Overview

Event link

Orosz, Márton. 2023. “György Kepes. Interthinking Art + Science.” GYÖRGY KEPES. INTERTHINKING ART + SCIENCE. https://kepesfilm.com/.

This film was directed by Márton Orosz and after the 2023 premier in Saskatoon, and showing across the globe, it was recently shown in OCAD University, where the director remotely attended the occasion. The documentary film explores the legacy of György Kepes and the influential network of artists, designers, and scientists who worked across disciplines to rethink the relationship between art, science, technology, and society.

Key takeaways

• For Kepes, media as collaboration, media as a field of interaction, as different from just a message
• Philosophy: humanizing science through art
• the book, The language of vision, 1944
• Educator and Enabler, creating frameworks, institutions for others to come forward
• Dissolving boundary between organic and technology
  • cybernetic art was the center
  • feedback mechanism between tech processes, human, and environment
  • not mathematical cybernetism, artificial intelligence, but more in organic life
• too scientific for art, and too art for science
• cannot rely on existing structure
• making allies, James Kilian, president of MIT, nuclear deterrence, intelligence, surveillance system
• corporate sponsorship
• system theory
• visual perception/cognitive perception
• Gestalt theories shaped his thinking, making sense of his visual thinking, in practices, camouflage of technology
• Which goes back o Bauhaus education
• 1965-1971, vol.1 Education and Vision
• Vision and value
• The visional art today, preface, visual culture is used here in the context of contemporary art
• Optical design, visual design
• as artist and designer
• trained as a painter
• there are more modern medium, so to self teach film, photography. Publicity, graphic design is something fine art was capable of teaching students of commercial design
• framework for designers to make compositions, how art could provide a system that can be taught
• design, public design, or for him, civic art (in the department of architecture and planning) public commissions, and private art interacted with each other
• ended up at MIT, restart painting, leverage the experience at MIT
• art that uses all sensory channels, painting is a living organism, “my painting will take care of each other when he’s gone”

  Related notes

• film
• The film was created as the director’s doctorate thesis, when he realized it would be his last chance to record many people in the film. More than half of the participants have since passed away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tNPGsSjTew

• Kepes was invited to MIT in 1940s
• organic quality and engineered quality in playful interaction
• kepes looked at the center as an extension of Bauhaus idea

https://youtu.be/3NSGJLtXWr8?si=2Hw_HLkWGFn36a03

• goal: give human the chance to be fully hman
• William Morris, Ruskin
• you cannot see your true self unless being negated your best self
• be fully human is to have an enriched life while not neglecting social obligations
• childhood dream: blue sky, honest human relationship
• simple art forms, the honest craft has inner radiation
• social human and painter dream
• 1978 critic by Pamela Olara: failure

His validity was questioned even at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1ubKCh14c8

• visual theorist
• born 1906 in a town outside Budapest
• trained as painter
• influenced by avan-gard modernism
• worked with Moholy-nagy
• became a teacher in Bauhaus
• explores photograph, photogram, objects placed on film
• New Bauhaus in Chicago
• then MIT, 1845-1975, first artist there
• very out of place, displaced person, overlooked in history, but tried to forge connection with scientists
• sense of vagabond, exile, diaspora of Bauhaus
• Language of Vision ![[Pasted image 20260412152759.png]]
• education of vision
• harsh critique from Sibyl Moholy Nagy ![[Pasted image 20260412165021.png]]

• response: affirms Bauhaus, finding centrifugal force, finding order in chaos

• MIT research is devoted to military
• collaborated with metallurgist (plutonium), engineer (air defence), mathematician (hydrogen bomb)
• scientific images
• book, the new landscape
• bring artists to work in MIT: building a center
• Exploration, exhibition
• collaborative endeavours
• perception, fractured perception

• New Bauhaus attempts to contribute through camouflage, a way to stay relevant during war, another is poster

