I am still pondering all the things the illusionist Prakash Puru said at the Rubin Museum event yesterday. One thing in particular continues to roll around in my mind.<\/p>\n
It was a quote from Teller (of Penn and Teller), a definition of magic as: \u201cThe theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that \u2013 in our hearts \u2013 ought to.\u201d<\/p>\n
To me this thought speaks to the heart of all fictional narrative. We know that Lizzy and Mr. Darcy are just words on a page, that the guy playing Hamlet up on the stage is just an actor in a costume, that Humphrey Bogart isn’t really Rick Blaine.<\/p>\n
Miraculously, it doesn’t matter. Because these characters and the narratives containing them are beautifully constructed, we feel that they ought<\/i> to exist. In our heart of hearts, they are real to us.<\/p>\n
I think narrative Virtual Reality will need to find its own version of that magic. It is not yet clear to me what that will be.<\/p>\n
I do know that even VR pieces that I really love do not have that effect on me. Dear Angelica<\/i>, Pearl<\/i>, Giant<\/i>, all of the other wonderful and award winning VR pieces, they are all great. But they don’t move me in the way that I am moved when Rick and Ilsa rekindle their love, or when Hamlet dies.<\/p>\n
I am not convinced that this deficiency is intrinsic to the medium of VR. I think, rather, that we have not yet figured out how to use this medium to create magic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am still pondering all the things the illusionist Prakash Puru said at the Rubin Museum event yesterday. One thing in particular continues to roll around in my mind. It was a quote from Teller (of Penn and Teller), a definition of magic as: \u201cThe theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has … Continue reading “A definition of magic”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18546,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18545\/revisions\/18546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}