If Tecnòpolis were a book, Massimo Temporelli would be the editor: putting the chapters in order, weaving together voices, giving the narrative its rhythm. If it were city, he would be its planner: designing the public squares, avenues of ideas, spaces where science and culture breathe as one.
But Temporelli is a trained physicist. He has been a science communicator for over twenty-five years. Through social media, through his journals, he helps us to understand the physical phenomena of daily life. There is no one better suited than him in programming this event with us, entrusted to us by Tecnopolo di Bologna. One of the world’s leading centres for supercomputing, big data and artificial intelligence, it is now opening its doors to the public for the first time.
We will be one of the Metropolitan City of Bologna’s project partners for Tecnòpolis Festival, running from 19 to 21 March. We will be providing our method of circular communication: the close synergy between our team with over a decade of experience in design and production of live events, and the richest Speakers Bureau in Italy, an almost unlimited wealth of voices, visions and relationships, proving its worth once again in selecting Massimo Temporelli as the scientific director of the project.
“Speaking to a general audience” – Temporelli explains – “is natural for me: I don’t stop at simplifying the science, but I try, with my work, to impart scientific method, curiosity and the pleasure of discovery. When I’m on stage I maintain my wonder: I’m regarding science with curiosity along with the audience, and I believe that this is what creates connection.”
“Putting yourself out there in unknown territory”, this is the challenge Temporelli readily took on, providing contacts, professionalism and vision, in constant dialogue with Elastica and the Metropolitan City of Bologna. It was a natural choice for a communicator who has always explored methods and mediums – books, radio, television, podcasts – and who now sees in Tecnòpolis “a new medium of communication, in which passion for discovery meets concrete organisation”.
Together we built a dynamic and stimulating project, because “a festival functions like an orchestra: it needs rhythm, voices that rise and others that accompany”, with the willingness to “overcome divisions of expertise, like when in the Renaissance science leaders and other branches of culture were put into dialogue with one another”. Among those that will rise onto the stage of Tecnòpolis Festival are American science reporter David Quammen, neuroscientist Stefano Mancuso, historian of astronomy Adrian Fartade, ethologist Margherita Paiano, and journalists Emilio Cozzi, specialist in space and gaming, and Chiara Piotto, expert in new languages of information. “These figures were selected because they think in deep, refined and designerly ways. Not of different worlds, they are part of the same culture.”
The two-part narrative structure stems from a deliberate decision: first looking at technologies that are about to become concrete in the upcoming future of 2030-2040, followed by the era of the most visionary research, 2050-2060. “Development and research aren’t the same thing”, Temporelli explains, and exploring them separately allows us to lend depth and breadth. In this way, artificial intelligence, space, automation and sustainability become key in interrogating the present without being limited to criticism, but instead looking at it with a far-sighted and optimistic gaze.
Tecnòpolis Festival begins with our city, Bologna, and aims to involve the residents of 55 towns across the Metropolitan area – students, families, enthusiasts and non-experts – with educational talks, lectio magistralis, workshops and laboratories. But the goal is clear: “grow with time, become a national point of reference for discussions of science, technology and innovation as drivers of human transformation”. Because, as Temporelli reminds us, “technology is not an ‘add-on’ of society, but its driving force; it is what defines us as a species, because a species changes on the basis of what it decides to adopt”.
“Tecnopolis will be an open, informed and shared space in which the future will be discussed together, with curiosity and optimism”.
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