Gyorgy Kepes

Kepes Gybrgy 1947-ben fogott hozza az anyaggyujteshez a tudomany es a muveszet kblcsbnbs bssze-fUggesei ro l fran d6 kbnyvehez, amelyet ,Az uj latkepnek" nevezett. 1 A kbnyvhbz bsszegyult tudomanyos fotografiak fekete-feher nagyftasainak a felha sznalasava l kiallftast rendezett ugyanezzel a elmmel az MIT campusan, a Charles Hayden Kbnyvtar ujonnan epult, Ralph Walker, az MIT tanara altai tervezett minimalists tereiben. 2 A kiallftas megtervezeseben reszt vett az MIT egyik vegzos diakja, Thomas McNulty is. Kepes a fot6kat szello-

Based on György Kepes’s call for ecological consciousness in the arts (1972) and taking Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as a departing point, this paper examines the continuous growth of interconnectedness between art and ecological issues, using examples such as Hans Haacke’s Non-Human Living Sculptures and biological systems (1965–72), Pierre Huyghe’s sculptural situations1 Untilled (2012) and After ALife Ahead (2017), Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s critters and food sculptures, and Diana Lelonek’s Center for the Living Things (2016–) and The Seaberry Slagheap stand (action). Looking back over a timespan of around 60 years, the relationship between the arts and what has been called ‘nature’ has undergone major shifts as a historical, cultural and scientific concept. Various theories of post-(human)nature and eco-fiction have become influential over the last decades; a fact that is well-established. Leaving behind confirmed dualisms, an expanded idea of ecology might help to approach these artistic positions and their specific sculptural aesthetics of the living.

Con motivo de la celebración del 150 aniversario de la Escuela de Arquitectura y Planeamiento Urbano del Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), cuyos actos de conmemoración acaban de finalizar, el presente artículo plantea una revisión de algunas experiencias interesantes que tuvieron lugar tras la inauguración del Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) del MIT, un centro de investigación nacido a finales de los años sesenta, orientado a la realización de proyectos medioambientales que incorporaban nuevas tecnologías, gracias a la colaboración entre profesionales de distintas disciplinas. Fundado por György Kepes en 1968, quien ocupó la dirección del centro hasta el verano de 1974, el CAVS se creó con el objetivo de desarrollar investigaciones en el campo del arte, la arquitectura y el urbanismo que demostraran la viabilidad de las nuevas tecnologías de la información
como herramienta de creación, y su aplicación en proyectos colaborativos de escala urbana que involucraban a la ciudadanía,
buscando paliar el impacto ambiental producido por el rápido crecimiento de las ciudades modernas. Para ello, el artículo comienza
centrándose en la figura de Kepes, impulsor de la iniciativa, destacando aquellas líneas de trabajo que desarrolló a lo largo de su
trayectoria profesional, que influyeron directamente en su concepción del centro, y ofreciendo algunas referencias sobre el contexto
en el que se funda el CAVS. A continuación, plantea el estudio de una selección de obras significativas realizadas por los primeros
residentes que trabajaron directamente bajo la dirección de Kepes, con el fin de valorar su aportación al campo de la arquitectura
y, más concretamente, a la construcción colectiva del medio ambiente mediante la tecnología.

PALABRAS CLAVE arquitectura; tecnología; proyecto urbano; Kepes; medio ambiente.

On the occasion of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the School of Architecture and Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whose commemorative events have just ended, this article presents a review of some interesting experiences that took place after the inauguration of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), a research centre founded in the late sixties, aimed at carrying out environmental projects that incorporated new technologies, thanks to the collaboration among professionals from different fields. Founded in 1968 by György Kepes, who headed the centre until the summer
of 1974, the CAVS was created with the aim of developing research in the field of Art, Architecture and Urban Planning, to prove the
viability of information technology as a new creative tool, and its application in collaborative urban-scale projects involving citizens,
seeking to mitigate the environmental impact produced by the rapid growth of modern cities. The article begins by focusing on the
figure of Kepes, the promoter of the initiative, and highlights those lines of work that he developed, throughout his professional career, which directly influenced his conception of the centre and offers some references on the context in which he founded the CAVS.
A study is also made of a selection of significant works carried out by the first fellows who worked under the direction of Kepes, in
order to assess their contribution to the field of Architecture, and, more specifically, to the collective construction of the environment
through technology.

KEYWORDS Architecture, technology, urban project, Kepes, environment.

