CWC Docs: “György Kepes: Interthinking Art+Science”

“With the scientist’s brain, the poet’s heart and the painter’s eye”: this was the motto of the Hungarian-American artist, educator, and impresario György Kepes, author of the 1944 textbook Language of Vision, a foundational text for contemporary media art. Márton Orosz’s documentary film György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science is the first comprehensive assessment of Kepes’s animated life. Orosz introduces Kepes not only as a shapeshifter of modernism, but also as a polymath and visionary thinker who played a pioneering role in the history of the Art and Technology Movement. As the architect of the first educational program dedicated to light as a creative medium at the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 and the founder 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. His work was instrumental in advancing programs that bridged the realms of art and technology, and was a precursor to institutions dedicated to new media art worldwide.

Filmmaker/curator Márton Orosz will join moderator George Legrady (Media Arts & Technology, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science. This event is presented in conjunction with the 2024 UCSB Reads Program, which focuses on Your Brain On Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross.