New Landscape in Art and Science

Figure: Transverse section of wood: 250X 1951 Photographic enlargement on particleboard Lent by Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Gyorgy Kepes, Hungary 1904

György Kepes was an artist, educator, theorist who studied the impact of emerging imaging technologies on visual culture. A pioneer of interdisciplinary collaboration Kepes developed a new model for creative practice that is equally invested in art and advanced technology.

At the invitation of Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy the Hungarian-born artist moved to Berlin in 1930 and then in 1937 emigrated to the US to teach at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. In 1967 Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), an art-science research institute at MIT. His early work with the military on camouflage techniques had a lasting impact on his visual design pedagogy as well as on his position towards the military-industrial complex in Cold War America. The CAVS was at the center of the conflict during the antiwar movement of the late 1960s as students protested the institute’s involvement with defense contractors.

While there was a growing exchange of ideas amongst a number of science departments, he noticed very little discourse between the humanities and science faculties. Even when some people thought that art and science were unmixable entities, Kepes was convinced that there existed a symbiotic relationship between the two, which would only grow stronger when nourished. He believed the obvious world we know on gross levels of sight, sound taste and touch, could be connected with the subtle world revealed by scientific instruments and devices developed through technological progress.

Seen together, aerial maps of river estuaries and road systems, or electron micrographs of crystals and the tree-like patterns of electrical discharge-figures are connected, although they are vastly different in place, origin and scale. He claimed that none of these similarities of forms are purely accidental, and that they are all patterns of energy-gathering and energy-distribution translated into similar processes, a theory he translated through the comparison of a vast array of scientific images, among them microscopic minerals, cell structures, and electric discharges with works of art.

By 1947, he furthered his explorations between art and science by assembling material for his book entitled “The New Landscape in Art and Science”. The content he gathered for the book consisted of a variety of black and white enlargements of scientific photographs, and the collection of this material evolved into his exhibition “The New Landscape in Art and Science” at the MIT Charles Hayden Memorial Library. In both the book and exhibition, he emphasized the extensive visual analogies between scientific photographs and abstract art. He turned away from the naturalistic representation of plant and animal life, and towards the visible processes of growth. His goal was to portray continuities between science and art in all possible forms of visual expression, dynamic as well as static.

It can be argued that Kepes was also inspired by Thompson’s work, since both publications “The New Landscape” and “On Growth and Form” consisted mainly of scientific photographs framed with an artistic intention28. His undertaking was the recurrent topos of the European Modernist culture from the early 20th century of recognizing the similarities between abstract art and natural recurring forms, which he termed “naturamorphic analogy”. Such theories of the scientific image analogy had already taken place within the discourse of France and the nature-centric worldview of “Biocentrism”. Kepes aimed at enacting an interdisciplinary “ethic” that would lead to the “union of the arts and sciences”, an ambition he achieved in his book and exhibition The New Landscape in Art and Science.

Suggested readings:

Blakinger, John R. Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus. MIT Press.

M.J.M. Bijvoet: Art As Inquiry

Kepes, Gyorgy. The New Landscape in Art and Science.

Rawsthorn, Alice (2015-03-18). “Gyorgy Kepes, Wizard of Light and Motion, Comes Back Into Focus”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-06-11.

Oliver A I Botar. György Kepes’ “New Landscape” and the Aestheticization of Scientific Photography. The Pleasure of Light, 2010.

Languages of vision: Gyorgy Kepes and the “new landscape” of art and science Finch, Elizabeth.City University of New York, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2005. 3187401.

Anne Collins Goodyear. Gyorgy Kepes, Billy Klüver, and American Art of the 1960s: Defining Attitudes Toward Science and Technology. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2005

Kepes, Language of Vision. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944. P196.

Figure 1 (top): Lichtenberg figures: A. R. von Hippel 1951 Photographic enlargement on particleboard Lent by Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries Figure 2 (bottom): Stroboscopic Photo, 1948, The Kepes Institute, Hungary

Figure 3 (top): Lichtenberg figures: A. R. von Hippel 1951 Photographic enlargement on particleboard Lent by Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries Figure 4 (bottom): Caboderay oscilloscope displays of a problem being solved by a Digital Computer. MIT

Figure 5 (top): Cabode-ray oscilloscope displays of a problem being solved by a Digital Computer. MIT Press. Figure 6 (bottom): Aquilegia Radiograph: General Electric X-rays. The New Landscape in Art and Science

Figure 7: Transverse section of wood: 250X 1951 Photographic enlargement on particleboard Lent by Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Figure 8: Transverse section of Osmanthus wood: 50X 1951 Photographic enlargement on particleboard Lent by Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries