György Kepes. Interthinking Art + Science

Hungary, Canada, 2023/2024. 98 minutes. Directed by Márton Orosz, produced by László Zsolt Bordos, music by Péter Nánási. Screening followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker Márton Orosz.

“With the brain of a scientist, the heart of a poet and the eye of a painter”: this was the guiding principle of György Kepes, artist, designer and cultural catalyst, who introduced the term interthinking. With this concept, he envisaged a bold new approach: the collaboration of artists and engineers to address some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as ecological awareness, augmented reality and adaptive design, long before these ideas entered the mainstream.

Although still little recognised, Kepes’s influence extended far beyond the limits of art. From working alongside the Bauhaus figures in Europe to shaping the cultural landscape of post-war America, he was less a solitary genius than an “active humanist” who advocated the democratisation of visual culture and encouraged intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Márton Orosz’s documentary offers the first comprehensive portrait of this intellectual and modernist force. It reveals Kepes not only as a visionary thinker and a polymath, but also as a pioneering figure in the Art and Technology Movement, whose ideas remain surprisingly relevant even today.