuer's mistake to escape, or remain undetected. The study of close-up magic is a wonderful introduction to misdirection. Without giving away any magic secrets, the limits of the human mind can be used to give the wrong picture and memory. The mind can only concentrate on one thing at a time. The magician uses this and the "victim's" picture of how the world is supposed to be, against him. Some of the results are most startling. A coin can actually be seen to dissolve in the air; and yet it was never there. The face of a card that was not seen is seen. Things can be torn that are not torn. An example of misdirection in magic might be as simple as a magician rolling up his sleeves and saying "nothing up my sleeve" and then 'magically' producing an object that in no conceivable way could have been 'up his sleeve'. The audience instinctively scrutinizes the magician's arms but ignores the location where the object-to-be-magically-produced is hidden. Memory can be manipulated in this way: an audience member may 'remember' a coin which -- lying on the magician's palm, first wobbles and then stands on edge -- as having floated into the air, or any other exaggeration which the mind may make while being misdirected. In such a way, a group of Jeeps with plywood coverings painted to resemble tanks may misdirect an enemy General into ignoring a fleet of trucks (which are actually tank transports disguised as grocery trucks etc.) and paying close scrutiny to the movement and activity of the fake tanks. The real tanks, suddenly disembarked on his flank may be remembered by the General as appearing 'out of thin air' as if by magic.

Optical Illusions

An optical illusion is any illusion that deceives the human visual system into perceiving something that is not present or incorrectly perceiving what is present. There are physiological illusions and cognitive illusions. Optical illusions can naturally happen by specific optical tricks that show particular assumptions in the human perceptual system. A mirage is a natural illusion that is an optical phenomenon. The variation in the apparent size of the Moon (smaller when overhead, larger when near the horizon) is another natural illusion; it is not an optical phenomenon, but rather a cognitive or perceptual illusion. Developed illusions include phenomena such as the Necker cube and the Scintillating/Hermann grid. They could also be called discovered illusions. Understanding these phenomena is useful in order to understand the limitations of the human visual system. Physiological illusions, such as the afterimages following bright lights or adapting stimuli of excessively longer alternating patterns (contingent perceptual aftereffect, CAE), are the effects on the eyes or brain of excessive stimulation of a specific type - brightness, tilt, colour, movement, and so on. The theory is that stimuli have individual dedicated neural paths in the visual outer wall of an organism for the early stages of visual processing; repetitive stimulation of only a few channels misleads the visual system. Cognitive illusions are more interesting and well-known. Instead of demonstrating a physiological base they interact with different levels of perceptual processing, in-built assumptions or 'knowledge' are misdirected. Cognitive illusions are commonly divided into ambiguous illusions, distorting illusions, paradox illusions, or fiction illusions. They often exploit the predictive hypotheses of early visual processing. Stereograms are based on a cognitive visual illusion. Ambiguous illusions are pictures or objects that offer significant changes in appearance. Perception will 'switch' between the alternates as they are considered in turn as available data does not confirm a single view. The Necker cube is a well known example, the motion parallax due to movement is being misinterpreted, even in the face of other sensory data. Distorting illusions are the most common, these illusions offer distortions of size, length, or curvature. They were simple to discover and are easily repeatable. Many are physiological illusions, such as the Cafe wall illusion which exploits the early visual system encoding for edges. Other distortions, such as converging line illusions, are more difficult to place as physiological or cognitive as the depth-cue challenges they offer are not easily placed. All pictures that have perspective cues are in effect illusions. Visual judgements as to size are controlled by perspective or other depth-cues and can easily be wrongly set. Paradox illusions offer objects that are paradoxical or impossible, such as the Penrose triangle or impossible staircases seen, for example, in the work of M. C. Escher. The triangle is an illusion dependent on a cognitive misunderstanding that adjacent edges must join. They occur as a byproduct of perceptual learning. Simultaneous Contrast Illusion. The grey bar is the same shade throughout. Enlarge Simultaneous Contrast Illusion. The grey bar is the same shade throughout. Fiction illusions are the perception of objects that are genuinely not there to all but a single observer, such as those induced by schizophrenia or hallucinogenic drugs.

  

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