Amazing video! I'd known about the TED talks but neglected to really listen to any of them - but this changed that.
To bring this back around to magic before someone starts crying about it being off-topic, I think this illustrates why some of us are trying to move the community as a whole away from 1,000-card-trick routines. It's almost the entirety of the community now, and it's making magic stagnant. We've exhausted cards, and to continue forcing ideas from the dry well is a damaging move on our part. We have to move away from our comfort zone and take the chance, go into something scary, experiment.
Imagine the magician that picks up a soda can and three months later has a 15-trick manuscript full of killer material using it, as well as some supplemental theory and routine ideas. That's impressive.
As far as the magic community goes, it takes even the smallest bit of imagination to create a trick, a series of moves or a device built to fool the rest of the world's senses. That takes talent! But these days, all we're concerned with is how to package that up and sell it, when instead we should be pushing that talent to its extremities and finding the weirdest thing we can come up with, then going back and figuring out how to make that practical for performance. You know, instead of figuring out another version of an already existing effect, figure out how to get information off a billet without looking at it or touching it. Figure out how to push a pencil through a window with no cover. Do something that's actually creative, actually impressive.
