Film Screenings / Programs / Series
MEDIA AVANT-GARDES: GYÖRGY KEPES AND CAVS/MIT
October 12 – October 13
October 12-13, 2024
The Hungarian-American artist, educator, and impresario György Kepes, a forgotten precursor of media art, was among the first to coin the term “visual culture,” and to treat it as an independent research subject. His quest to resolve the ever-increasing dichotomy between art and science led him to design the program of the Light Workshop at the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 and to found the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT in 1967.
Kepes, who became involved in the European avant-garde movement at a young age, joined fellow Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy’s Berlin studio in 1930 with the hope of mastering motion pictures, which were then seen as the most socially impactful artistic medium. Although Kepes’s aspiration to become a film director was never realized, his friendships and collaborations with cinema legends like Dziga Vertov, Boris Kaufmann, Maya Deren, Saul Bass, and Robert Gardner profoundly shaped his entire body of work.
CAVS, which Kepes founded at MIT, became one of the most internationally significant workshops for experimental filmmaking and early video art. Many prominent figures in the field, such as Peter Campus, Juan Downey, Antoni Muntadas, Nam June Paik, Stan VanDerBeek, and Aldo Tambellini, either worked there or were associated with the Center.
This film series brings together Kepes’s previously unknown moving-image works – which utilize cinematography to illustrate specific visual problems – as well as films by Kepes’s colleagues and students, and later works that emerged from CAVS following Kepes’s retirement, which demonstrate his ongoing legacy. In addition, the program marks the NYC premiere of the new documentary, GYÖRGY KEPES. INTERTHINKING ART + SCIENCE, directed by Márton Orosz, who is also the guest-programmer of this series.
Márton Orosz will be here in person to present all four programs! For more info about the documentary, GYÖRGY KEPES. INTERTHINKING ART + SCIENCE, click here.
Co-presented with the Liszt Institute New York.
Special thanks to Noémi Sallai (Liszt Institute New York); Michael Angeletti & Geoff Willard (Stanford University Libraries); Miguel Armas (Light Cone); Mackenzie Beasley & Marisa Bourgoin (Smithsonian Institution); Bronte Billman (ACMI); Jens Blumenstein (Schott Jena); Chicago History Museum; Michael Gotkin; Mickey Gral (Chicago Film Archives); Amanda Hawk & Thera Webb (MIT Libraries); and Tanvi Karia (Charles Correa Foundation).
