I studied engineering in university. Software and Electronic to be exact.
This is not an uncommon story. Dai Vernon studied mechanical engineering, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin built automata, and Robert Harbin is the most well known of a long line of illusion designers working from mechanical know how. Even Jesus started out in carpentry¹.
And isn’t that kind of weird?
In any other performance art, the technical side is relegated to backstage. Set builders, lighting technicians, audio engineers. The actors, musicians, and dancers on stage very rarely entered the arts because they loved the working of curtain pulley systems, valve amplifier schematics or shoe construction.
The obvious reason for this is that magic most commonly instills in its audience a desire to know how it works, and wanting to know how things work is also a strong drive in engineering and science education.
But this has further implications, linking my previous post to the world of STEM education, elitism in academia, and Gamergate. Yes, Gamergate.
Buckle the fuck in. It’s going to get bumpy.
The Lovely Debbie McGee
I’ve written before about women finally being accepted into the Magic Circle, and how at the 25th anniversary of that, I got a chance to learn about one of the most fascinating aspects, several women all claimed to have been the first female member, because the Magic Circle intentionally put all their applications through simultaneously, in order to make sure no one was first.
The various claims to this title have different evidence backing them up, one has the lowest sequential ID number, a couple were members before they were legally women so technically got in first, but overall the one which most people seem to believe is the Debbie McGee’s claim to being the first. Her claim is backed by the fact that her husband was Paul Daniels and you wouldn’t want to upset Britain’s most famous magician would you? The man who basically put The Magic Circle on the map in the eyes of lay people²?
So anyway Paul is dead now, and Debbie has pretty much ceased to have anything to do with magic outside of guest appearances to talk about her husband, so lets upset some people. Let’s quote the man himself in his Daily Mail interview
There is a reason there are fewer female magicians – girls give up toys sooner than boys. Around the age of eight they want fashion items.
There are women who are starting to see it as a business, but they do tricks straight out of the box. Men are more creative.
-Paul Daniels, 2013
It’s tempting to just say, “fuck that guy” and point out the sheer number of men who perform tricks straight out of the box, when women often have to get creative to perform at all due to the vastly reduced pocket availability in women’s clothing, but I’m going to come at this from a different angle. Because I have also heard similar sentiments about the field I started my career in – science and engineering.
Girls Can’t Math
The idea that girls are bad at math seems to be nearly universal at this point, a false concept which exists entirely due to misogyny, and we know it isn’t true because year on year the results show that girls outperform boys in almost all school subjects³.
Often the reason for a huge gender imbalance in technical fields is explained using similar rhetoric. Girls just lack the aptitude, and as such they don’t pursue those fields. When it is shown that they are every bit good enough the reasoning switches to the stance that girls are perfectly capable of becoming scientists and engineers but they just don’t like it. They’d rather be nurses and ballet dancers.
To counter this, every year huge amounts of money are poured in to promoting STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) for women. I remember seeing an advert in which yoing women did chemistry with test tubes and things juxtaposed with lipsticks and other cosmetics, using the slogan “Science: It’s a girl thing”.
This commercial was produced by the European Comission, meaning there were 28 countries who backed this nonsense.
For many this was the straw that broke the camels back, and really got people to open up about the real problem, colloquially referred to as The Leaky Pipeline.
The Pipe Is Leaking
It’s often said that most horror movie plots can be summed up with the same basic sentence, such as “What if there was a video tape that killed you?” “What if there was a ghost in the pipes?” “What if there was a serial killer in your dreams?”⁴
But for many the real question, the heart of their darkest fears, was always “What if there was a woman?”
As such the presence of women is at all times questioned in male dominated fields. Women’s mistakes are highlighted as signs of deficiency, and their successes are relegated to the status of “Not bad for a girl.”
This starts in education and I myself saw how over the course of a 2 year A-level in Computing, the number of women slowly decreased until I was the only one left who didn’t change subjects⁵ before the final exams.
This was a microcosm of the leaky pipeline, an accidental system in which all the effort to get women into certain career paths is exerted in front loading people into the pipe which should lead to well paid industry careers, but they leak out along the way, due to the attitudes of everyone they have to work with on the eay through. Women progressing in STEM feel simultaneously alienated from other women due to their isolation and small numbers, and also from the men in their field who view them either as a hinderance to the team or potential romantic partners and little else.
No wonder they fuck off.
As a masters graudate in software engineering, I have to admit I participated in this leaky pipeline, though not in the way you might imagine. I never once asserted that I was better than other women for making it into the industry⁶, but I did fall into the trap of asserting that my field was better than others.
