Derren Brown: ‘I love technology, but I don’t know if it’s improved my life’..
Good interview by Tim Lewis for the Observer…
How much does technology play a part in your illusions? Or would that be cheating?
There’s a whole area in the magic world of clever, electronic props, but if you are a professional performer, doing it every night, six months on tour, there’s just no way you can work with things like that. Sometimes they won’t work; they’ll break and then you’re stuck in front of 3,000 people. Also the reason I do what I do is because is because I love the process of having to make it work, so it takes the fun out of it to have some gadget that does it for you.
How have other magicians incorporated it?
There’s always been technology that is just ahead of what the public are aware of. Way back when, one of the performers I really like was an early mind-reader called Alexander; that exotic image of the turbaned mind-reader comes from him. But the reason he had a big turban was that he had a massive electronic headpiece underneath it that would allow somebody to feed him information…