SoMA Summer Newsletter 2023
Hello from SoMA!
Hope everyone's summers are progressing as excellently as possible! I just wanted to get in touch with some recent news and updates.
Our workshop on the 'Art and Aesthetics of Illusion' will be taking place next week at the Magic Circle in London. This is necessarily going to be a smaller event than our usual conferences, and due to some constraints of the venue, it's currently booked to capacity- although it's possible to join a wait list. On that note, if you've registered for the event but can no longer attend, please do withdraw your registration on eventbrite so that we can bring people in off the waitlist. Looking forward to seeing some of you there! I'm afraid the event is not going to be recorded, but there are tentative plans to produce some writing- I'll be sure to update here.
Additionally, plans are also moving along for our next full conference that will be taking place in late 2024- I look forward to sharing more details on that soon.
In the meantime, here's a recap of some recent SoM-related news including some cool new books, papers, and awards.
Best,
Matt Tompkins
On Behalf of the SoMA Committee
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Upcoming Event:
BSA/SoMA Workshop
The Art & Aesthetics of Illusion
We are delighted to announce an upcoming BSA workshop on the Art and the Aesthetics of Illusions funded by The British Society of Aesthetics (BSA) and co-sponsored by the Science of Magic Association (SoMA), The Magic Circle, and The Magic Circle Foundation. The workshop will be led by SoMA’s Jason Leddington (Philosophy, Bucknell). It will be taking place this Tuesday 11 July 2023 in central London at The Magic Circle.
The event is currently full, but there is a waitlist. And if you're registered for the event and can no longer attend, we kindly ask that you withdraw your registration so that your spot can go to someone on the waitlist. This event will not be streamed or recorded, but there are some developing plans to produce some written work that I will share here once we have it sorted.
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New Book Launch: Nobody's Fool
Professors Daniel Simons & Christopher Chabris, of New-York-Times-bestselling Invisible Gorilla fame, have recently written a new book on scams and deception. It's written for popular audiences and does contain a bit of magic-related material, particularly a discussion of fake psychics. But it also offers a great deal more including (but not limited to) fraudulent science, art forgery, and chess cheating. The authors cover a variety of fascinating historical and contemporary stories that they excellently contextualize from their perspectives as psychological researchers. Beyond simply storytelling, they also provide some excellent ideas on how to detect and remediate deceptive practices we encounter in our everyday lives.
Personally, I can highly recommend this! Dan and Chris's work played a major role in my opting to study psychology back when I was a student. Even if you know some of the stories already (as I suspect many many folks reading this may have), it's still fascinating to see how this text juxtaposes, recontextualizes and analyzes the delightfully eclectic cases.
The book launches on July 11- and you can pre-order (and subsequently just order) it HERE
You can also watch a nice video promo HERE
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New Book:
The Psychology of Magic- From Lab to Stage
Another excellent book to recommend: SoMA's Alice Phailès and Gustav Kuhn have a new book out through Vanishing Inc.: The Psychology of Magic- From Lab to Stage. Alice and Gustav are two of the most prolific magic researchers in the world, and this book offers something new relative to their previous, excellent experimental work. This one is not written for academics, or even a general audience (although if you're reading this you're almost certainly weirder than a 'general audience'), rather Gustav and Alice have used their expertise as researchers and performers to produce a remarkable book aimed at familiarizing performing magicians about the Science of Magic.
For more details and to order the book click HERE
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2023 Allan Slaight Awards Announced
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New Paper: More Magic & Robots
Jeehyun Yang, Jaesik Jeong, and Jacky Baltes have had a new paper published in The Knowledge Engineering Review. Their paper "reviews the hardware components and examines the robot platforms of participating teams in the robot magic show, the types of magic performances, the magic tricks and tools, the algorithms for the magic tricks, and the framework for humanoid robots."
And you can read the full article HERE
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