Screening: György Kepes. Interthinking Art + Science

György Kepes. Interthinking Art + Science (Canada/Hungary, 2023), 98 minutes

Screening followed by virtual Q&A with film director and former NTU CCA Singapore Curator-in-Residence Márton Orosz.

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"With the scientist’s brain, the poet’s heart, and the painter’s eye"—this was the guiding principle of György Kepes, an artist, designer, and cultural catalyst who introduced the term interthinking. With this concept, he envisioned a bold new approach: uniting artists and engineers to tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues—such as ecological awareness, augmented reality, and adaptive design—long before these ideas entered the mainstream.

Though still underrecognised, Kepes’s influence stretched far beyond the confines of art. From working alongside Bauhaus luminaries in Europe to shaping the cultural landscape of postwar America, he was less a solitary genius than a powerful enabler—an “active humanist” who championed the democratization of visual culture and fostered cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogue, from the Atlantic across Southeast Asia.

Kepes’s most visionary achievement was the founding of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967—a groundbreaking platform that united artists and scientists to collaboratively explore new ways of seeing and engaging with the civic space. His efforts to humanise technology and embed art into public consciousness came at a paradoxical moment: while MIT was being scrutinized for its ties to military research during the Vietnam War, Kepes was cultivating a counter-narrative—one that prioritised environmental ethics and civic responsibility.

Márton Orosz’s documentary film offers the first comprehensive portrait of this shape-shifting modernist and intellectual force. It reveals Kepes not only as a visionary thinker and polymath but as a pioneering figure in the Art and Technology Movement whose ideas remain startlingly relevant today.

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All images: Film stills from György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science. Courtesy The György Kepes Estate, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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György Kepes (Hungary, 1906 – United States, 2001) was an art theorist, author, designer, educator, painter, and photographer. He studied painting at the School of Arts in Budapest, and, after moving to the United States in 1937, he taught design as the head of the Light and Colour Department of the New Bauhaus at Chicago, now known as the Institute of Design. In 1944, he published his seminal book, Language of Vision,exploring concepts of visual organisation and design methodology that remain deeply influential for design education. In 1967, György Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to serve as a “brainstorming laboratory” for artists and scientists to bridge the gap between art and science and address the social responsibility of design. Kepes served as CAVS’s director until his retirement in 1972, nurturing a community for close collaborations between artists and scientists, extending the fields of science and technology into art and visual expression.

Dr. Márton Orosz is the Founder and Curator of the Photography and Media Arts Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, and has served as Director of the Vasarely Museum in Budapest since 2014. He has curated numerous exhibitions internationally, authored several books and scholarly articles on a wide range of art-historical topics, and lectured widely across the globe.

His research interests encompass light-based media, photography, avant-garde collecting, abstract geometric and kinetic art, computer art, film, and animation. In 2023, he released his first feature-length documentary, György Kepes. Interthinking Art + Science which has been screened at several international festivals and has received multiple awards.

Dr. Orosz is currently a Beinecke Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and a Humboldt Research Fellow at ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. He was Curator-in-Residence at NTU CCA Singapore from 1 to 7 February 2017.