First published here on Mariano’s Scifoo14 blog

Slides and text from my lightning talk (given this morning at Googleplex in Mountain View) are now available online clicking here. Enjoy!

My book L’arte di stupire (“The Art of Amazement”, Sperling&Kupfer, Milan 2014), written with Ferdinando Buscema, is already available in Italian and soon will be published also in the US with a preface by the English magician Derren Brown.

Wu Ming Foundation has an English website here.

The very ending of the act is an idea by Woody Aragon.

Nicolas Bergasse actually leaded a revolutionary group, using Mesmerism to disguise political activities.

This magic trick is part of a larger project labeled “Laboratory of Revolutionary Magnetism”, co-authored with Wu Ming Foundation as a transmedial extension of their historical novel The Army of Sleepwalkers (Einaudi, Torino 2014).