Underwater Basket Weaving
Stop me if you’ve heard this one:
What did the History of Art Graduate say to the Software Engineer?
Would you like fries with that?
-An ancient engineering joke
This kind of bullshit was a constant mantra in my university days. I had plenty of friends studying History and Literature and Media Studies and stuff, but deep down the thought was always there: What the fuck is that degree for? There are thousands of history graduates every year, do we need that many historians? Do people even read enough for all those literature graduates to spend their whole career writing books? As for media studies, we don’t need people to study media; We all watch it all the time. We know which movies are good and bad, why would you need a degree for that?
Indeed the mainstream press backed us up in this regard. Since people can choose the topic for their final dissertations, every year someone would choose a piece of popular media to dissect and so we get headlines like “Now you can get a PhD in Star Wars!” and “University offers Doctorate in Harry Potter!”
Stewart Lee summed this up best in an interview, in which he recollects Margaret Thatcher appearing in a TV news segement asking teenagers what they were studying in uni. One girl responds “Norse Mythology” and Thatcher responds, “Oh, what a luxury.”
Engineers, we surmise, invent things using principles discovered by scientists and methods calculated by mathematicians. STEM careers are moving the world forwards, that’s why we get paid the big bucks. But the so called Humanities… What are they even for? No one needs to hire a graduate in queer studies or philosophy or ancient languages. If you study shit like that you’re either so well connected that don’t need the education for a job at the end (“What a luxury!”) or your misguided desire for academia will land you in a skillless minimum wage role (“Do you want fries with that?”)
As a student I believed that, and so did millions of others just like me. Our minds were polluted to the point that we actually agreed with Margaret Fucking Thatcher⁷.
And.. this is about magicians, I swear it is, and we will get back to magic, but before we get there I need to take one more tangent because the entire point I’m making hinges on the supposed superiority of STEM careers over anything else, and the supposed superiority of men, and superiority leads to supremacy and for that I need to dip my toes in the bog of eternal stench.
Fake Gamer Girls
In 2013, Zöe Quinn released a videogame called Depression Quest. While the title may sound like a clever parody of the titles of 90s RPGs (and it is) don’t expect the chuckles you might get from West of Loathing or Secrets of Grindea⁸. Rather Depression Quest has a simple interface written in Twine to place you in the shoes of a person with depression to play through story options in dealing with that situation. Different choices can unlock the capability to deal with more complex problems, the solving of which will help witb the depression. Sort of like a skill tree or levelling up. Like Hey you got a cat. This adds extra responsibilities which take energy to fulfill but having a creature be dependent on you makes you feel like you’re achiving something every day it stays alive. Also it loves you. Did you know you were worthy of love? That kind of thing.
It got a nice write up on a couple of gaming websites so you might imagine things went pretty well for Zöe after that.
But you would be wrong.
You see, in the cess pit of capitalism, where everyone is desperately trying to claw their way to the top of the pile in order that their efforts can reach an audience and maybe earn them a fair wage for their labour, that kind of press coverage can make a person’s career. So, people asked, why was that golden opportunity being given to some random woman (Zöe uses they/them pronouns but was still directly affected by misogyny using these terms at the time) who wrote a boring⁹ game that wasn’t even fun⁹ in a basic game engine for babies⁹. That journalist could have spent the same time writing about a cool puzzle for big brain smart guys or a fast paced shooter for monster energy slurping expert gamers.
The answer they came up with (Zöe must have slept their way to the top) was pure misogyny and a made up rumour started by their ex-boyfriend, and co-opted by the alt-right to ultimately turn the trivial politics of “what if there was a woman… In videogames” into an issue that recruited thousands of teenagers into full on fascism. This was called Gamergate and for some was their first exposure to the true insidiousness of modern Nazi ideology, to the point where I myself and many others believed briefly that the entire american alt-right movement had been birthed fully formed from some dude’s callout post against his ex on 4chan.
But the question only existed in the first place because videogames, despite the demand to be taken seriously as an art form, were still recognised as a product of technical skill. Misogynists and right wing extremists may have aimed the gun, but STEM supremacists made the bullets.
The mantra of STEM is one of pure utility:
Skills → Product → Value
Which for games is:
Coding → Fun → Money
But Depression Quest was mostly praised for its good writing and themes, the underlying code was nothing special. It wasn’t fun on a kineasthetic or intellectual level, and it wasn’t even doing capitalsm right because it was free with an optional donation link.
To put it simply, Depression Quest… Was art. So called Gamers were demanding that games be considered an art form and as soon as someone made something which was more a work of art than a technology product they decried it as not a real game and set about trying to purge other would be artists from the industry.
