Pit Hartling – Card Fictions

Imagine if you could….

• sense the colors of playing cards through a solid table.
• stack four Poker hands in less than ten seconds.
• kick any named number of cards off a tabled deck.
• put chaos to order.
• magically move cards to any positions in the pack at will.
• transpose a card from between a spectator’s hands to under his watch.
• instantly memorize the order of a shuffled deck.

This book will not enable you to any of those things. Most of them are after all impossible. Fortunately however we can make our spectators experience these impossibilities anyway. We do that by creating fictions In this case Card Fictions.

It may sound obvious but it is this simple realization that makes magic as a performing art possible in the first place: Evoking the feeling of impossibility does not require actually doing the impossible. However it will always require a team-effort. A fiction is created in somebody’s mind. Equipped with those marvels called human perception and the human mind our spectators play a necessary and active part in the process. All that we performers do is to provide adequate input. Then we lean back and relax as the spectators themselves spontaneously and effortlessly complete the job and create fascinating impossible – magical – fictions.