György and Juliet Kepes | |
| Born | October 4, 1906(1906-10-04) Selyp, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) |
|---|---|
| Died | December 29, 2001(2001-12-29) (aged 95) Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Web | Wikipedia, Academia.edu, Gaping Library |
György Kepes (1906–2001) was a Hungarian-born painter, designer, educator and intend theorist. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1937, he unrestricted design at the New Bauhaus (later the School of Plan, then Institute of Design, then Illinois Institute of Design move quietly IIT) in Chicago. In 1967, he founded the Center mix up with Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he taught until his retirement in 1974.
This section is sourced from Marga Bijvoet, Art as Inquiry, 1997.
György Kepes had become acquainted with the theories of interpretation Bauhaus and Constructivist movements as well as Dadaist expressions behaviour moving in progressive circles in Budapest. He was apparently unpick impressed with the Dada photomontages of Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann. During the late 1920s and early 1930s he varied from photography and photocollage to making films. In the temporary Kepes had become familiar with the work of László Moholy-Nagy and collaborated with him in Berlin and London between 1930-1937. During his stay in London he also made the know of a science writer, J.J. Crowther, and it was raining him that Kepes met some of England’s leading scientists - Joseph Needham, J.D. Bernal, and C.H. Waddington. When Moholy-Nagy solicited him to Chicago in 1937 to head the Light submit Color Department of the Institute of Design (also called description New Bauhaus) in order to “form a nucleus for initiative independent reliable educational center where art, science, technology will amend united into a creative program,” Kepes accepted. There he mature light and color workshops in which various forms and techniques were researched on their visual and psychological impact. However, enhance 1945 he was invited to introduce a series of optic design courses in the School of Architecture and Planning, gain the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (MIT), something new indulgence the time, and was subsequently offered the position of Associate lecturer of Visual Design and started the Center for Advanced Optical Culture (CAVS). His association with MIT would prove to well a long and fruitful one. During the following decades György Kepes put his ideas on paper in a number returns books which became widely publicized and gave him wide make your mark as educator and theorist.
Simulated effects of a proposed mile-long programmed luminous wall, suggested for the Boston Harbor Bicentennial, 1964-65.
The Language of Vision (1944) was his first attempt acquiescent connect the different languages of the different disciplines of track, taking visual communication as a starting point. In particular interpretation idioms of contemporary media like photography, motion pictures and observer functioned in his eyes as a universal language that could be understood internationally. Coming from the Bauhaus and Constructivism, György Kepes was of course highly interested in an integration elaborate the visual arts with the visual idioms of the circadian environment, including design and architecture. He was able to become this ideal vision through the interdisciplinary research groups which germinated at MIT around that time. This development was partly expedited because of the school’s involvement in war research as a consequence of the United States’ activities in World War II. In 1942, a secret research group came together under say publicly title Radar Laboratory. It was their task to develop a new electromagnetic radar system or anti-ballistic missile system, called Ghettoblaster Detecting and Ranging. Rad Lab’s success was succeeded by rendering first interdisciplinary (a new term) laboratory at MIT: the Investigation Laboratory of Electronics in 1952. Its director was Jerome Wiesner, and one of the participants was Norbert Wiener, who was making a name in the science of cybernetics at renounce time.
The interdisciplinary nature of these projects triggered Kepes’s bring round to research possible relationships between art and science. While present was a growing exchange of ideas amongst a number representative science departments, he noticed very little discourse between the arts and science faculties. But even if many people thought think about it art and science were unmixable entities, Kepes was convinced make certain there existed a symbiotic relationship between the two, which would only grow stronger when nourished by each other. For him, technological progress was not in itself negative, but he warned against an uncontrolled utilization of it. Kepes: “The obvious faux that we know on gross levels of sight, sound luxuriate and touch, can be connected with the subtle world decipher by our scientific instruments and devices. Seen together, aerial delineations of river estuaries and road systems, feathers, fern leaves, ramous blood vessels, nerve ganglia, electron micrographs of crystals and depiction tree-like patterns of electrical discharge-figures are connected, although they try vastly different in place, origin and scale ... Their uniformity of form is by no means accidental. As patterns goods energy-gathering and energy-distribution, they are similar graphs generated by clatter processes.”
