Digital transformation is in full swing. There’s hardly an event – and I get around quite a few – where digitalisation, digital transformation, Industry 4.0 and artificial intelligence aren’t at the top of the agenda. This transformation began around two decades ago, has been gathering pace ever since and has reached every industry – including magic! Just like industrial companies, we artists have to consider how we want to deal with these disruptive innovations and with the opportunities and risks of digital transformation. Web 2.0, social media and video-sharing platforms in particular seemed to undermine magicians’ business model.
Back then, many magicians reacted to the new technologies like this:
• YouTube: “…that’s where our tricks get explained!”
• HD cameras: “…they make some tricks impossible, because the audience can now see everything in razor-sharp detail.”
• Digital devices such as iPads: “…distract far too much from the actual trick and water down the magical effect.”
The magic of new technologies as competition for good old-fashioned magic? Once I realised that the internet couldn’t simply be magicked away, I decided to hang up my magic wand and pick up the iPad instead: as Simon Pierro, I became known across the web as THE iPad magician! So I can counter my sceptical fellow magicians with my own experience:
• YouTube: “…this platform has let me reach 100 million viewers!”
• HD cameras: “…allow me to perform my illusions live in front of up to 10,000 people!”
• iPads: “…have become my magical trademark!”
Three factors behind my success – which took me all the way to Hollywood and The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
From there, I look back at key moments in my career in which I learned to see change – and apparent defeats – as opportunities. For example, when I lost at a shell game and walked away 20 dollars poorer but one career idea richer; or when I lost my place on prime-time German TV because Frank Elstner stepped down as host, which led me to look for a new audience of my own on YouTube – and that ultimately brought my real breakthrough!
As a magician, I face the constant challenge of astonishing and surprising people. So I have learned to keep questioning my own thought patterns, to give myself a disruptive mind reset and to keep my creative process going with external impulses. In the keynote, I show video excerpts and give examples of how innovations and illusions – in other words, my products – came into being.
Now available to book as a keynote: “Artistic Intelligence”
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