My name is Mark Setteducati and I'm a magician and an inventor of magic, games, puzzles,
illusions, and toys and all kinds of fun things.
Here we have Optical Conclusions. It appears to be a cube in the mirror. But half of the
cube is really only four cubes that are sitting on top of a mirror that gives you the illusion
of one large cube.
Here we have a puzzle with the Mona Lisa. And as you can see there's something strange
about it because the Mona Lisa's hands are over here, and her face is in the mirror.
Anything you draw is going to be reflected in the mirror. It's like drawing inside a
kaleidoscope. Wow. See that? I'll draw this. I'll draw a little man.
So I was a student at the School of Visual Arts and I answered an ad on the School of
Visual Arts bulletin board for an inventor to come up with some ideas for a hexaflexagon.
And a hexaflexagon is a mathematical object and it really fascinated me. But the thing
that fascinated me even more was that the payment was going to be a royalty. And that
sounded good to me. Hmm, you can get a royalty for coming up with ideas? That sounded better
than just doing a job and getting paid for the job.
Now Martin Gardner wrote quite a bit about hexaflexagons, and he wrote the mathematical
column for Scientific American for many years. Everything that Martin wrote about is everything
that I'm really interested in. Now I'm actually involved in a conference, the Gathering for
Gardner, to honor his work.
The Jigazo puzzle, one of my latest inventions, was a direct result of the Gathering for Gardner.
This is the Jigazo puzzle and, as you can see, this is a picture of me. And the Jigazo
puzzle has 300 pieces but the amazing thing about Jigazo is that the pieces can be arranged
to make any face in the whole world. In this case, it's me. And here it is in the box and
you can see all of these different faces were made with the exact same 300 pieces. And that's
the Jigazo puzzle.
I guess I'm an inventor because I have a lot of patents and I invent things. But I consider
myself more of a magician and an artist than an inventor. Because most inventors try to
improve the world. They try to create the better mousetrap or make improvements on something.
But for me it's more of a personal expression. So I pick themes like mirrors. It's been a
big topic for me. And I explore principles and I try to do something that nobody would
ever think of, something that's personal to me.
Many times in real life we're actually fooled by, we accidentally walk into a glass door
and we didn't realize it was there, or we think there's something there and it turns
out to be a reflection. I love being fooled that way spontaneously, because then there's
the basis of something that I can explore and maybe make even more amazing. And make
it intentional instead of accidental.
And that's what I try to do.