Sama Alshaibi, Sadik Alfraji, and Huma Gupta | From the Great Flood to the Great Migration
October 26
György Kepes. Interthinking Art + Science
documentary film by Márton Orosz, Hungary–Canada
97 min
Part of the Fall 2023 Lecture Series. Film screening followed by Q+A with the filmmaker.
Can technology save us from technology itself? “Can prosthetics be used to emulate the pageantry of nature and provide a viable alternative for building a sustainable world?
“With the scientist’s brain, the poet’s heart and the painter’s eye”—this was the proverb of the Hungarian-American artist, educator, and impresario György Kepes, a forgotten precursor of media art. Kepes was among the first who used the term “visual culture” as an independent research subject in a contemporary sense. As the architect of the Light Workshop at the New Bauhaus/School of Design in Chicago in 1937 and as the founder and first director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT in 1967, Kepes’s enterprise was to fill the gap between the humanities and the sciences. The powerful new tools he offered to “intersee” and “interthink” knowledge on a participatory basis proved to be the foundations of a program that defined the aesthetic agency of the ecological consciousness.
Márton Orosz’s documentary film is the first comprehensive assessment of György Kepes’s animated life, which introduces him not only as a shapeshifter of modernism but also as a polymath and visionary thinker whose legacy and faith in “optical democracy” grants him a pioneering role in the history of the Art and Technology Movement.
Non-ticketed event. It is free and open to the public. First come, first served.