Wait… That sounds familiar.
We Demand To Be Taken Seriously
In 2016 a bunch of magicians submitted a resolution to Congress requesting that magic be legally recognised as an art form.
This was Resolution 642 and is without a doubt the absolute pinnacle of cringe. The absolute lack of self awareness and not even the media literacy to recognise that 13 years earlier this exact concept had been the butt of a joke on the cutting edge sitcom Arrested Development.
Paul Daniels got to the heart of something really fundamental without even realising it. With a similar lack of self awareness to a man who says, “I know the female orgasm is a myth because my wife’s never had one.” he basically admitted that magic is an extension of playing with boys toys in the same way that engineering follows on from Meccano and bricklaying from Lego, whereas girls are steered into fashion and aesthetics. You know, artistic careers in the arts.
Because magic is, at its core, not an art form.
Magic can be art, just as videogames can be art (sorry Roger Ebert), and big budget action movies can be art (sorry Martin Scorcese) but in order to achieve that they have to move beyond the skill, product, value model.
Magic, in the eyes of the world, is valuable only as the kind of distractive escapist entertainment product which gets bums on seats for ticket money, or which can inoffensively entertain customers or guests as part of a hospitality event.
Art can make people cry. It can make people think. It can make people angry or scared or motivated to engage in local politics.
Magic is a slave to applause and gaping jaws. Confusing tricks are seen as insufficiently streamlined in the process of turning deception into astonishment.
Its funny that “astonishment” is a term popularised in modern conjuring parlance by Paul Harris, when the very books he named Art of Astonishment contain a great number of effects described simply as “A little piece of weird”. Things like the Dehydrated Deck, Strange-Os, and that fucked up thing with the orange, intended as offbeat moments with no built in applause queues or through line, over before they started and leaving audiences wondering what they just saw. There are magicians doing this kind of thing on stage, such as Rob Zabrecky and there are magicians trying to put emotion and politics into their work such as Teller & Penn respectively, but in order to make them palatable to an audience they must also pepper them with jokes and visual humour or the audience conditioned to expect certain things from magic would simply not turn up.
Magic without applause rejects its classification as a product in the same way as a game without fun, because the way I previously described magic as a weird side channel for uncharismatic youths to end up on stage is mirrored in these industries.
See the backlash about the Depression Quest article, and about modern media analysis in general, is that science fiction and videogames and dungeons & dragons and superheroes and all that supposed nerd culture, whilst appealing to STEM geeks, is written, published, and analysed by folks who spent time studying the arts. Once upon a time this was fine because no one thought Return of the Jedi or Wolfenstein or Prisoner of Azkaban were worthy of serious analysis, but since all these degrees in Star Wars and Harry Potter, there are serious academics pointing out that the battle on Endor is an analogue of the Vietnam War, casting America as the Evil Empire, and that the descriptions of house elves and goblins openly use the same pro-slavery and antisemitic symbolism and arguments as real world slavers and the Nazis.
Worse still it turns out that games where you indiscriminately shoot people and ogle scantily clad women might not actually be so great on a cultural level.
Nerds wanted their media to be respected as an art form, and somehow it got invaded by all these fucking arts graduates! To the geeky kids who grew up unpopular and mocked for their¹⁰ borderline autistic interest in science, computers, comics, fantasy novels, and terrible sci-fi, seeing all their interests become mainstream didn’t go as expected. By the late naughties videogames became a bigger industry than movies, movies got entirely consumed by big budget sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero franchises, science was suddenly sexy and everyone on Earth was using the internet 24/7. In this world you would think that the people who spent their lives totally engrossed by these things would become the new popular kids, and they would finally have their day. Except what actually happened was that the popular kids got into these things too, and the lives and fortunes of the unpopular kids barely changed at all, other than now having to occupy the same fandoms as attractive charismatic people.
And then they all became nazis¹¹.
Ethics in Magic
Paul Daniels identified in his aritcle that magic was a side channel for the unpopular kids who played with their toys alone and never grew up to somehow end up with careers in the performing arts, and magic is striving to be seen as an art form, just like ‘geek’ culture did, so when do we get our gamergate moment? When do women and minorities speak up about abuses in the industry, creating a backlash which-
Oh, there it is. Well that escalated quickly.
I’m sure that magicians, as an ethical collective¹², replied to this with compassion.
Oh actually a lot of them responded that people should toughen up and learn to take a joke. No really, it took me a while to find it but the comments on this personal account of one incident were echoed pretty much everywhere I saw things like this shared.
