Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
CWC Docs: György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science
- Tuesday, January 30, 2024 / 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (PST)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: Sony 2K digital projection (98 minutes)
- With Márton Orosz (filmmaker/curator)
“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 joined 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.
Márton Orosz will also be discussing his work on Monday, January 29 at 1:00 PM as part of the MAT seminar series. For details, please visit this page.
Biographies
Márton Orosz (filmmaker/curator, Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery)
Dr. Márton Orosz serves as the founder and Curator of the Collection of Photography and Media Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts – 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 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. His first documentary film, György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science, was completed in 2023 and garnered recognition and accolades at many international film festivals.
Moderator George Legrady (Media Arts & Technology, UCSB)
George Legrady is Distinguished Professor of Digital Media and director of the Experimental Visualization Lab in Media Arts & Technology at UC Santa Barbara. He is an internationally exhibited and published artist, author and scholar, whose practice and research have explored since the mid-1980s the potential of born-digital processes for fine arts practice. He is a pioneer in the integration of computation with fine arts photographic practice. His research, teaching and projects contribute to the ongoing historical and contemporary developments of how technologies transform visual content to result in new kind of representations. His artistic works, teaching and writings address the intersections of computation, data, photographic visualizations resulting in works-on-paper, multi-image lenticular panels, time-based animations, and digital interactive data-based installations.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center and the Media Arts & Technology Graduate Program.
Presented in conjunction with the 2024 UCSB Reads Program.
CWC Docs
The Carsey-Wolf Center is committed to screening documentaries from across the world that engage with contemporary and historical issues, especially regarding social justice and environmental concerns. Documentaries allow filmmakers to address pressing issues and frame the critical debates of our time.