Marco Tempest is a Creative Technologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a Director’s Fellow Alumni at the MIT MediaLab, and the Founder and Director of the MagicLab in New York City. With his background in technology and stage-magic, Tempest is the embodiment of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Tempest’s gift is to the use of illusion in prototyping future technologies. This involves creating immersive user experiences so users can, in effect, experience tomorrow’s technology today. This gives valuable insights into the way people interact with new and emerging technologies.
His characteristic style and staging range from subtle sleight of hand to touch screens, from the conceptual to the unpredictable, from the visual to the interactive, being the first to use live some technological resources and special effects reserved only for film or television.
For this Swiss founder and director of MagicLab in New York, there are no barriers of time or space. The real and the imaginary blend with a common denominator: the spectacular nature of technology. This exploration, halfway between art, illusion, and innovation, led him to win the World Technology Award for Arts in 2011.
Marco Tempest starred in the television series “The Virtual Magician,” broadcast in 50 countries for over 13 seasons. He has also taken his art around the world, performing in casinos in Monte Carlo, Atlantic City, and Las Vegas; and has captivated all kinds of audiences at corporate events for Apple, Microsoft, Toyota, and IBM, among many others. He is currently recognized as one of the most influential digital artists and illusionists in the world.
Marco Tempest has a proven record of using digital technologies to communicate with audiences in astonishing ways. As a regular speaker at TED conferences he is known for his work with digital technologies to create immersive, and often astonishing, experiences. One constant goal throughout Marco’s career is to inspire.
Marco Tempest combines generative AI, mixed reality, storytelling, gesture sensing, and robotics to offer us a glimpse of an augmented and enchanting future in the present. On stage, Marco Tempest demonstrates live how you can interact with new technologies in a virtual world and how this new field can be accessible and equitable. If you are interested in exploring new ideas for advanced technologies, how we might interact with them, and finding innovative ways to bring those concepts to life, you cannot miss his lectures.
Marco Tempest believes that good ideas, like good people, are nurtured and that with the right amount of care and support, nothing is impossible.
