Film Screening: György Kepes. Interthinking Art + Science

"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 underrecognized, 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 MIT – a groundbreaking platform that united artists and scientists to collaboratively explore new ways of seeing and engaging with the civic space. His efforts to humanize 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 prioritized 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.

Canada / Hungary, 2024
98 minutes
Director: Márton Orosz

Panel discussion:

Dorcas Müller (ZKM)
Philipp Ziegler (ZKM), Moderation
Ming Tsai (Tsai Foundation)
Márton Orosz (Director)