Monthly Story, June 2023

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Archetype → Magician

Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

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The seven ingredients of magic

First ingredient of magic: Presence. Bring every morsel of your mind and matter to here and now. You breathe. You are.

Second ingredient of magic: The universe. Place everything within the ring of your control. Extract yourself. Now play. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

Third ingredient of magic: The elements. Earth. Water. Fire. Air. Conjure your dragon.

Fourth ingredient of magic: Newton’s third law of motion. Everything has an equal and opposite reaction; there are no exceptions. Use this.

Fifth ingredient of magic: Time. Time is the river your dragon wades in. Time listens to no one. But, Time is a trickster and accepts invitations to play games. But, be warned when you play with Time; it always wins. So, play only if you enjoy the game, not for victory.

Sixth ingredient of magic: Honesty. You cannot hack intentions; they must be meant in all honesty.

Seventh ingredient of magic: Trust. Set your dragon free; but, never define its path. Trust, because you know.

Read the previous story

Go to Reading List for this story.

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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Reading List, June 2023

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We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

Tell us how these stories made you feel, and where they lead your thinking. We’d love to know.

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Archetype → Magician

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June 2023

• We’ve decided to dig into our collection of archetype playlists. We use these to help us rapidly “get into” a brand persona. Over the years we’ve slowly accumulated and collected these sounds to help us work effectively. Here are a few selections from the Magician playlist.

  1. The evocative emotional power of music is magical. London-based Caribbean-Belgian composer, producer, and musician Nala Sinephro described the making of the album: “I became more focused on the inner workings of the body and created a sonic world that helped me heal.” This kind of music seems to be a sort of soundtrack to memories. It evokes a sense of wonder. 2021, Space 1.8. Nala Sinephro, Warp Records

  2. Another way of looking at narratives found in music, particularly in terms of rhythm and time. In the trance-like state of a repetitive track, someone can be swept away into a fantastical realm. Terry Riley. American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition is an ideal example of this altered state of mind. 1964, Composition In C. Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air

  3. The ability to conjure a narrative through space is another interesting aspect of sound, particularly in terms of vibrations and echo. Hiroshi Yoshimura was a Japanese musician and composer whose music lies mostly in the He is considered a pioneer of ambient music in Japan. His music lies mostly in the genre of Japanese environmental music characterized by soft electronic melodies infused with the sounds of nature. He is considered a pioneer of ambient music in Japan. 1986, Time after time. Hiroshi Yoshimura, Soundscape 1: Surround, MISAWA Home

• Christopher Nolan’s 2006 award-winning film The Prestige, makes a good point of positioning the wonder of magic as an obsession with deception. It also seems appropriate to us for this MS. As the movie starts with the three steps to a magic trick; also a preface to the structure of the story told in the movie

• Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa (16 December 1875, British Ceylon – 18 June 1953, United States) was a Sri Lankan author, occultist, freemason and theosophist. The fourth president of the Theosophical Society, Jinarajadasa was one of the world's foremost Theosophical authors, having published more than 50 books and more than 1600 articles in periodicals during his life. His interests and writings included religion, philosophy, literature, art, science and occult chemistry. He was also a rare linguist, who had the ability to work in many European languages;

  1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curuppumullage_Jinarajadasa

  2. https://archive.org/details/JinarajadasaTheSolarSystemAsAFlower1946

  3. https://archive.org/details/JinarajadasaIsAndIsToBe1946

  4. https://archive.org/details/JinarajadasaThePlaceOfIntuitionInTheNewCivilization

  5. https://archive.org/details/JinarajadasaTheSecretOfTheAges

• The Magician’s connection to experiences of synchronicity, flow and oneness, with a curiosity about the hidden workings of the universe can also be illustrated through body language or body movement. The dance performance can be another aspect of the magician's personality which is interesting to investigate.

  1. Weaving dreams, walking on air, trying to fly… Gratte Ciel performances are known to be enchantingly beautiful, astonishing and breathtaking spectacles. Part dance, but mostly acrobatics these performing artists move through the air, magically suspended above the crowd below. The Gratte Ciel company’s work tends to live within the relationship between the infinitely large and the deeply intimate; they are masters of the rope, its nature, possibilities, and limits. Like the magician archetype whose state of mind and expertise are vectors of innovation at the service of major aerial projects and the artistic teams that it accompanies in surpassing themselves.

• In Ben Mendelsohn’s 2012 documentary, Stephen Graham (Professor of Cities and Societies at Newcastle University says “Contrary to the rhetoric that the “Cyber Space” suggests that the internet is some non-physical realm that exists “out there” on its own; it is in fact, very much physical.” This short documentary peeks inside one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity; illustrating the physicality and scale of the internet. The narration takes on the role of the magician offering us a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible. Hundreds of telecommunications companies interconnect their respective internet networks (known as peering) as well as conventional TDM traffic through numerous meet-me rooms and optical and electrical lines placed throughout the building.

• Tom Sachs and Van Neistat cor wrote The Paradox Bullets, a film that attempts to help people come to terms with the irrational and to realize that things don't always make sense. The film narrative is mysterious and wondrous; it demonstrates strong perceptional strength, awe-inspiring intuition, charisma and cleverness. In an interview with Cultured Magazine, Tome Sachs said “In school, we learn one plus one equals two, but in the Studio we learn one plus one equals a million. And you can only get that equation of equaling a million when you put the right two wrong elements that combine to make an exponential expansion of energy.”

• Magician film directors have the ability to frame the world and show us a different side to a story.

  1. Feist’s 2023 music video for Hiding Out in the Open, is clever. What at first seems like just a little fun with a green screen ultimately forces the viewer to ask, which one is the real Feist and which ones are overlays? And that’s what the song is about. Who’s the real you? Which version of yourself are you putting out into the world vs. what are you trying to hide?

