Tools from the format

Two web apps used in lectures, seminars and lessons. They run directly in the browser, store nothing on a server and need no account.

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Ideomotor pendulum

A ring on a thread, held still above the open hand. “Don’t move anything. Just think: left, right.” After thirty seconds the ring is swinging, and the person holding it has, as far as they can tell, done nothing at all. The app turns this parlour trick into a complete experiment: on the phone held flat, a disc swings like a mathematical pendulum whose pivot is the phone itself. It measures how much real hand movement (in millimetres) and how much tilt (in degrees) were needed to set it swinging. A hand movement of two millimetres in the right rhythm produces a swing of six centimetres.

Notes: Sensors must be enabled once; on an iPhone, open the app in Safari and add it to the home screen via “Share → Add to Home Screen”, after which it runs offline. On a desktop, “Ohne Sensor testen” (test without sensor) starts a mouse mode. Measurement series can be exported as CSV. The interface is currently in German; an English version is planned.

Open the ideomotor pendulum

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The Masks of Tarot

From the 22 Major Arcana you first choose your favourite card, then the one you dislike most. A short reading emerges: the favourite card is the mask, the rejected card the resistance, and the position of the two relative to one another tells the rest. Behind the choice lies a hidden structure of two closed chains of eleven, which serves in the format as an entry into pattern-seeking, interpretation and the Forer effect. For performers, the final page offers a covert way of reading the result.

Notes: English and German, three moods (parchment, cool, candlelight). The structure follows Scott Grossberg’s “The Masks of Tarot”; the app is an independent implementation for this format.

Open The Masks of Tarot

Why tools in a magic format?

The pendulum is the most honest piece in the format because there is no trick: no sleight of hand, no false bottom, only the person themselves. Without a control, you are merely repeating a nineteenth-century parlour trick. With a control, you have hypothesis, measurement, falsification and debrief in one object, where the participant is at the same time the observer of their own blind spot.

The card choice shows the other side: how convincing an interpretation feels when it springs from a hidden rule. Both apps belong to a larger toolkit that also includes anonymous card voting by camera for team seminars. The software is continually extended; the source code is openly available on GitHub.

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