I launch our day-long workshop on artist and impresario György Kepes, in particular his Vision + Values Series, with the terms " cybernetics " and a " cybernetics of cybernetics. " I explore how these ideas unfold in various places within Kepes's publishing exploits, both within and beyond the V+V Series. I do so not foremost according to objects, artworks or artefacts, arguing that the publishing endeavors of Kepes might be construed as cybernetic because of, say, the interactive and kinetic nature of work by George Rickey and Naum Gabo, or, say, the ecological processes inherent in the work of Robert Smithson or PULSA. While possible, as all figures elicited contributed to Kepes's books, I will not pursue definitions in this way. Rather, I define said terms according to the words published in Kepes's anthologies – by way of the writers in his collective stable of thinkers, their style of writing, and the language they used. Thus, what follows is an argument for the cybernetics of Kepes's work based on a close reading of the text as artefact. If cybernetics is the science of observed systems, second-order cybernetics is the science of observing systems: which is to say, first-order cybernetics is based on the logic of watching, creating, and organizing systems from a stable locus outside of the system while second-order cybernetics is based on the observer located within the dynamic system, affected by and affecting the system through the act of observation. The latter, the subject/observer of second-order cybernetics, is thus molding, molded by, and participating within the self-organization of a given system.

A paper given at the session 'Surrealism's Subversive Taxonomies", Annual Conference of the College Art Association,  Los Angeles, February 2018. Chairs Claire Howard and Sean O'Hanland

The paper discusses the development of Roger Caillois' critical and comparative method and his role as a surrealistic 'Encyclopedist'. It addresses the influence of surrealism on Caillois' concerns with drawing together apparently paradoxical or distinct objects of study and how he developed this method into an interdisciplinary approach he called 'Diagonal Science'. The paper discusses Caillois' personal collection of artistic and natural objects, and how they reflect his interest in bridging science and poetics and his notion of the latter as "the science of correspondences".

A tanulmány az amerikai művészet az 1960-as évekre vetített magyarországi recepcióját vizsgálja. A hatástörténetben elmélyedve arra keresi a választ, hogy mennyire volt egyértelmű és kizárólagos két ország művészei között kibontakozó párbeszéd iránya? Más szóval: mekkora figyelem övezte a tengeren túlról a vasfüggöny mögötti ország művészetét a hidegháborús korszakban, és egyáltalán volt-e rá igény, hogy a magyar művészet képviselőivel kapcsolatot tartson fenn az Egyesült Államok?
A kontextust, amelyben a téma elhelyezésre kerül, Edward Fry-nak, a New York-i Guggenheim Museum legendás kurátorának 1965-ben tervezett budapesti látogatása adja. Az amerikai szakember magyarországi kutatásával kapcsolatos dokumentumok alapján feltárásra kerülnek azok az okok, amelyek lehetővé tették, hogy a 60-as évek közepétől a két ország új művészeti irányzatainak képviselői között egy személyes, az adott politikai berendezkedéstől független párbeszéd jöhessen létre. A tengerentúli művek autopsziáját deficitként megélő magyar neoavantgárd minden eszközt megragadott arra, hogy bekerülhessen a globális művészet vérkeringésébe, a háború utáni amerikai művészet alakítói ugyanakkor nem átallottak felhasználni azt a szerény ismeretet, amiről Magyarország kapcsán ebben az időben értesülhettek.

The chapter follows the thread of design education and tactile pedagogies, focusing on a significant shift in the 1950s and 1960s by which the senses started to be treated as commodities, technologies, and infrastructures. These new models of sense turned sensual operations and feelings into data that had to be brought into information flows and produce feedback loops to improve teaching and research; it also made classrooms into research laboratories and workshops where new ways of being in the world and languages to talk about experience were configured. Throughout the chapter, my argument is that design education contributed in significant ways to define a new sensorium that was to be central to educational research and to social and psychological sciences, in which tactile and visual experiences were translated as information records and as data processing. 
I first present some ideas about tactility as a pedagogical strategy in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in the Bauhaus school. In the second section, I introduce the shifts that the “Americanization” of tactilism in the 1940s and 1950s. In the third section, I discuss both Konrad Wachsmann’s algorithmic pedagogy and Bruno Munari’s tactile workshops in the 1950s-1970s. Both experiences, despite their differences, shared some assumptions about knowledge and the self that were related to the new sensorium  and new kind of governmentality. In the concluding remarks, I reflect on what the history of design education as a seemingly marginal field might say about educational research and its silences and blind spots.

