What Magic Teaches Us About Beliefs & Polarization | Jeanette Andrews
In this episode, I explore illusion as philosophy in motion with artist and magician Jeanette Andrews. What can magic teach us about how we form beliefs, perceive reality, and place our trust in what we see? We talk about consenting to be deceived, the ethics of manipulation, and how wonder itself can be a form of inquiry.
Jeanette Andrews is a New York–based artist and magician whose work bridges illusion, installation, and conceptual art. Her performances function as live thought experiments — multisensory investigations into perception, cognition, and belief. She has presented commissioned works with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Québec City Biennial, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, among many others, and has been affiliated with Harvard’s metaLAB and held a fellowship with MIT’s Center for Art, Science and Technology.
More from Jeanette Andrews:
Website: https://www.jeanetteandrews.com/
Instragram: / jeanetteandrewsmagic
0:00 – What Is Magic, Really?
5:15 – The Power of Framing: How Context Impacts Perception
11:47 – Consensual Deception: When We Agree to Be Fooled
13:12 – Magic, Manipulation, and the Ethics of Belief
19:04 – The Real Purpose of Illusion
24:58 – What Magic Reveals About the Mind and Perception
26:37 – Where Art Meets Philosophy and Science
35:00 – Deception, Bias, and the Architecture of Belief
40:06 – How Magicians Exploit (and Expose) Our Cognitive Traps
46:40 – A Live Experiment in Cognitive Magic
50:01 – Inside Jeanette Andrews’ MIT Project The Attestation
1:05:20 – (Announcement) What Is Coming Next For Jeanette Andrews
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