  2. Art and film come together easily in the vividly imaginative mind of Michel Gondry. His sets become sculptures—melding art forms to accommodate the vast world of his dreams. Michel Gondry's films, from his music videos to his feature films, employ technical wizardry involving various kinds of special effects, animation and intricate narrative set-ups. He leaves plenty of room for his playfulness and irreverent satire. In this 120min interview at the Walker Art Center; Michel Gondry: unpacks his 2006 film, The Science of Dreams

  3. Dead Man is a 1995 American acid western film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. The movie, set in the late 1800s, follows William Blake, a meek accountant on the run after murdering a man. He has a chance encounter with the enigmatic Native American spirit guide "Nobody", who believes Blake is the reincarnation of the visionary English poet William Blake.

  4. Tim Burton; Big Fish. The film tells the story of a frustrated son who tries to distinguish fact from fiction in the life of his father, a teller of tall tales. Big Fish was shot on location in Alabama in a series of fairy tale vignettes evoking the tone of a Southern Gothic fantasy.

• In My Collected Silences, Doron Solomons combine’s excerpts featuring dozens of interviewees in the pause before the beginning of a television broadcast, from which he edits four intense minutes. The video excerpts are the redundant raw materials cut from the broadcast, which usually remain unavailable for viewing. Solomons choose to focus on those idle, marginal moments contrary to common practice – to put them in the limelight and at the work’s very core. Observation of the changing photographed subjects, some familiar and others unfamiliar, introduces a new gaze which had heretofore been absent. Surprisingly, they appear silent and uneasy. Some take a breath in anticipation of the broadcast; others await their turn indifferently and impatiently. Solomons render’s chaff into wheat, refining a new meaning. It is precisely in these moments of wait that the more human aspects of the interviewees seem to be revealed, eliciting identification. These are, in fact, the true moments, the reality behind the pretense and other games underlying the interview situation.

• 2023, Making the impossible real; understanding the Magician archetype: As we get to know this world with more and more access to information, instances where we can return to childlike wonder are rare. The Magician archetype can fill this void, and help people find wonder in stories, against the everyday drear. 

How to disappear

Artistic voice is probably the only thing we creators treasure more than the tools of our craft or access points to our muse. Artistic voice is very connected to our creative egos. But, when it comes to making brand stories, the creator’s artistic voice is not always a good idea. It could compromise quality and make the story less responsive to the audience.

When I first started writing for different brands about ten years ago, I had clients whose brand voices more-or-less aligned with my writer’s voice. Looking back, now I also think that they clearly hired me as a writer because they ‘liked’ my artistic voice, whether it was right for their brand or not. But, when they started recommending me to others, I started getting clients whose brands didn’t quite speak like me. I remember back then, getting the first client whose brand had a specific sense of humor; my mind went uh-oh.

This is when Public Works had to create a disappearing trick. We had to avoid subjectivity and defaulting into our personal artistic voices when producing commissioned stories. The challenge was to figure out how to make our artistic personalities temporarily disappear, leaving behind our expertise in making stories. This is how we ended up creating our Brand Articulation Framework.

The Brand Articulation Framework is a document used as a tool to unify ideas concerning a business's values, identity, and personality. Although best created through a workshop with the brand custodians, we also created a more economical interview-based document version so that more clients could afford it. It basically aligns all decision-makers of a project. The Brand Articulation Framework documents a brand’s desires, values, key personality traits, strategies and audience. It’s a work tool that sets the narrative voice and even themes for our stories for clients. It gathers and streamlines consensus as to ‘who’ a brand persona is, using near-universal symbols and emotional spectrums. This makes the brand persona easily translatable to creative productions from writing, photography, and films to interiors and customer experiences.

Public Works Brand Articulation Framework is a tool that helps us keep stories true to clients’ brand personas consistent while creating. It allows us to quiet our personal egos as creatives, and incorporate the persona of the brand we’re currently creating for, along with our expertise. It retains the intended persona, and gives the story its form through our skills in creating stories.

The Brand Articulation Framework is such a fundamental part of our storytelling now, and we’ve nicknamed them BAFs. Now, I begin each commissioned story with the BAF, making room for the brand persona and making a part of myself disappear for the time being. It works like magic.

BAFs are not just for writing; it’s a tool that can be used by all kinds of creators from designers, visual artists, interior designers, and filmmakers to content creators. Alain, my other half in life and at Public Works, also uses the BAF similarly when creating stories; his process involves mood boards, brand playlists which lends to constructing more abstract narratives using visuals.

We also use BAFs to help business founders to view the brand as a persona external to their own personality despite natural parallels. This removed room for subjective feedback based on personal preferences and moods, allowing the brand to maintain a consistent face and voice in the public eye. It was a win-win from all directions.

After we incorporated BAFs into our storytelling process, the stories were always written from the voice that was clearly identified and outlined with the involvement of the business founders. Our clients like it because hearing their stories being told from a voice they’ve only fleetingly heard in their head before is something of a trip. Even beyond working with us, our clients use BAFs as a guide to create briefs for other creatives and remind themselves of the motives and values that their brand stands for. We are sometimes commissioned by clients to brief and help new creatives joining their team to use the framework effectively.

Although the outcomes of this process seem ‘uncanny’ in our stories as some of our clients say, there’s nothing magical about it. It’s really a very rational and straightforward process that drives the BAF and how it enables us to map and maintain a brand’s persona through stories. Seeing life through the magician lens often enough, I find this concrete rationality quite magical in the same vein that chemistry is magical. This is why the Brand Articulation Framework becomes a neat disappearing trick for all creators making stories for brands.

Curious about how our Brand Articulation Framework can help your personal or business brand? You can read more about it here.

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