• scientific patterns: muscle fibres, chemical compounds, cells
• microscopic, mixing scales
• electricity, objective record for scientific study as art
• The New Landscape: uniting art and science, a rose with computer punch tape, compare and contrast, snow flake vs stem, organic and inorganic, opposites that are united, balance sheets: meaningful vs meaningless, leaf and dried desert
• why? institution is blind to humanistic, counter-discouse to science
• Creativity is value, creativity can be taught, teach people to see, think about perception
• micro vs macro, extending perception to different direction
• ![[Pasted image 20260412160836.png]]
• ![[Pasted image 20260412161138.png]]
• ritual way of understanding, mystical mythological visual study
• ![[Pasted image 20260412161235.png]]
• entrails, traces
• leaf samples
• ![[Pasted image 20260412161433.png]]
• a tension, alienation in MIT
• ![[Pasted image 20260412162445.png]]
• unite disciplines through vision

Unite disciplines through a single, accessible lens, like a line, a code, vision

• How to reconciliate militaristic object/research with his humanistic art form. Entanglement ![[Pasted image 20260412163928.png]] medicine vs explosives, see beyond, through the tension?

• re-volution: turning of vision
• radical: from the root, to understand the very basis of vision
• only ways of seeing, repressed version of politics, latent politics
• the end of ideology by Daniel Bell, marxist becomes irrelevant

• critic: confusing, and entangled in military

• Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1960s
• artists work alongside scientist, at Hayden Gallery (1970), and Smithsonian
• “idioms of collaboration” find methods of working together, not conventional art artifact
• proposal, models, textual description, take place in public spaces, environmental experience
• light, photoelastic walk
• science to emulate natural, ecological landscape
• being surrounded by phenomenological effect

• electronic patterns ![[Pasted image 20260412170027.png]] ![[Pasted image 20260412170038.png]] ![[Pasted image 20260412170050.png]] ![[Pasted image 20260412170105.png]]

• becoming compelling in 50s 60s, securing funding
• similar to Bauhaus, holistic, centers are interdiscipinary
• but art was missing, it needs to be a center, but engineers need to join that
• March 4 research stoppage against Vietnam War
• Leonardo, lincoln lab, instrumentation lab, computer scientist
• He required resources from companies and institution
• while putting name against war
• Noam Chomsky: total conversion, collaboration would help redirect the resources of the centers, arts are powerful and compelling, and change people

How to convert? How art can change the world?

Environments

• Arts of the Environment, book
• human disaster vs. natural disaster
• humans have impact as great as nature, can it be redirected?
• ![[Pasted image 20260412175901.png]]
• create something in the landscape
• searchlights at Boston harbour, optical experiences
• ![[Pasted image 20260412180130.png]]
• monitor the environment and raise consciousness ![[Pasted image 20260412180600.png]] ![[Pasted image 20260412180614.png]]

Influence on avantgard in Japan (after Gutai) Hideko Fukushima

Through her involvement in the Summer Modern Art Seminar, she met surrealist painter Nobuya Abe and became involved in Studio 50, an artistic research group that met in his studio. The group self-published a mimeographed booklet, invited critics to speak, and read texts such as György Kepes’ Language of Vision together. Aside from Fukushima and Abe, members included photographer Kiyoji Ōtsuji, artist Hideko Urushibara, and sculptor Aiko Miyawaki

Influence on computer art

Max Bense developed information aesthetics between 1954 and 1965. He used Hegel as a starting point, seeing art as both a historical and an epistemic process. Bense defined the aesthetic object as a material carrier connected to “co materiality” (Mitrealit?t), thus understanding the object as a sign

