György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science

“With the scientist’s brain, the poet’s heart and the painter’s eye”—this was the proverb of Hungarian-American artist, educator, and impresario György Kepes. A forgotten precursor of media art, Kepes was among the first to use 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 at the Massachussets Institute of Technology 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 “intercommunicate” knowledge on a participatory basis proved to be foundational for a program that defined the aesthetic agency of the ecological consciousness.

Sponsored by Bridgman Collaborative Architecture.