Ecological Environments

A programme of experimental films made at CAVS, MIT.

The programme curated by Márton Orosz focuses on György Kepes’s ecological and environmental experiments at CAVS and on their wider legacy.

Although “The New Landscape in Art and Science” had already articulated its planetary vision in the 1950s, by the end of the 1960s Kepes was increasingly concerned with the ecological consequences of technological civilisation and with the possibility of developing new art forms capable of addressing them.

These concerns acquired a particular urgency around 1970, when environmental issues came to the forefront of public debate: President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act on 1 January, and the first Earth Day took place in April. Kepes’s programmatic book, “Arts of the Environment”, published in 1972, articulated his response to these anxieties, criticising the separation of art from life and its reduction to a commodity, and calling for artistic practices capable of restoring direct experience and reconnecting human perception with the environment.

Techno-ecological practices

For Kepes, the challenge was not only the representation of nature, but also a reconsideration of the relationship between human-made environments and the larger systems of which they form part. At CAVS, this expanded conception of landscape developed into a field of techno-ecological practices in which new media, ecological thinking and civic-scale interventions converged. From Otto Piene’s sky art and Jürgen Claus’s underwater art to projects involving rivers, cities, atmospheric phenomena and planetary environments, these experiments sought to transform technological systems from instruments of control and representation into means of perceiving, inhabiting and rethinking our environment.

Film selection

1. Flame Orchard, György Kepes, 1972, 7 min
2. Planet Meer. Underwasserkunst von Jürgen Claus [Planet Sea. Underwater Art by Jürgen Claus], Sigurd Tesche, 1980, 28 min
3. You and Your Neighbourhood, Charles M. Correa, 1954, 10 min
4. Video Trilogy. Study of the Charles River, Bob Lewis, 1969, 7 min
5. Monument to a River, Juan Downey, 1973, 13 min
6. After Laughter, Stan VanDerBeek, 1981, 7 min
7. Looking Forwards/Looking Backwards, Rus Gant, 1982, 8 min
8. Desert Sun / Desert Moon, Otto Piene, Shawn Brixey, Elizabeth Goldring, Lowry Burgess, Tom Van Sant and others, 1986, 20 min
9. Planet Ocean. Underwater Art, Jürgen Claus, 1978/1983, 5 min