György Kepes (founding director) — MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies founded

1967

Artists: György Kepes (founding director) · Year: 1967 · Medium: Research institution — artist fellowships in residence at MIT, focused on art/science/technology collaboration · Substrate: MIT institutional resources; visiting-artist fellowships; studio and research facilities for fellows · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) György Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT in 1967 on the argument that the most consequential artistic questions of the twentieth century — scale, environment, light, collaboration between artist and scientist — required an institution that did not yet exist. CAVS was that institution. It was housed in a small building on Ames Street in Cambridge, staffed by rotating fellowships rather than permanent faculty, and explicitly modeled on the scientific laboratory — a place where artists would work on research problems beside, and sometimes with, MIT's engineers. Kepes had been a Bauhaus-adjacent designer in Hungary, the art director at László Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus in Chicago, and, from 1946 forward, a professor at MIT teaching visual design to engineers. His 1944 book Language of Vision is one of the clearest twentieth-century arguments that seeing is a constructed skill; his 1956 The New Landscape in Art and Science, illustrated with photomicrographs and X-ray images from MIT's labs, was the first sustained case that the visual culture of the sciences was in itself an aesthetic movement. CAVS was the institutional expression of that thirty-year argument. The fellows Kepes convened in the first decade included Wen-Ying Tsai (cybernetic sculpture), Otto Piene (who would succeed Kepes as director in 1974), Harold Tovish, Vassilakis Takis, Joan Brigham, Aldo Tambellini, and Paul Earls. The Center produced no degree, held no gallery, and measured its output in completed projects. Its model — artist-in-residence at a technical institution, working at scale, with access to engineering resources — became the template for every subsequent art-and-technology lab, from the MIT Media Lab (which subsumed CAVS in 2009) to Ars Electronica's Futurelab. What the Center argued in 1967 is now almost uncontested: that serious artistic work with technology is research, and requires institutional space to fail, and cannot be done alone. Lore Kepes was already sixty-one when he founded CAVS. He had been at MIT since 1946 — twenty-one years of teaching design to engineers — and had campaigned for the Center for nearly a decade before the administration approved it. He staffed the early years out of personal goodwill: Tsai, Takis, and Tambellini all came on Kepes's handshake. The Center's annual budget in 1967 was roughly $100,000, most of it secured from the Graham Foundation. Kepes ran it like a small Budapest atelier: long lunches, arguments about Bauhaus pedagogy, an insistence that engineers be welcome. He stepped down in 1974 to make room for Piene and spent the rest of his life writing. He died in 2001 at ninety-five, having outlived most of his original fellows. CAVS's archive now lives in the MIT Libraries. Sources • Kepes, György (ed.) — The Visual Arts Today (Wesleyan, 1960). • MIT CAVS — program files and fellows list, MIT Libraries Distinctive Collections. • Wasserman, Max — "Kepes at MIT: The Founding of CAVS," Leonardo Journal, vol. 38 (2005).