Gerard Senehi is a performer of tiny miracles or, if you’re looking for a more formal job title, a mentalist. A mentalist is someone who blows people’s minds by doing things that just can’t be explained through science or reason and Gerard is exactly that. Be it his hands-off approach to smoking a cigarette, his ability to mostly read your mind, or his delightful manipulation of cutlery and glassware, he is the one who asks you how much you know about your constructs of reality.

Using a small group of random volunteers, Gerard starts to play. He has some of them hold the contents of their pockets in their open palms and smiles politely as the untouched objects begin to jump up and down. He asks a volunteer to hold a TED supplied wine glass and with a fork laid across it and fills the theater with the sounds of cutlery bouncing on glass. He borrows a cigarette, and after making it float around a bit, catches it with his mouth and takes a casual drag. Was this telekinesis? “Maybe it was,” he says. “We’ll see.”

And then things start to get surreal.

Two volunteers step up and are given forks. He asks who would like to have the power and the one on the left politely accepts. The two volunteers are instructed to try and bend their forks with their fingertips. One guess as to whose fork was broken into two and whose fork was completely unscathed.

A volunteer is asked to pick a random person from their cellphone. After a series of increasingly accurate directed questions, “What is his name?”

“Daniel.”

“OK. I got Isha. This proves that mind reading is not an exact science.”

It is this definitive vagueness that proves to be the linchpin of Gerard’s performance. Was he really able to read a woman’s mind and simultaneously draw almost the same exact thing as she did? Did he really guess the word a volunteer was thinking of (after telling her that her initial word choice was too easy)? From his perspective, it didn’t matter. In his mind, none of this is about bending spoons and reading minds. It is all simply a metaphor for the potential of when we question the most fundamental aspects of our life.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Catarina Mota has many friends. One of her friend’s fathers, when her friend was a kid, built a vehicle out of a bicycle and washing machine, because the family couldn’t afford a car. Culturally, we used to know how to make and fix everything. As the 20th century progressed, we lost that ability, but thanks to the maker community, we are slowly getting it back. By fostering the development and invention of new smart materials, Catarina hopes to help makers reach the next level.

What are smart materials? Fundamentally, they’re materials we are already incredibly familiar with like paint, paper and plastic. The trick is, all of these materials now come with a twist. Paint and ink, for example, can now conduct electricity such that people are able to paint circuits with a brush or, with the addition of a magnet, make a speaker out of a sheet of paper. Acrylic, a type of plastic, can now be infused with light diffusing particles so light can reflect through its entire surface instead of just the edges. What this means practically is, by flipping a light switch, you can turn your windows from see-through to opaque. Thermochromic pigments can be added to plastics so you can see when your baby’s bottle is hot. Possibilities are becoming endless.

However, in order to harness the full potential of these materials, Catarina believes that we need to have a deeper understanding of the components that are making up our world. We need to have a deeper understanding because when we do, we are able to shape the objects we use instead of those objects shaping use. Beyond being savvy consumers, by delving into tinkering, we open the doors to innovation. From mountain bikes to airplanes, semi-conductors to computers, history has repeatedly shown that it’s been the amateurs who have been the significant inventors and improvers of the world.

To bolster the tinkerers’ ability to create, Catarina co-founded openmaterials.org, a website where people publish information and aggregate research, papers, and tutorials by other makers. Her overall message is simple: draw from the experiments of the crowd and understand smart materials. Like learning about computers in the 1970s, the best way to ensure we have a say in our future is to acquire pre-emptive knowledge of emerging technologies now.

Photos by James Duncan Davidson