The Tricks of Art and the Art of Tricks

escape-body-blow3

In June this year a helicopter carrying four passengers crashed in forest in Far North Queensland.  A photo of the crash site with the caption “Escape from Disaster” was featured on the front page of the Brisbane “Courier Mail”.  All well and good.  But below this photo (which had a brief description of the miraculous survival of all four passengers) was the headline “BODY BLOW  - Transplant patients miss out on organs”

Now, perhaps it’s just me but this particular front page, at first glance, seemed a trifle … wrong.  You see the story it seemed to convey was of eager transplant patients lusting after the organs of victims of a helicopter crash only to have their hopes dashed when it was revealed that no one had actually died.

That kind of interpretation would, in fact, be typical of the writing in the Courier Mail. Anyway, check out the PDF and see what you think.  Am I way off target here?

I recently travelled to Brisvegas to visit my son, chill out, visit the art gallery and interview an architect on my project about the impact of air-conditioning on the design of the North Queensland house.  This is not to imply that there is only one “house”.  It is not like the stickers I used to to see on the back of Jeeps - “There is only one Jeep”.  What a lie!  I saw dozens of them.  Misleading advertising I call it.

No, in referring to ‘the North Queensland house’, I mean the typical North Queensland house.  This used to be a house built of timber with a corrugated iron roof, on stilts and with a verandah on most sides.  You can see one version of it here: http://www.upfromaustralia.com/typqueenhous.html

That’s the way houses in North Queensland used to be built. Now, the typical house is built of concrete block, rendered on the outside and lined on the inside with plasterboard.  Roofs are typically corrugated zinc-plated steel - “Zincalume”.   Tiled roofs are not uncommon despite the generally held view that tiled roofs do not stand up well to the strong winds of the cyclones that often occur in the summer months.

Why the change?  My research so far does not suggest that the availability of air-conditioning was the reason.  Other factors were at work: the ready availability of concrete blocks at a reasonable price and the simplicity of this form of construction combined to make concrete block houses competitively priced in relation to wooden houses.  Maybe the “new” look of block houses and their monolithic nature suggested to Northerners more permanence.  Perhaps it was thought such houses would be resistant to two of the scourges of the North - white ants and cyclones.  In fact, any wood (and there is a lot) in concrete block homes is just as exposed to white ant damage as the timber of a wooden house.  And it is much harder to detect white ant intrusions in a concrete block house than it is in the old-style wooden house on stilts where ant trails over the metal stump caps are more easily observable.  As for cyclones, there is no reason why a wooden house cannot be constructed to be cyclone resistant.

I need to do a lot more work but at least I can see a way forward.

I have noticed a bit of air play given to magic lately.  The first item I found was a paper published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience - Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research (http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nrn2473.html).  The article was written up in various electronic print media (is that an oxymoron?) including the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12magic.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=190e4385d2978d97&ex=1219204800&emc=eta1&oref=slogin)

According to the paper, magicians often have a “deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness.”  Neuroscientists can learn from magicians some “powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness”. They could use these methods in the laboratory to study “the behavioural and neural basis of consciousness itself, for instance through the use of brain imaging and other neural recording techniques.”

One reference in the paper is to Prof Richard Wiseman’s “amazing colour changing card trick” which is on You Tube and also on his website http://www.quirkology.com/UK/index.shtml.  It is given as an example of change blindness.  This is different from inattentional blindness, an example of which is the experiment where people are asked to pay attention to something (people in white shirts passing a basketball) they may miss something. One version of the test is here  viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html.

Magicians would call both these things “misdirection” There is a lot more information in the paper and, if you are interested in making magic, it is worth reading.

This set me off onto searches to do with the mind and magic.  I came up with this site that had a video of “Brain Magic”: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/keith_barry_does_brain_magic.html.  This is a talk from TED.com - standing for Technology, Entertainment, Design, a site which looks good but which I had never heard of before. It dates from 2004 but was posted in July 2008.

This is a good talk with some demonstrations of “brain magic”. I understand the very first trick and there is a spoiler explanation on TED about how to do the bottle trick.  There is a method for the cup and spike trick although I don’t know it.  I do know, however, that it is dangerous and can go wrong.  But I am clueless about the blindfold driving the remote touching and the other hypnosis-type effects.  It’s well worth a look.

When I followed up on this topic of mond and magic, I found The Magic of Conciousness Symposium held by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and the Mind Science Foundation in Las Vegas in 2007.  There are some great videos of demonstrations by outstanding conjurers.  You can see them and download them from this site: http://www.neuralcorrelate.com/smc_lab/.  I especially like the pickpocket sleight of hand of Apollo Robbins and the style of James Randi.

Avid followers of the media may vaguely recall that a baby humpback whale was killed by veterinarians at Pittwater, Sydney last month. It was said the whale had been abandoned by its mother and was starving.

A legitimate query at the time was: Why didn’t they ask the Japanese who have expertise in these things?  Now that the blood has cleared from the water and the poor whale calf has, presumably, been autopsied, dissected and turned into cat food, it is time to ask again:  Why were not urgent telegrams despatched to the Institute of Cetacean Research in Japan?

Anyone with a passing interest in the activities of the International Whaling Commission would be aware that the ICR is THE premier whale research organisation in the world.  Surely they could have helped.  First, all their scientific research should have given some clue as to how to save the poor little thing.  Second, if all else failed (as it did) then they could have harpooned the sucker.