What I am suggesting is that the pushback against cultural critique of inappropriate material in magic acts and the fact that magic is limited to spectacle, applause, and laughter are in fact deeply intertwined.
Approval Needed
Applause is addictive. Many magicians have admitted to me that there is a sensation you get from the appreciation of a large crowd which cannot be obtained in any other way. It’s akin to the feeling of being loved, a mass parasocial oxytocin bomb for the brain which is like having your parents tell you they’re proud of you, except that there are hundreds or thousands of them, and they do it several times a night. I have felt a smidgen of it myself but I’m not exactly packing arena tours.
Now I’m not saying that this is true of magicians but no other kind of artist wants to be praised. We all want to be praised, thats just human. What I’m saying is that when people write a great novel about a subject matter that they deeply care about, or put their heart and soul into performing a piece of music or painting a mural that moves them deeply, being praised for it is secondary, and most would rather the work stood alone and was praised on it’s merit. This isn’t because they want a pat on the head for making it but because they wrenched a piece of themselves out and put it on display and when other people relate to it that appreciation becomes a shared kinship. It means the audience understands them and relates to their deepest emotional core.
Whereas magicians will tell other people’s jokes and perform other people’s tricks, purely because they want the laughter and applause that makes them feel good. The result of this is that if they have to denigrate an audience volunteer to get the laughter and applause, they’ll do it. Laughter is arguably easier than applause because it’s involuntary. Telling a joke is almost like a magic spell which can trick people into laughing at things which they would certainly not clap for.
This is not art, and suggesting that it is makes us look insane.
I Want less entertaining magic shows with fewer tricks made by people who are paid more to upset the audience and I’m not kidding.¹³
In my last post I said that the solution to all of this is to worsen the public perception of magicians (as if it could get any lower). Specifically I said that to stop magic from being packed with people trying to heal their internal trauma through the adulation of strangers, we need to promote magicians who are pitiable wretches.
This might not quite dovetail with the rest of this article initially because as I pointed out, magic already appeals to the inherently uncharismatic; technical types who want to gain the cultural cachet offered by the performing arts. Isn’t that aready pretty pitiable? Well, yes and no. It’s pitiable if you see that side of it, but most people only see the end product of a bullied kid who became a star of stage and screen.
The huge difference between magic and other performing arts is that in magic you get uncharismatic techically minded people who, at the absolute peak of their success, manage to present themselves as cool, suave, sophisticated and fashionable, whereas in drama well spoken interesting charismatic performers at their absolute peak of success will play absolute fucking monsters, disgusting charicatures of the worst human beings imaginable, and scruffy shambolic shagsacks¹⁴.
What if people leave magic shows not thinking “Wow. I wish I could do that,” and instead are left with the thought “What the fuck did I just watch?”
Of course there will always be dazzling amazement shows, in the same way that there will always be big budget blockbuster movies fronted by chiseled megastars, and there will always be big budget photoreal IP franchise videogames. But these spaces have room for the low budget alternative, experimental and personal shows on a small scale. Art pieces which barely make back their budget or fail entirely. Pieces which aren’t even expected to succeed, but are made because the people involve have a message they have to get out into the world, some piece of information that they can only express in their chosen medium.
When you ask magicians if their show is about something, the vast majority will say their show is about ‘impossiblity’ or ‘imagination’ or ‘perception’. You know, the things that magic is about. This is because most magic shows are actually about nothing. They are performed to show what the performer is capable of, and if the audience is entertained then the performer feels the sense of outside approval they desire. Because magic is the one art form that doesn’t really attract artists¹⁵.
We will never get away from this until magicians are willing to write shows which make the audience feel anything other than “Oooh”, “Ahhh”, “Awww”, and “Haha”.
But for that to be viable we need audiences to be willing to go to such shows and not feel compeltely ripped off when they leave a magic show feeling confused and uncomfortable.
But for that to happen we need them to be exposed to that kind of magic.
But for that to happen there has to be a venue for it.
But for that to happen there has to be an audience.
Uh oh. We’re caught in a loop.
¹ Can I get into a little conspiracy theory with you? In the bible “Carpenter” is a translation for the benefits of a culturally English audience. The original texts simply say Jesus was a maker, so he could have made anything. Most likely, given his location, he’d have worked clay instead of wood – and a strong foundation in pottery would have given him the requisite skills to invent something not entirely unlike a lota vase, foo can, or assassins teapot. You know, the kind of equipment you could use for a rudimentary water into wine effect.
