Download or read book The Art of Magic written by Thomas Nelson Downs and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Artist and a Magician written by Hugh Fleetwood and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Black comedy at its most lurid, refined, and raffish... Wilbur George has made court-jester parasitism into an art form: four creepy but wealthy fellow expatriates (who hate each other) contribute to the upkeep of his Roman villa and matchless dinner parties. And when ancient, horrid Pam decides to stop contributing, she dies - moments after taking tea with Wilbur... the three surviving patrons congratulate him on a good clean kill, praise which vain Wilbur can't quite bring himself to deny...' Kirkus Reviews 'It is Hugh Fleetwood's great ability as a novelist to analyse the world of the rich, to test it with violence and to subtly probe its corruption.' Peter Ackroyd, Spectator 'Artistically successful and enthralling... It shimmers for a long time in the memory's eye.' Glasgow Herald 'Extremely readable and suitably chilling.' Jeremy Lewis, Times
Download or read book Industrial Light and Magic written by Thomas Graham Smith and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 1986 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A behind-the-scenes look at the world of special effects discusses a wide range of ingenious techniques--from computer graphics and optical compositing to matte printing and model construction--used in such films as "Star Wars," "Poltergeist," and "Raider
Download or read book The Magic Rainbow written by Juan Tamariz and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Magic written by Jamie Sutcliffe and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first accessible reader on magic’s generative relationship with contemporary art practice. From the hexing of presidents to a renewed interest in herbalism and atavistic forms of self-care, magic has furnished the contemporary imagination with mysterious and often disorienting bodies of arcane thought and practice. This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians, and theorists that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary art’s varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic. Dispensing with simple narratives of reenchantment, Magic illustrates the intricate ways in which we have to some extent always been captivated by the allure of the numinous. It demonstrates how magical culture’s tendencies toward secrecy, occlusion, and encryption might provide contemporary artists with strategies of remedial communality, a renewed faith in the invocational power of personal testimony, and a poetics of practice that could boldly question our political circumstances, from the crisis of climate collapse to the strictures of socially sanctioned techniques of medical and psychiatric care. Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a “magical-critical” thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present.
Download or read book Magic and Loss written by Virginia Heffernan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A digital-culture expert who writes for The New York Times Magazine discusses the logic, aesthetics, cultural potential and societal impact of the Internet, a medium that favors speed, accuracy, wit, prolificacy and versatility."
Download or read book Magic and Showmanship written by Henning Nelms and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highly instructive book by a noted authority on the subject analyzes every phase of conjuring, from sleights, devices, misdirection, and controlling audience attention to incorporating patter and the effective use of assistants.
Download or read book Legend Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist written by Ernst Kris and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1979-01-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the first English translation of a brief, scholarly, and brilliantly original work which sets out to examine the links between the legend of the artist, in all cultures, and what E.H. Gombrich, in an introductory essay, calls 'certain invariant traits of the human psyche.'"--Denis Thomas, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts "This book gathers together various legends and attitudes about artists, ancient and modern, East and West, and gives fascinating insights into attitudes toward artistic creation. It impinges on psychology, art history and history, aesthetics, biography, myth and magic, and will be of great interest to a wide audience in many fields.... A delightful and unrivalled study."--Howard Hibbard "Thought provoking and valuable.... To all those interested in psychiatry and art from the perspectives of history, criticism, or therapy and to the wide audience concerned with the psychology of aesthetics and of artistic creation."--Albert Rothenberg, American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book Transformations written by Lawrence Hass and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Secret History of Magic written by Peter Lamont and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pull back the curtain on the real history of magic – and discover why magic really matters If you read a standard history of magic, you learn that it begins in ancient Egypt, with the resurrection of a goose in front of the Pharaoh. You discover how magicians were tortured and killed during the age of witchcraft. You are told how conjuring tricks were used to quell rebellious colonial natives. The history of magic is full of such stories, which turn out not to be true. Behind the smoke and mirrors, however, lies the real story of magic. It is a history of people from humble roots, who made and lost fortunes, and who deceived kings and queens. In order to survive, they concealed many secrets, yet they revealed some and they stole others. They engaged in deception, exposure, and betrayal, in a quest to make the impossible happen. They managed to survive in a world in which a series of technological wonders appeared, which previous generations would have considered magical. Even today, when we now take the most sophisticated technology for granted, we can still be astonished by tricks that were performed hundreds of years ago. The Secret History of Magic reveals how this was done. It is about why magic matters in a world that no longer seems to have a place for it, but which desperately needs a sense of wonder.
Download or read book Experiencing the Impossible written by Gustav Kuhn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the scientific study of magic reveals intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the mysteries of the human mind. What do we see when we watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or read a person's mind? We are captivated by an illusion; we applaud the fact that we have been fooled. Why do we enjoy experiencing what seems clearly impossible, or at least beyond our powers of explanation? In Experiencing the Impossible, Gustav Kuhn examines the psychological processes that underpin our experience of magic. Kuhn, a psychologist and a magician, reveals the intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the human mind that the scientific study of magic provides.Magic, Kuhn explains, creates a cognitive conflict between what we believe to be true (for example, a rabbit could not be in that hat) and what we experience (a rabbit has just come out of that hat!). Drawing on the latest psychological, neurological, and philosophical research, he suggests that misdirection is at the heart of all magic tricks, and he offers a scientific theory of misdirection. He explores, among other topics, our propensity for magical thinking, the malleability of our perceptual experiences, forgetting and misremembering, free will and mind control, and how magic is applied outside entertaiment—the use of illusion in human-computer interaction, politics, warfare, and elsewhere. We may be surprised to learn how little of the world we actually perceive, how little we can trust what we see and remember, and how little we are in charge of our thoughts and actions. Exploring magic, Kuhn illuminates the complex—and almost magical—mechanisms underlying our daily activities.
