Joseph Bradshaw’s investigation into the non-life of one of America’s greatest Modernists, In the Common Dream of George Oppen, was recently published by Shearsman Books. His previous publications include chapbooks from Cannibal Books and Weather Press. Bradshaw currently lives in Brooklyn, teaches literature at the School of Visual Arts, and works in the archives at BAM, where he contributes to the BAM 150 Blog. Rediscovering German Futurism, 1920-1929 is a lecture/performance/screening by Kurt Ralske and Miriam Atkin that explores the cinema of 1920s Berlin, and what that particular political and cultural moment has to say about our own. Does the power of technology always intoxicate? Do we make images in pursuit of knowledge, or only in pursuit of power? The project takes both a real and a hypothetical form. The fantastic tale of an innovative cinematographer, Eugen Schüfftan (1893-1977), creator of the special effects for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), forms the backstory to strange experimental films screened here. These films raise questions of skepticism and belief, fiction and meta-fiction, timeliness and timelessness.
Kurt Ralske’s video, installations, performances, and prints have been exhibited internationally, including at the 2009 Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. His digital transformations of classic cinema reveal hidden worlds with familiar films. His work explores the shadow cast by cinema: on culture, on history, on subjectivity. It depicts cinema as it lives in the mind. Kurt was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship, and received First Prize at the Transmediale International Media Art Festival, Berlin. He is on the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design, in the graduate department of Digital + Media, and the School of Visual Arts, NYC, in the graduate department of Computer Art.
Miriam Atkin is a New York-based poet. She has an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.