Spirit slates are a very old magician’s tool. I say that, they’re sort of a mentalists tool really. Or arguably they’re a tool used by fake mediums… which is to say they’re a tool used by mediums. In short it’s a pair of framed blackboards (slates) which are shown blank and placed together, with a piece of chalk is sandwiched in the gap between formed by the depth of the frame itself. These are then held or bound in place and after a little theatrics, the slates are opened up again and the chalk has written the answer to the medium’s or the mentalist’s or the magician’s questions on the boards.
They are a classic of magic. And now they’re back! in pog form!
Don’t make me say Organic
I feel like I must have spoken before about my hatred of the way magicians use the word Organic, but since I can’t find a post to reference let me just summarise.
I hate the way magicians use the word Organic.
Organic magic seemed to be all the rage when I first got onto the scene, conveying the idea that magic tricks should look like every day objects rather than specialist props. There’s a logical reason for this and a cynical reason for this. The logical reason is that a regular object will attract far less scrutiny from a spectator. The cynical reason for this is that if you build an illusion mechanism into an empty gum packet, the bill of materials is an empty gum packet. It is for this latter reason that I started calling organic magic garbage magic, because it’s usually (but not always) made from trash.
The other reason I hate it is that you end up having to carry around a bottle cap or some shit that cost £40 and can’t be handled by a spectator.
So, imagine my joy¹ a couple of weeks ago when I saw a trailer on youtube for a magic trick called Organic Spirit Slates.
And I get it. I really do.
Chalk boards are approaching cultural irrelevance, they’re bulky to carry around, they’re messy, you need something new. I don’t know the creative process of Juan Capilla and Julio Montoro but I’d imagine they saw some of these key rings and thought, hey you could use those like spirit slates.
Only one problem, and you can sort of see it on the trailer. The smallest spirit slates you can buy are about 4″ by 3″, or roughly 10cm by 7.5cm plus a frame; a little larger than a playing card. Organic spirit slates have a writing surface which is a little less than 4cm by 2cm, roughly half of your little finger. As the trailer shows, using a dry wipe marker, you’d expect to get about 3 legible characters per slate.
If only someone had thought about this and made a versions which was lar-
The Second Mouse Gets tThe Cheese
Having written off this entire concept as unworkable I was having my usual scroll of youtube, where I follow all the magic retailers’ channels I can, keeping me abreast of the latest dreck when I had a brief taster of what alzheimer’s must feel like. I was actually quite surprised when I saw Spirit Nametag and found myself thinking wait, I saw those before but they were smaller. Did I misremember them? Have I entered the Berenstein Bears universe²?
No, this was in fact a wholly different project in which someone replicated the spirit slates by using a dry wipe surface on a small glossy keyring tag. Just not quite as small. The only problem is that while I 100% recognise the Organic Spirit Slates as a kind of keyring I’ve seen before… those Spirit Nametags look kinda sus. Never seen anything like that before. Maybe they’re more of a thing in Europe, I don’t know.
The thing is though, I don’t know the creative process of Axel Vergnaud and TCC Magic but I’d imagine they saw Organic Spirit Slates and thought, hey those would work better if they were a bit bigger, lets do that.
Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe spirit slates are in the air at this time of year. The spooky month of May.
The Problem
Either way, for whatever reason, there are now two sets of pocket sized dry-wipe spirit slates on the market and this situation is, in short, bullshit. Bullshit because both of these products seem to have forgotten the #1 thing that made spirit slates a good idea in the first place: You put the chalk between the slates. Spirit slates aren’t meant to just be an appearing message. The idea was that the chalk spookily drew its own message on the surface while isolated. Without that, a huge part of what made the spirit slates a great tool is gone.
It just doesn’t make sense that a passing ghost has a sharpie to turn this
Into this
But there is a solution, which I haven’t seen anyone else suggest. If you want to evoke the idea of a spirit reaching in to manipulate it, what makes more sense than letters appearing is motion of ink that’s already present.
And I dont mean writing one word and getting another back, that’s more like just wiping it out and writing something new, or if you want to really stretch the premise, the core conceit of the 90s PBS kids show Ghostwriter³.
I mean something like giving it a blob of ink:
Which a spirit can smear around:
This will require some artistry and probably a very fine tipped dry wipe marker to pull off well. The kind of pens which would have been used on overhead projector sheets (Remember those, 80s kids?).
If you don’t have that kind of skill or time to setup theres another solution and all it needs is a dried up felt tip pen.
You openly fill in the slate with a dry wipe marker:
And then the slate you reveal has had the information wiped out:
Come to think of it, this technique would work well on any spirit slates, with eerie finger marks wiping letters in the laid out chalk.
But I don’t use spirit slates. Don’t like em. Don’t get me wrong, I like the effect, but the use of two slates never appealed to me. I usually only want to reveal one thing at a time, and I know there wre methods for using a single slate but they’re so annoying and unwieldy. When I want to do a spirit slates effect, I use a locking miracle card case and a paper and pencil. After closing the case I snap the lead off the end of the pencil and toss it inside as an afterthought.
Lovely effect and after the fact they can keep the paper. If you’re smart, they can even sign it on the back before the reveal.
So it turns out all these attempts to make walkaround pocket sized spirit slates were pointless, because a better solution has been around for decades.
I know what you’re probably thinking and I reject that outright. Do not make me use the phrase “Every Day Carry”.
¹ until the unicode consortium figures out a way to encapsulate tone indicators into online text, I am forced to add a footnote explaining the sense of despair and revulsion which throbbed through my whole body, starting at the eyeballs, as they passed over the words “Organic Spirit Slates”
² The Mandela Effect is named after the surprising number of people who thought Nelson Mandela died in prison and so news of his release amazed them so much that the only explanation that came to mind is that they weren’t wrong, rather they had somehow tunnelled into a parallel universe where world historical events had played out differently. This effect has also been used to explain false memories of the Berenstein Bears books, which were actually called the Berenstain Bears, and the movie Shazam starring Shaquille O’Neal, which was actually called Kazam. It evokes a feeling of your brain suddenly kicking out of gear as reality changes around it, like the feeling when you check a footnote about the Berenstein Bears and it reads like a footnote about The Mandela Effect.
³ Ghostwriter was a semi-educational childrens drama in which the main cast had befriended a ghost with the singular ability to move letters of the alphabet around, be that on a screen, a page, or a bowl of alphabetti spaghetti. There’s probably a great magic trick in there but it wouldn’t play well on a 1cm tall writing surface.