² Arguably the thing that keeps The Magic Circle in the popular consciousness now is Penn & Teller’s friendly rivalry with it, and they aren’t even members, but I don’t want to relitigate that whole thing.
³ I would like to be able to give statistics for this but I don’t have access to them, Im purely going on UK news headlines, which also fail to take into account non-binary exam results, probably because the statistics do the same. How are we supposed to know anything when we aren’t even tracking all the numbers!?
⁴ The Ring, Dark Water and Nightmare on Elm Street. Thanks for playing.
⁵ My secret ingredient is Queerness. It’s worth noting also that I didn’t see the same reduction in mathematics students, presumably because maths is finally being seen as a universal skill, thank fuck.
⁶ Although I did flirt with a few colleagues in a way which I have since come to realise is absolutely cringe as fuck. God save me from my borderline autistic lack of self awareness.
⁷ Okay, I recognise that in these modern times the Overton Window has shifted to such a degree that Margaret Thatchers policies seem relatively tame compared to the kind of shit we’ve seen in the last 13 years of Conservative government, but between them Thatcher and Reagan essentially twisted the world economy to allow all of this to happen long after their reign. Thatcher’s impact in particular will never be forgotten for the absolute decimation of UK industry and refusal of sociap responsibility which led to the shambolic lack of infrastructure and welfare in this country.
⁸ Many people assume that satire or parody has to be funny, when in truth it merely holds a distorting mirror up to something in order to caricature its most grotesque elements. This can be played for laughs or it can be used to highlight injustice, or draw parallels between apparently dissimilar topics. Folks with basic media literacy understand this, but no one took media studies because its a useless degree, remember?
⁹ Its important to note that these are subjective terms. Slow paced text heavy games are only boring if you’re the kind of dull person who thinks reading is boring, Twine is easy to learn for beginners but is highly versatile and can be used in very complex ways when mastered, and games dont explicitly have to be fun.
Surely you’ve heard of Monopoly. Nobody enjoys that, its a meaner version of The Landlord Game, which arguably was the Depression Quest of its time.
¹⁰ Okay our. I was one of these kids, why try to deny it?
¹¹ Okay, not all of the awkawrd kids became nazis, but lots of them did because the ideology of fascism relies upon an imaginary golden age that people are trying to return to with an invading outgroup to hate, and not only was the “it was better before the girls and jocks arrived” narrative a perfect fit for that, but also most of them were pre-sold on the idea of revenge against said out-group by years of priming from media depicting them as the archetype of the plucky underdog. It does seem kind of weird that they would see themselves as a master race, and their attractive, charistmatic, and athletic nemeses as the degenerate underlcass, but the ideology of fascism has never made sense, and if you ever start to think it does, you may have to do some serious soul searching to avoid slipping down the rabbit hole yourself.
¹² “All done by kindness” as David Devant once said… although he did also traumatise children by making them drop eggs on stage, a routine which inspired a short film starring Ian McKellen. Seriously though, some people have put a lot of research into creating rules of ethics for magicians. Sure the rules are all about protecting magic as an artform from new outsiders who don’t get the culture and might want to become famous without putting in the work, but that’s more important than not abusing your audience or cultural appopriation or misogyny or boring stuff like that, right? Right?
¹³ “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding” is a statement about crunch in videogames, but it has come to represent a wider argument about the fact that modern high budget video games packed with hours of repetitive but high fidelity gameplay, created by armies of underpaid developers and artists with zero job security in order to bolster shareholder value whereas all the interesting things being done in games are often the result of small teams working on passion projects while barely staying afloat.
¹⁴ Yes I’m talking about Gary Oldman in Dracula, The Fifth Element and Slow Horses respectively, but you’d be forgiven forthinking I was talking about any other actor, Richard E Grant also came to mind even as I was writing it.
¹⁵ Okay technically many people in the arts have had an interest in magic, but for the most part it is a side interest at best incorporated into performances of their true calling, be that acting, musical theatre or comedy. Famous magicians you may have heard of include Niel Patrick Harris, Daniel Radcliffe, Hugh Laurie and Steve Martin. “But those guys aren’t magicians!” You cry, and you’re correct, because no matter how good they were at magic, they were artists and as such saw zero appeal in becoming known as magicians. Ricky Jay once said “Magic is a powerful art which can support a poor performer”. But Ricky Jay also said “The pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art.” Suggesting that doing magic bad is what makes a bad magician, whereas some of the worst magic shows I’ve seen are ones where he magicians were absolute experts in their field and nothing else. Fay Presto once told me that she became a magician because she couldn’t act, dance or sing.