The manifesto
Voyage au Centre de la Tech is an event that moves away from the purely technical and scientific applications and demonstrations of techno to reflect on its place in the imagination and in society, as in the novel by Jules Verne.
Organised over the course of a day, live from the Louvre Lens Valley in Lens, the event aims to promote innovation and the use of technology among tourism professionals in order to inspire them and encourage them to adopt best practices.
Funded by the INTERREG V France Channel England C-Care programme, the event is aimed at tourism professionals in the Channel area. During this day of round tables, feedback, inspiring moments and application and collaborative workshops, the event will provide answers and technological solutions to the problems that SMEs and GPOs encounter on a daily basis. It is also open to students and institutions.
Technology will be approached from a benevolent angle, a tech for good, a timely tech that everyone must seize to serve the management of territories, employment, recruitment, management, customer experience, and the human.
The aim is to create an interactive space between participants and speakers to encourage the sharing of experiences and exchange ideas on the benefits of technology. Technology that enables us to anticipate and solve social and economic problems.
The event should serve to understand the usefulness of technology in tourism from the point of view of benefiting people and the planet through inspiration and experimentation.
What is the link between the event, steampunk and Jules Verne? Why this concept?
Travel, utopia, science and progress are the major links between the 3!
Jules Verne is not only the pioneer of travel tech, he is also on the podium of the best writers of his time. Rare are the adventure stories where the imaginary worlds are expressed so fluidly. Verne is a master at combining stories and climax. We believe that this is work that tourist destinations must carry out and that technology can help them to enhance their territories through strong storytelling. And this is precisely one of the themes of the event.
In Verne's book, the characters rarely reach the goal they have set themselves. It is the preparation for the journey, the experimentation and the experience that fuels the stories. Verne did not take any of the characters to the Moon, Lidenbrock and his nephew did not reach the centre of the Earth... It is the search, the quest, the descent into the depths that helps to understand. The professor in Journey to the Centre of the Earth is surrounded by scholars, scientists, and this is a common point with this event where we have mobilised scholars, experts, specialists who draw up a panorama of the new realities of technology linked to tourism, trends and signals of a most virtuous tech society.
The stories take place in remote and unknown places such as the bottom of the oceans, the depths of the Earth, the polar regions, remote islands and exotic lands, in the Amazon, on African soil, in India... The characters explore these worlds with the help of inventive machinery and technology and make incredible discoveries while crossing paths with strange creatures. This is what the Steampunk movement is doing today, mixing all genres and adding some delicious anachronisms: you can meet Superman, Queen Victoria, Frankenstein, the President of the United States... Everything is possible, except that in Steampunk, we always start from the context of a world in crisis in which everyone has to make the best of it... with the others.
Finally, technology is the medium of Verne's extraordinary journeys, and here technology is at the service of those who use it and not the other way round. We have thought of this event as an inspiring parenthesis so that everyone can correct their aim in a period where technology is moving faster than the assimilation capacities of organisations, companies and individuals.
You could say that Voyage au Centre de la Tech is a tribute to the man who never stopped being inspired and experimenting.