By understanding aesthetic objects as signs, Bense framed them within Shannon’s purely technical communication the ory, which he attempted to adapt to human communication

terposed Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, which he understood as a model for the process of art production, consumption and criticism. Within this theoretical frame, Bense aimed to create a rational aesthetics, freed from subjective speculation and grounded upon a scientific base

s a cornerstone for a scientific aesthetics, Bense adopted David Birkhoff’s method for measurement of aesthetics. In the early 1930s, Birkhoff presented a simple formula to meas ure the aesthetic value of art: M = O/C, where the aesthetic measurement M is defined by the ratio of order O to com plexity C [2]. At a time when other structuralistic approaches were emerging, Bense combined Shannon’s theory and analy sis of the English language, Birkhoff’s mathematical analysis of aesthetic measurements and Chomsky’s generative gram mar into a theory that allowed for the analysis of art objects on a micro-aesthetic level by investigating the used sign reper toire in artworks. Having a repertoire and rules for combin ing its elements, Bense now had the tools to build a model for the macro-aesthetic values of aesthetic objects

The final aspect of Bense’s aesthetic theory is the notion of negentropy. Bense saw in art a process going in the direction opposite that of the physical process. While the physical world moves toward chaos, the world of art moves toward order. Both process and order are key terms in Bense’s aesthetic, delivering the ontological basis for his scientific approach

’s concepts, superseded the aesthetic theories of his time. By 1965 Bense had transformed the purely descriptive approach of information aesthetics into a genera tive aesthetic: Generative aesthetics therefore implies a combination of all op erations, rules and theorems which can be used deliberately to produce aesthetic states (both distributions and configurations) when applied to a set of material elements. Hence generative aes thetics is analogous to generative grammar, in so far as it helps to formulate the principles of grammatical schema-realization of

synthetic aesthetic, the goal is to produce order based on rules. How ever, just as art is defined as a ratio be tween order and disorder (with a trend towards order, i.e. negentropy), the ele ment of disorder comes into concrete generative computer programs through the pseudo-random-number generator.

Cultural life and politics in the 1960s were dominated by the debate over C.P. Snow’s “two cultures.” Snow gave his Cambridge Rede Lecture, “The Two Cul tures and the Scientific Revolution,” in 1959 [15]. The lecture was strongly in fluenced by the Sputnik shock of 1957 and full of political speculations. Snow’s main claim was that the humanities and natural sciences should bridge the abyss between them; otherwise Russian tri umphs in engineering would continue unbroken. Over the next decade, discus sion followed in nearly all parts of the in dustrialized world. T

961 Snow himself published an article in Computers and Automation, a journal that would hold the first worldwide computer art contest in 1963 [16]. In 1966 the Hungarian computer artist Leslie Mezei, living in Toronto, Canada, published a call for a network of computer artists in the same journal, and she referred to C.R Snow [17]. The opening ceremonies of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies by Gyorgy Kepes at the Massachusetts In stitute of Technology, as well as of Har vard’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, referred specifically to Snow: The science-humanities gap is being closed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Neighbors along Boston’s Charles River, these venerable seats of learning are both exploring new concepts of art education that bring together students of the humanities, social science, natural science and advanced technology to create a new kind of Renaissance man?the visual de signer of tomorrow [18].

With Kepes’s arrival from the New Bauhaus in Chicago, the tradition of the Weimar Bauhaus was brought into elite research institutions, bridging C.P. Snow’s two cultures.

Of course Bauhaus also played an important role in Ger many. Max Bense taught “information” at the Hochschule f?r Gestaltung (School of Design) in Ulm, Germany. The School of Design was founded by Inge Scholl, one of the Scholl sisters who played in important role in the Munich resistance in Nazi Germany; she wanted to found a postwar institution connected explicitly with the forbidden Weimar Bauhaus. The concrete artist Max Bill, a friend of Bense, invited him to the school shortly after its opening in 1953. During his Ulm period, Bense wrote the first part of his aesthetics. For Bense, the bridging of the gap between the two cultures was crucial.

