Márton Orosz

Márton Orosz is Curator of the Collection of Photography and Media Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest and the Acting Director of the Vasarely Museum affiliated with the same institution. He has recently curated Time Landscape. Alan Sonfist and the Birth of Land Art (2014); Nathan Lerner: Photo-Eye (2012); Film Experiments Brought to Light (2014); and Hungarian Artists and the Computer (2016).

He earned his PhD in Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. During his studies, he was Terra Fellow at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. and Gyorgy Kepes Fellow for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research at MIT.His publications range across the histories of photography, film, and collecting. His essay on Gyorgy Kepes’ Polaroid experiments appeared in AR – Artistic Research (Walther König, 2013) and his study on the European abstract animated film industry of the 1930s in Regarding the Popular (De Gruyter, 2011).

The projects consists in a comparative study of the Hungarian–American artist Gyorgy Kepes’ social commitment to the optical message. Kepes’ ‘education of vision’ referred to an attempt to use scientific advancements to democratize the act of looking. Addressing this idea, the project will shed light on the practical applications of Kepes’ concept-oriented design pedagogy, experiments in which he juxtaposed ‘l’imagination’ with ‘l’entendement’, the visual and the intellectual functions of perception. By linking the genealogy of image science to language-oriented conceptions on vision in mid-century Modernism, the project examines the artist’s contributions to visual study initiatives avant la lettre that regarded psychophysical and neurobiological aspects of vision as a path to encyclopedic knowledge.

Kepes’ program will thus be related to the holistic integration of different disciplines in art, science, and technology in projects such as the Center for Advanced Visual Studies he founded at MIT in 1967. A historical precursor for community-based art practices, the Center came into existence in the wake of market-oriented capitalist structures.