Technology Is An Engineered Illusion, MIT’s Digital Magician Marco Tempest Says..
“There’s a lot of similarity between the world of interactive computing and magic. To me, the world of interactive computers is a kind of an engineered illusion. We swipe on screens. We have things which feel like books, but they’re not books. We want them to be books.”
I met digital magician Marco Tempest some weeks ago, after a show he gave at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna. He was soft spoken and kind, much different from the smart and all-but-shy entertainer I had the pleasure to see at work just an hour before.
Watching him on stage was a bit like turning back time and being a child again, the awe and wonder of age not yet corrupted by life experience. Being first of all a scientist at the MIT’s Media Lab, the magic he practices is of course a strange one: it has more to do with smartphones, LEDs, algorithms and motion templates than with Harry Potter style magic wands.