Nees decided to write his Ph.D. thesis with Bense as supervisor. The thesis, “Generative Computergraphik,” was pub lished in 1969 and was probably the first on this topic [22]. Nees’s goal in this book can be described as a practical proof of Bense’s aesthetic (Fig. 3). The computer served Nees as an aesthetic laboratory to test Bense’s theories. Nees described the programs he used in great detail, set out the aesthetic goal he had in mind, and used numerous graphics as proofs.

Schotter (Gravel Stone) (Fig. 4), in which 22 rows with 12 squares are trans formed from a state of perfect order into a chaotic pattern, illustrating the funda mental principle of negentropy

![[Pasted image 20260412183704.png]]

and composition of well-defined objects. Mohr studied some of Bense’s works and was fascinated by the idea of an objective aesthetic based on scientific principles made possible by using the computer as a tool. He took Bense literally, investigated his form lan guage, counted the occurrence of each geographic element, fed them in

Conclusion and Outlook For an understanding of the beginning of computer art in the Stuttgart school, it is important to recontextualize the pi oneering work of Nake, Nees and Mohr within the information aesthetics of Max Bense and Moles. The discussion of the abyss between the “two cultures” provides a frame within which to formulate the new artistic approach, which was based on scientific methods and aesthetic ex periments. The experiments of the Stutt gart school were clearly a cornerstone of the “algorithmic revolution,” which to day can be discussed as a “digital Bau haus” [24]

![[20206475.pdf]]

https://monoskop.org/Max_Bense

The information aesthetics initially developed by Max Bense and Abraham A. Moles in the latter half of the 1950s tried to bridge philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, social sciences, and art theory. The goal was to develop a theory that would allow one to measure the amount and quality of information in aesthetic objects, thus enabling an evaluation of art that goes beyond “art historian chatter”.

Bense focused on physical concepts such as entropy, process, and co-reality, while Moles, similar to Daniel Berlyne, accentuated aspects of perception theory and psychology. (Klütsch 2012:67)

Following Wiener’s theory of feedback, whereby some proportion of the output signal of a system is passed (fed back) to the input, Bense devised a model for theorizing how the process of art production, consumption, and criticism is procedurally related in terms that suggest computation.

As a keystone for his scientific aesthetics, Bense adopted Birkhoff’s mathematical measurement of aesthetic values. In the late 1920S, Birkhoff had presented a simple formula to measure the aesthetic values of art: M = O / C, where the aesthetic measure (M) is defined as the ratio of order (O) and complexity (C). to This formula was adapted in very different ways. Whereas Bense adhered to the original equation, M = O / C, Moles modified the formula into M = O x C, with drastic implications. If you take low order (O) and low complexity (C), for Bense the measurement (M) can still be high, but with Moles’s modification it would be at a minimum. If both values C and O are high, Bense gets a comparatively low measurement (M), while Moles gets a maximum. Both approaches serve a purpose, and both pose problems. Bense was focused on the relation of the two values, and couldn’t explain why very low values for O and C would be considered high aesthetic values. Whereas Moles’s formula excludes the problem of the extreme ends of the function, it doesn’t have an answer for the relation of O and C (O = 0.1 and C = 10 have the same value as O = 2 and C = 5). This fundamental problem was not discussed in detail in the Stuttgart school. (Klütsch 2012:68)

As these structuralist approaches to sign systems emerged, Bense combined Shannon’s information theory, especially his analysis of the English language, with Birkhoff’s mathematical analysis of aesthetic measure and Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar (an idea of a general grammar that is hardwired into human brains and serves as a base for all natural languages). He formed a theory that allowed for the analysis of an art object on a microaesthetic level by investigating the use of sign repertoire. Having a repertoire and rules for combining the elements of that repertoire, Bense now had the tools to form a model for the macroaesthetic values of aesthetic objects. In art he saw a process that moves in the opposite direction of the typical physical process. While for Bense the physical world heads toward chaos (entropy), the world of art heads toward order (negentropy). Both process and order are key terms in his aesthetic, and these concepts deliver the ontological basis for his scientific approach. (Klütsch 2012:68)

art seeks order, not chaos

The relation of chaos/complexity and order defines the aesthetic value.

