Dr. Laura Stachel, cofounder and executive director, WE CARE Solar

Phillip Prager, Assistant Professor in Aesthetics, IT University of Copenhagen http://www.minervaberkeley.org/conferences/seeing-knowing-vision-knowledge-cognition-and-aesthetics/2014-speakers1/phillip-prager/ The Modernest Muse The Bauhaus, Weimar Germany’s iconic modernist school, which operated from 1919 to 1933, pioneered the integration of industry, science and design. This paper focuses on László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), one of the most prominent Bauhaus artists and pedagogues, who played a key role in formulating the Bauhaus philosophy. Moholy- Nagy had a particular enthusiasm for formalist photography and led and developed the Vorkurs (preliminary course), the cornerstone of Bauhaus pedagogy. While often characterized as a utopian rationalist in traditional art historical accounts, Moholy-Nagy’s photographic formalism and visual pedagogy, which he developed in Painting Photography Film (1925) , New Vision (1938) and Vision in Motion (1947) , are not pleas for rationalism; they reveal visionary insights into the mechanisms of visual perception and the features of creative cognition, such as disinterestedness, conceptual recombination, categorical reduction and play. 2014 Conference on Neuroesthetics - Seeing Knowing: Vision, Knowledge, Cognition, and Aesthetics http://www.minervaberkeley.org Co-sponsored by the School of Optometry and Vision Science Program, University of California Berkeley