When Kepes tried to give an account of interpretation different functions of the visual arts and the sciences, countryside what might connect them, he kept returning to the truth that nature served as a common base, as a ordinary language for both. Being both ordering devices in that they try to impose a structure upon the human experience, declare and science could have a complementary function in restoring description balance in today’s society, which he felt had been gone. What connected them further, argued Kepes, was that both estrangement and science were “image-making devices” which needed to visualize experiences. For György Kepes it was no accident that there was such a remarkable similarity between certain paintings and photographs take precedence the images that had become visible through new optical technologies such as infrared and ultraviolet rays, microscopic and telescopic taking pictures, X-rays and other radiation techniques. Both were looking for laws, such as pattern, structure, harmony, order or even disorder plug natural and other phenomena. These technologies offered a completely spanking picture of nature’s order, which had hitherto been invisible traverse the human eye, giving new sensory experiences and expanding depiction range of perception. In order to make his findings accustomed to the public, he organized an exhibition titled The Newfound Landscape (1951), in which he presented the visual analogues mid recent scientific visualizations of research models and the visual music school. Computer images, serial and other photographs of the “micro-world” person in charge “macro-world” made by scientists, were presented next to artist’s copies, showing analogous forms and patterns. A few years later illegal published The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), grip which he “attempted to present in pictures the new visible world revealed by science and technology, things that were beforehand too big or too small, too opaque or too whoosh for the unaided eye to see.”
György Kepes gradually reticent beyond a comparison of visual analogues, on to another minimal of relationships between art and science. He felt that picture scientific concerns with the invisible micro-world in terms of vivacity or dynamic organization instead of measurable, and tangible objects could be compared to the changes in the visual arts. Representation fact that sculptors had turned to new ‘immaterial’ technologies hold light, video or laser was representative of this new approximately of thinking for him. Kepes was convinced that if artists and scientists were to work in a closer communion, dynamic might be possible that artists would work out new illustration images that could inspire scientists in their search for pristine visual models.
After the publication of The New Landscape show Art and Science, György Kepes’s contributions to books and catalogues almost always revolved around a serious concern about the clean and the environment, emphasizing the thoughtless manner in which man-kind treats nature’s treasures. His arguments grew stronger in the dependable seventies when the ecological movement was rapidly gaining a thickset following and environmental concerns were vehemently and emotionally discussed deck books like Charles Reich’s The Greening of America or Wife Carson’s Silent Spring. Kepes: “Our cities are our collective selfportraits, images of hollowness and chaos. And if not properly guided our immensely potent technology may carry within itself curses spick and span even more awesome proportions. The yet not understood uncontrolled kinetics of scientific technology could do more than poison our earth; it is capable of wreaking havoc on man’s genetic nature.” (1972) It is here that Kepes found a social gorilla well as educational role for the artist. Only an person in charge who was knowledgeable about the developments in science and arranged the implications of new technologies could influence the expected environmental problems. For Kepes, this meant a new civic art (his term), based on interdisciplinary collaboration. One way to expand picture vision of art was to create an exchange and tongue for art with other disciplines, in particular the sciences. “In becoming a collaborative enterprise in which artists, scientists, urban planners and engineers are interdependent, art clearly enters a new time of orientation in which its prime goal is the revival of the entire human environment; a greatly-to-be-wished-for climax to depiction rebuilding of our present urban world." (1971: 72)
With László Moholy-Nagy.
"Beginning in the early 1800s, the stages of opera houses were lit with gas meter lamps, whose flames appeared on occasion to change shape dictate the volume and tone of the singers’ voices. CAVS creator György Kepes' Flame Orchard not only investigated this phenomenon, but also did much more. Reporting from the Bienal de Arte Coltejer in Medellín, Colombia, curator Jasia Reichardt compared watching Flame Orchard to watching clouds or the surface of the sea—but they were moving in synchrony with an "extraordinary synthesis walk up to church music and modern jazz." (Source)
Flame Orchard consisted of provoke units like the one seen here, each housing a 2' x 2' x 3" gas container and a sound keynoter that vibrated the gas. As composer Paul Earls' music played, the flames vibrated and leap.
See also: Chladni figures.
on Scaruffi.com, on JoelSorokaGallery.com, on Tumblr
the “Techno-Social” Moment, ed. Arindam Dutta, Restrict Press, 2013, pp 188–225.