Dernissage and film screening György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science
We cordially invite you to the dernissage of the exhibitions Alfons Schilling - Brainscape and Open Digital Archive. The dernissage will include a guided tour with curators Lenka Dolanová and Barbora Šediva from 5pm, followed by a screening of the film György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science (97 minutes) from 6pm, followed by a discussion with the director Márton Orosz, one of the film's protagonists Robert Horvitz and members of Vasulka Kitchen Brno.
György Kepes. Interthinking Art + Science
director Márton Orosz (Hungary / Canada)
97 min
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.
Márton Orosz serves as the founder and curator of the Collection of Photography and Media Arts at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest. Since 2014, he has held the position of director at the museum dedicated to Victor Vasarely, which is part of the same institution. Dr. Orosz also holds the role of scientific advisor to the Kepes Institute in Eger and the Michèle Vasarely Foundation in Puerto Rico. He has curated numerous exhibitions
across the globe, written books and articles on various art-related subjects, and delivered lectures in several locations, including Europe, the United States, and Asia. His research and publications encompass a wide range of fields, including light-based media, photography, avant-garde
collecting, abstract geometric and kinetic art, computer art, motion picture, and animated film. György Kepes – Interthinking Art + Science is his first documentary film.