Since Simon Pierro was a little boy growing up in Germany, he has been fascinated with magic tricks.
Pierro now lives in New York City and is best known for his iPad illusions.
“He’s the world’s first iPad magician to use specially developed apps to interactively perform unique, startling illusions. His special brand of entertainment has taken the world by storm, astounding sellout crowds with his iPad magic,” his Facebook page explains.
Pretty cool.
Who is Simon Pierro?
Simon Pierro was born in 1978 in Ettlingen, a town in the southwest of Germany, and he was performing magic long before tablets existed. He built his reputation the traditional way, with close-up tricks, stage shows and years of television work in his home country. He appeared more than twenty times on the German hidden camera show Verstehen Sie Spaß?, where his job was to fool unsuspecting members of the public with illusions that looked like everyday situations going strangely wrong.
The magic world noticed him early. In 2002 he was named Magician of the Year by the Magic Circle of Germany, and in 2004 he received the Siegfried & Roy Award in Las Vegas. He has also won an award at the FISM World Championships of Magic, the competition often described as the Olympics of the craft.
How the iPad became his signature prop
Pierro began working seriously with digital magic around 2008, and when Apple’s tablet arrived he saw something other magicians had missed. A screen is the perfect accomplice for an illusionist, because audiences have learned to trust it. We know what a photo looks like, how an app behaves and what happens when we tap a button. When that familiar logic breaks, the brain has nowhere to hide.
His routines play with that expectation. Objects seem to pass from the real world into the screen and back out again. A drink poured on the glass appears to fill a glass inside the display. A photo taken on the tablet turns into a physical print. The tricks rely on custom software, careful timing and old fashioned sleight of hand working together, and part of the fun is that even people who understand technology cannot see the join.
He became known internationally as “The iPad Magician,” and he was the first German magician invited to perform at an Apple Store.
The Ellen show and the viral moment
The clip above comes from his appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and it is the performance that made him famous far beyond Germany. The video of that routine passed 20 million views on YouTube, and by the middle of 2015 his iPad magic videos had been watched more than 80 million times in total.
Why did it travel so well? A few reasons stand out:
- It needs no translation. The tricks are visual, so a viewer in Brazil or Japan enjoys them just as much as someone in the studio audience.
- It is short. Each illusion lands in a few seconds, which suits the way people watch and share video online.
- It uses an object everyone owns. Watching a magician do the impossible with a deck of cards is impressive. Watching him do it with the same device you use to check email is unsettling in the best way.
- The reactions are real. Much of the pleasure comes from watching the host and the audience lose their composure.
Why digital magic still feels like magic
Some purists argue that tricks built on apps are less impressive than a coin vanishing from a bare hand. Pierro’s work suggests the opposite. The technology does not do the trick by itself. A magician still has to hide the method, control where the audience looks, and time every movement so the screen and the hand agree perfectly. A mistake of half a second would reveal the secret.
There is also something new here. Classic magic plays with physical laws, like gravity or solidity. Digital magic plays with our assumptions about the boundary between the virtual and the physical, a boundary most of us cross hundreds of times a day without thinking. By blurring it, Pierro makes people look again at something they had stopped noticing.
Beyond the stage
Pierro’s skills have also been used behind the scenes. He has consulted on illusions for television productions, including Germany’s Next Top Model, and he regularly performs at corporate events where companies want to present a product in a memorable way. For brands launching a new gadget, a magician who can make it seem to do the impossible is a natural fit.
His success also opened the door for a new generation of performers who mix screens, projection and apps into their acts. Today it is common to see tablet routines at magic conventions, and many young magicians first discovered the art through viral clips like this one.
Want to try a little magic yourself?
If the video has you curious, the best advice from working magicians is simple: start small. Learn one trick well, practice it in front of a mirror, and perform it for friends before trying anything more ambitious. Local magic clubs, library books and beginner courses are all good places to start. The technology can come later. What makes Simon Pierro’s performances work is not the tablet, it is the thousands of hours of practice behind every tap and swipe.
Until then, you can simply sit back, press play and try to work out how he does it. Good luck.