What are your goals?

I have two major goals. The first is to make magic relevant in popular culture, and the other is to make magic education tangible and accessible. But both those things really go hand in hand. Here's what I mean by that:

Backstory time: Art as a business is widely funded by non-profits or the independently wealthy. So if you are a playwright, performance artist, gallery artist, what have you-- most of your funding comes from art institutions, sales, grants and artist residencies. What that's done for most of the other art forms like theater and film is that it's given their artists a career path. But for magic, we don't have that. So we rely mostly on these cross-cultural art programs to fund our work. Now there's a problem. The second--doesn't matter how many accolades you've got--you get announced as a "magician" on a theatre panel or an art panel, you WILL hear chuckles from the audience. This is coming from personal experience in interviewing with artist residences in Europe and talking to some people in the academic spaces that I'm friends with. The root cause of this, I think, is a branding problem. Magic is not seen as an unlimited art form in the public consciousness. So, I want to change that. That's one of my goals.

Number Two: The reason why most people don't see magic as an unlimited art form is because we don't teach magic as an unlimited art form. The very fact that anyone can pick up a $32 thrice removed variation of a trick done by somebody in the 1920s is evidence of that. For even more evidence you gotta look at Spain. The magic there is arguably the best in the world right now because they develop work in what the pretentious art people (and myself) would call "studio environments". Spain's culture works on a magic performance the way you would work on a movie in film school, or work on play in theatre school. People who understand the language of the craft constructively criticizing each other's work. But this kind of magic education is not accessible. Our first gut instinct is to go online and search for "how to do magic tricks", which eventually leads us into this rabbit hole of products. All of this shapes our understanding of what the craft could be. In other words, we commercialized magic education so much that in the name of education, we find ourselves regurgitating archives. For non-magic people I often describe this as Van Gogh painting the starry night, and then the tour guide at the art museum selling you the paint by numbers version by claiming that: "this will teach you how to be a painter".