Instead we were left with the unedifying spectacle of an Australian vet harpooning a baby whale with a syringe. That is not the Australian way. We might well ask, have we lost all sense of dignity and fair play?

My friend Ray told me he had heard of people being hypnotised by reading  texts written in online chat rooms.  I think this is what he was referring to.  I told him I did not think this could happen.

However, I have had cause to reconsider having read http://www.ladyjulia.net/0057.html.  The post dated  16 August 2005 entitled Can someone really be hypnotized by text only? convinced me it is feasible.  So I will have to tell Ray to knock off reading those texts.

I am often sucked in by texts when reading fiction so I  develop affinity with the character/s in the novel and I suppose this is  a form of trance. In that sense I have been hypnotised into believing the premise of the story and reacting accordingly.

Nevertheless, I do not think I have performed any actions (such as, barking like a dog; walking around like a chicken; and the like) such as might be the province of the stage hypnotist.  Only booze, and lots of it, can produce that effect, I am proud to say.

And this is what Ray was really asking about: can you, by reading text, be hypnotised  into performing some action such as paying someone a lot of money on paypal or sending out your bank account details.  I said I did not think so: that is actually just internet fraud, not hypnosis.  Maybe I’m wrong to make this distinction.  Maybe I was hypnotised by http://www.ladyjulia.net/0057.html.

This is the subject of my newly-started honours thesis.  I attended a weekend workshop on research methodology and now am into the actual research stage, identifying the literature so I can review it.

Should be fun.  So far I have not found a lot of books/papers about this.  It is an architecture-centred topic but it will contribute to a project for the Q150 celebrations in 2009 marking 150 years since Queensland was founded.  There will be an exhibition in the Pinnacle Gallery in Thuringowa (Townsville).

Ages ago I wrote a post about this illusion “Post Mentalism” by Alvo Stockman.  I said I was going to try it out.  I did that and it worked a treat!  I predicted the result of a weekend football game.  I went to my friend’s house, wrote the prediction out on a piece of paper.  Sealed it in an envelope in his presence; Drove him to a post office and had him put it in the post box.  Then, when the post arrived (on Tuesday, the mail is so slow here) he rang saying “How the f##k did you do that??”  I had predicted the exact score and I got to laugh a lot and it was great!

I thought I would eschew the use of exclamation marks!! And don’t you think I have been using too many question marks lately?? I know I find it annoying! Don’t you?

Of course, there is a point to punctuation. There are books written about it. I haven’t read them. It shows, I suppose.
Sometimes, it is said, with regard to punctuation and other things, less is more. I, personally, don’t buy it. Less is less and more is more, as far as I am concerned. I think the less-is-more brigade mean that less is best.

Either that or it is some salesman’s trick: “If you want this car with front and rear seats, climate control air-conditioning, six-stacker CD player, sat-nav, sixteen cup-holders, angora-like carpets, silk-touch safety belts, ivory-look steering wheel, silver-plated spark plugs, inbuilt vacuum cleaner, etc etc it will only cost you $39,999 drive away no more to pay. BUT, if you would like our sports model which has no frills but the engine makes a lot of noise so it sounds like you are going fast…then you will pay $69,999!” In that case, I agree, less is more.

Which leads me to “The Einstein Factor”. I was watching this on TV the other night(http://www.abc.net.au/ einsteinfactor/). I think quiz contestants have a lot to answer for. I notice that none of the contestants on “The Einstein Factor” has chosen “global warming” as their specialty. Oh! I forgot: we’re not allowed to say “global warming” any more since, apparently, if we say “global warming” too many times it might lead to another ice age. We now speak of “climate change” or better still “anthropogenic climate change”. Which leads me to a stunned silence.

I suppose the risk is that the adjudicators on the aforementioned show would start an all-in brawl about the questions, let along the answers. For example:

Question - If all the car-makers are putting “climate control ” air conditioning in cars these days why can’t we control the climate?

Is the answer: A. We can, but it only works in developed countries.

B. We can, but it is just too hard to get everyone to choose the same setting; or

C. We can’t, because you have to wind the windows down for it to work and no one is prepared to do that.

Cartoon “Martin Ferguson prods OPEC on oil prices” by Nicholson from “The Australian” newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

Nicholson is the excellent cartoonist in “The Australian”:www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

This cartoon features Australia’s very own Minister for Resources and Energy and Minister for Tourism. The text is informed by Mr Nicholson’s careful observation of The Honourable Minister’s idiolect and manner of pronunciation of, what many quaintly refer to as, “the English language”.

Incidentally, when we arty types want to sound smart, we use the expression “informed by” at every available opportunity - I recommend you do too. Just throw in the occasional “informed by” whenever you can: people will think you are so well educated and knowledgeable. For example, when you see a film about robots, or any other film starring Arnie, you can sniff and say “the work is informed by post-modern notions of intertextuality, self-referentiality, parody, pastiche, and a frequent recourse to various past forms, genres, and styles etc” (see http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/ Postmodernism-POSTMODERNISM-AND-FILM.html)

If you do this, you have no idea how this will change peoples opinion of you.

I painted the above picture while attending classes with a Kuranda artist, Claire Souter. The subject is a beach in South Australia. It was painted as an exercise in painting waves and stuff like that.

This picture is of Busselton Jetty. It is said to be the longest wooden jetty in the Southern Hemisphere. It certainly seemed very long when I walked out on it. I painted it for a friend for her office.

I just discovered how to put images in a post. So I did. These are some of my few pictures that don’t make me puke when I look at them. I also hope you don’t puke.