Download or read book Illusions The Art of Magic written by Christian Vachon and published by 5Continents. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2015 the McCord Museum in Montreal, Canada, was gifted with the Allan Slaight Collection, one of the largest treasuries of posters and documents on magic in the world. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Illusions. The Art of Magic at the McCord Museum, this volume presents 250 exceptional posters from this collection, dating from the 1880s to the 1940s. During this period, known as the Golden Age of Magic, droves of traveling magicians and prestidigitators fought a veritable advertising war. All over the United States and Europe, city walls and billboards were plastered with posters offering tantalizing previews of their most spectacular tricks, giving poster designers and printers of the era a golden opportunity to flex their imaginations and load their work with devils and demons, skeletons and skulls, bodies and decapitated heads, playing-cards and rabbits, alluring assistants, phantasmagoria and esoteric symbols. Seven authors recognized as experts in their respective fields introduce this dazzling array of color and fantastic imagery, providing insights to explain the full historic, social and artistic value of these magnificent posters.
Download or read book Our Magic written by Nevil Maskelyne and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-08-05 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books like this contain what may be called the raw material of the art, the processes which the magician can employ at will in building up his larger experiments in magic, each of which should be a complete play in itself. Then, when the student has found out how tricks can be done, he would do well to turn his attention to Our Magic, by Mr. Maskelyne and his associate, Mr. David Devant. And from this logical treatise he can learn how experiments in magic ought to be composed. It is from this admirable discussion of the basic principles of modern magic that more than one of the points made in this paper have been borrowed. Mr. Devant calls attention to the fact that new tricks are common, new manipulative devices, new examples of dexterity and new applications of science, whereas new plots, new ideas for effective presentation, are rare. He describes a series of experiments of his own, some of which utilize again but in a novel manner devices long familiar, while others are new both in idea and in many of the subsidiary methods of execution. One of the most hackneyed and yet one of the most effective illusions in the repertory of the conjurer is that known as the Rising Cards. The performer brings forward a pack of cards, several of which are drawn by members of the audience and returned to the pack, whereupon at the command of the magician they rise out of the pack one after the other in the order in which they were drawn. In the oldest form in which this illusion is described in the books on the art, the pack is placed in a case supported by a rod standing on a base, and the secret of the trick lies on this rod and its base. The rod is really a hollow tube and the base is really an empty box. The tube is filled with sand, on the top of which rests a leaden weight, to which is attached a thread so arranged over and under certain cards as to cause the chosen cards to rise when it descends down the tube; and in putting the cards into the case the conjurer released a valve at the bottom of the tube, so that the sand might escape into the box, whereby the weight was lowered, the thread then doing its allotted work, and the cards ascending into view, no matter how far distant the performer might then be standing. It seems likely that the invention of this primitive apparatus may have been due to the fact that some eighteenth century conjurer happened to observe the sand running out of an hour-glass and set about to find some means whereby this escape of sand could be utilized in his art. The hollow rod, the escaping sand, and the descending weight have long since been discarded; but the illusion of the Rising Cards survives and is now performed in an unending variety of ways. The pack may be held in the hand of the performer, without the use of any case, or it may be placed in a glass goblet, or it may be tied together with a ribbon and thus suspended from cords that swing to and from almost over the heads of the spectators; and however they may be isolated the chosen cards rise obediently when they are bidden. The original effect subsists, even though the devices differ.... The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life, Volume 40
Download or read book How Magicians Think written by Joshua Jay and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professional magician Joshua Jay's (author of Magic: The Complete Course) brief and fascinating essays offer an inside look at how the very best magicians think about magic, how they practice and put together a show, what inspires them, and the psychology behind creating wonder and being tricked when we expect both, as well as why we seek magic in the first place.
Download or read book Myth Magic written by John Howe and published by HarperCollins (UK). This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time ever, a portfolio of illustrated work from the award-winning artist, John Howe, which reveals the breathtaking vision of one of the foremost fantasy artists in the world. Myth and Magic is arranged into six sections, which looks at the books by J.R.R. Tolkien that have inspired John, as well as a fascinating tour through the paintings that he has produced for some of the finest fantasy authors working today. From the beloved painting of Smaug which decorates The Hobbit, his numerous and bestselling calendar illustrations, the world famous "Gandalf" picture, which is synonymous with the HarperCollins one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, this large-format hardback will delight fans of Tolkien, and anyone who has been captured by the imagination of the artist who so brilliantly brings to life the literary vision of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Download or read book Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts written by Vaughan Hart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-03-11 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning from the inauguration of James I in 1603 to the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Stuart court saw the emergence of a full expression of Renaissance culture in Britain. Hart examines the influence of magic on Renaissance art and how in its role as an element of royal propaganda, art was used to represent the power of the monarch and reflect his apparent command over the hidden forces of nature. Court artists sought to represent magic as an expression of the Stuart Kings' divine right, and later of their policy of Absolutism, through masques, sermons, heraldry, gardens, architecture and processions. As such, magic of the kind enshrined in Neoplatonic philosophy and the court art which expressed its cosmology, played their part in the complex causes of the Civil War and the destruction of the Stuart image which followed in its wake.
Download or read book The Fine Art of Magic written by George Gilbert Kaplan and published by . This book was released on 1948-01-01 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