Order is a state of circumstances; it is a property, that is, a relation between entities. Artificial objects have special properties of “coreality”; they are more than their material carrier. In the case of aesthetic objects, coreality is determined by macroaesthetic rules. These rules can be interpreted as executed algorithms; the result refers to a process of neg-entropie (negentropy).

No wonder I find beauty in generative art..

 English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality, 1929) developed a process-ontology that was useful for Bense in this regard. (Klütsch 2012:68)

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=5343

The artsts featured in this portfolio were early proponents of computer art. Hiroshi Kawano, in particular, was among the very first in the world who experimented with a computer to generate works of visual art which could be accepted as such. Frieder Nake is another of the founding fathers of computer art, producing his first works in 1963. George Nees was the first artist to show his works of computer art worldwide, in an exhibition held in Stuttgart in February 1965. Kenneth Knowlton was included in MoMA’s 1968 show “The machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age.”

https://eliza-pert.medium.com/1960s-d611bd76d056

Information Aesthetics was a short-lived but influential attempt to establish a mathematically rigorous aesthetic theory that is based on objectification of perception and effort to bridge philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, sciences, and art theory.

Influenced by Wiener’s cybernetics, Shannon’s information and Communication theory and Birkoff’s semiotics, its main instigators were Max Bense[1] and Abraham Moles[2] in the second half of 1950.

Max Bense called for modern aesthetics that employ “mathematical and empirical procedures, (…) and pursues, besides numerical descriptive also technological goals”. “Modern aesthetics rest on a methodological concept, rather than a philosophical one”. According to Bense, control of the methodology can lead to objective criteria for aesthetics. As an object is a structured set of elements, he proposes to evaluate its aesthetics using a formula where complexity and order are associated. By this way he creates “machine oriented” aesthetic criteria that can be translated into a programming language or a machine code. One can get an idea of the outcome of Bense’s proposition for aesthetics by looking at the artwork of Georg Nees, who did his PhD under Bense’s supervision in the university of Stuttgart.

![[Pasted image 20260413073020.png]]

While Bense focused on the generative process of creation, Moles, as a psychologist, extended his ideas to focus on the receiver. As he states in his article “ Cybernetics and the Work of Art”,“Nobert Wiener posed the fundamental social problem of cybernetics: symbiosis with the machine that have discretely invaded our world, or more precisely, the world of our thoughts.” Moles mentions that the predominant conversation about information machines can be translated into two paths: one is the most common interpretation of a “thinking machine” and the other –more interesting according to him- is “a machine that make us think”.

Based on Shannon’s information theory and semiotics he describes how artists can become critiques and their work would be a critique on people’s perception of art. He suggests different “Cybernetic organigrams” each reflects a position of the aesthetician/artist in relation to the external world.

![[Pasted image 20260413112136.png]] ![[Pasted image 20260413112142.png]] ![[Pasted image 20260413112147.png]] ![[Pasted image 20260413112152.png]]

They also recognized a paradigm shift in design and they articulated that the designer does not only design objects, but also processes. Last but not least, their contemplation on visual perception and the implementation of this into the process of the “thinking machine” suggests ideas of artificial intelligence.

https://medium.com/sciforce/computational-aesthetics-shall-we-let-computers-measure-beauty-db2205989fb

1933, when American mathematician George David Birkhoff in “Aesthetic Measure” proposed the formula M = O/C where M is the “aesthetic measure,” O is order, and C is complexity. This implies that orderly and simple objects appear to be more beautiful than chaotic and/or complex objects. Order and complexity are often regarded as two opposite aspects, thus, order plays a positive role in aesthetics while complexity often plays a negative role. Birkhoff applied that formula to polygons and artworks as different as vases and poetry, and is considered to be the forefather of modern computational aesthetics.