The impact of the quasi-philosophical movement ‘General Semantics’, founded by Alfred Korzybski, on post-war visual communication theory has yet to be fully explicated. While Korzybski’s influence on the British ‘Independent Group’ of the 1950s is recognised (c.f. Massey 1995), and more recently contacts between General Semantics and post-war modernism in the United States have been exposed (Vallye 2009), the philosophical and historical connections between General Semantics and László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes of the New Bauhaus Chicago remain under explored.

Ideological and methodological homologies between the Dessau Bauhaus and the Vienna Circle Logical Positivists have been elucidated by Peter Galison (1990, 1996). A core aspect of what unites Logical Positivism and modernist design theory is a concern that inherited languages (even ‘visual languages’) interfere in some way with understanding; that languages bring with them conceptual schemes and therefore, potentially, conceptual distortions. Thus, some form of purified language is sought; one that will erase national, cultural and historical peculiarity, and bring forth an age of technological reason.

But of course these ideas recur throughout twentieth-century discourse. We find them not only in the cradle of analytical philosophy, but also in the (less reputable) theory of General Semantics. General Semantics was founded by Korzybski in 1933 with a vanity-published tome, Science and Sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and General Semantics. Korzybski was not a philosopher in any typical sense (and in fact, he was rejected as a quack by analytical philosophers including Ernest Nagel, W.V.O. Quine and Alfred Tarksi). Like the Logical Positivists, Korzybski was concerned that natural languages engendered illogical habits of thought. However, Korzybski’s aim was not simply to refute misguided notions, but to invent a psychotherapeutic technique. At the expense of a short course from The Institute of General Semantics, one could break the ‘historico-grammatical’ bonds of language and fulfill one’s intellectual potential. General Semantics was presented as a cure-all snake oil, capable of remedying ‘neuroses and psychoses; various learning, reading or speech difficulties […], general maladjustments in professional and / or personal lives […], heart digestive, respiratory, and ‘sex’ disorders, some chronic joint diseases, arthritis, dental caries, migraines, skin diseases, alcoholism’.

A spate of books followed Science and Sanity in the late-30s and early-40s, popularising Korzybski’s ideas. These included Stuart Chase’s bestseller, The Tyranny of Words (1938)  and S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Action (1939). It was Hayakawa (at one-stage Korzybski’s heir apparent), that did the most to consolidate connections between modernist design theory and General Semantics. In 1940 Hayakawa attended summer sessions taught by Moholy-Nagy and the two became close friends. This led to Moholy-Nagy inviting Hayakawa to give seminars on ‘semantics’ to his students.

More than a personal friendship, Hayakawa found homologies to General Semantics in Moholy-Nagy’s and Korzybski’s writings. The theory of visual communication developed in post-war America by Moholy-Nagy in Vision in Motion (1947) and The New Vision (1947) and by Kepes in Language of Vision (1944) (for which Hayakawa provided the introduction), was derived from the theory of modernist painting of the European and Russian avant-gardes. Central to Moholy-Nagy and Kepes’s account was the claim that the inherited mode of perspectival spatial representation was not based on fidelity to reality, but was rather an inherited ‘visual language’. The arbitrariness of this ‘language’ had been proven by developments in physics and non-Euclidean geometry which described the world in more than three dimensions. The task of modernist visual communication was to develop new non-arbitrary modes of spatial representation, which would be scientific and transcultural, and therefore tethered to a vaguely defined metanarrative of emancipation through science. For Hayakawa, this was a direct analogue of the General Semanticists’ claims regarding the necessity of overcoming ‘insane’ linguistic habits.

As Galison has shown, connections with the Logical Positivists were continued at The New Bauhaus in Chicago; however, in the United States both groups shed their left-wing internationalist associations. It is telling that as links between the Positivists and the Bauhaus came undone on American soil, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes were drawn to General Semantics, a commodified form of linguistic philosophy.


References
Dahms, Hans-Jaochim, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit in the Architecture and Philosophy of the 1920s’, in Carnap Brought Home: The view from Jena, ed. by Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), pp, 357–376

Galison, Peter, ‘Aufbau/Bahuas’, Critical Inquiry 16/4, 1990, pp. 709–752
——, ‘Constructing Modernism: the cultural location of Aufbau’, in Origins of Logical Empiricism, ed. by Ronald N. Giere and Alan W. Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), pp. 17–44

Massey, Anne, The Independent Group: Modernism and mass culture in Britain, 1945–59 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Vallye, Anna, ‘The Strategic Universality of trans/formation, 1950–1952’, Grey Room 35, 2009, pp. 28–57