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Séjour long

Aleksandar
Boskovic

Film studies - USA

Contact details

Email.
ab3865@columbia.edu
Personal Website.
http://slavic.columbia.edu/people/profile/1411

Research topics

Project

Bioscopic Book: Slavic Avant-Garde Cinépoetry

This book project focuses on long narrative poems accompanied by photography or photomontages that were published as separate editions across Slavic countries during the interwar period. It provides a comparative analysis of the avant-garde cinépoetry from Soviet Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, while surveying similar artworks from Western Europe. Through a number of distinct case studies, this project examines the cinépoetry works from the angle of the “bioscopic book,” a concept envisaged in a programmatic manner by El Lissitzky in 1923. The essential aspect of the project demonstrates that the bioscopic book should not be mistaken for a genre, but rather, should be understood as a theoretical, if not visionary, concept of a visual technology approximated in the series of experiments. Bošković conceptualizes the bioscopic book as an alternative cinematic apparatus (ciné-dispositive) through examining its materiality and dynamic conceptual design. The project offers a theory of the bioscopic book as a technology for a) the formulation and re-production of montage thinking as a new cognitive model by which we interact with the outside world, b) augmentation of intercultural, intermedial, and interpersonal dialogue, and c) transformation of readers/viewers into prosumers. In addition to investigating specific works of art, this project looks at the cross-cultural networks: the ways and conditions under which a specific artwork was produced, disseminated, and consumed. By exploring the diversity of ciné-dispositives through which the larger apparatuses (dispositifs) are realized in lived experience, reproduced and transformed, Bošković’s project provides an analytic context in which these differences become meaningful and thus provoke new forms of understanding.

Activities / Resume

Biography

Aleksandar Bošković is a Lecturer in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. He holds PhD in Slavic studies from the University of Michigan and M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Belgrade. He was previously employed in the Institute for Literature and Art in Belgrade. He is the author of The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s Oeuvre (2008) and a co-editor (with Tatjana Aleksić) of the Mediated Resistance: The Struggle of Independent Mediascapes During the Yugoslav Dissolution (forthcoming in 2019). His articles appeared in scholarly journals in the United States and Europe (Slavic Review, Cultural Critique, Apparatus, Digital Icons, Književna istorija) and various edited collections. He is currently working on several projects, including the anthology of Yugoslav avant-garde (with Steven Teref) and a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exploration of interwar photopoetry and bioscopic books within Slavic avant-gardes.

Main publications

  • 2019 Mediated Resistance: The Struggle for Independent Mediascapes During the Yugoslav Dissolution, co-edited with Tatjana Aleksić, Leiden: Brill (forthcoming).
  • 2019a “Thinking Film: Cinefied Matereality in Slobodan Šijan’s Fanzine Film Leaflet (1976-1979),” Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, No. 8 (forthcoming)
  • 2019b “FM Art in 1990s Belgrade: Fleka’s Šišmiš Radio as the Urban Zone of Underground Resistance,” Mediated Resistance: The Struggle for Independent Mediascapes During the Yugoslav Dissolution, Tatjana Aleksić, Aleksandar Bošković eds. (forthcoming).
  • 2018 “The Avant-Garde Quest for a Bioscopic Book,” Beyond Given Knowledge: Investigation, Quest and Exploration in Modernism and the Avant-Gardes, edited by Veivo, Harri / Montier, Jean-Pierre / Nicol, Françoise / Ayers, David / Hjartarson, Benedikt / Bru, Sascha. De Gruyter, 2018 : 59-76.
  • 2017 “Revolution, Production, Representation: Yuri Rozhkov’s photomontages to Mayakovsky’s poem ‘To the Workers of Kursk’,” Slavic Review, 76, No 2 (Summer), 2017 : 395-427.
  • 2016 “The Avant-Garde Photopoetry,” Književna istorija, XLVIII, No. 158, 2016 : 287-310.
  • 2016a “The Avant-garde Bioscopic Photopoetry Book,” Preplitanja i ukrštanja (Hibrodnost u književnosti), Bojan Jović, Marija Šarović eds. (Belgrade: Institute for Literature and Art, 2016), 223-247.
  • 2015 Временный памятник работы Владимира Маяковскаго Рабочим Курска добывшим первую руду, Москва 1924 / фотомонтаж Юрия Рожкова = Temporary monument: photomontages for Mayakovsky’s poem “To the workers of Kursk” / by Yuri Rozhkov. [Catalogue of an exhibition held March-May 2015.] Translation, comments, and design by A. Bošković. New York: Harriman Institute, Columbia University, 2015, pp. 36.
  • 2014 “The Arrest of Ratko Mladić Online: Tracing Memory Models across Digital Genres,” co-authored with M. Božović and B. Trifunović, Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, No 12, 2014 : 55-82.
  • 2014a “Агитационная фотопоэма как рукотворный памятник” [“Propagandistic Photopoem as a Handmade Monument”], Фотомонтажный цикл Юрия Рожкова к поэме Владимира Маяковского «Рабочим Курска, добывшим первую руду...»: Реконструкция неизданной книги 1924 года. Статьи. Комментарии / сост. К. Матиссен, под ред. А. Россомахина. — СПб. : Издательство Европейского университета в Санкт-Петербурге, 2014 : 27-42. — (AVANT-GARDE; вып. 4). Translated in Croatian as “Sovjetska agitprop foto-poema: fotomontaže Jurija Rožkova za poemu Majakovskog Radnicima Kurska...” and published in Književna smotra, br. 185 (3), 2017 : 17-25; and Kulturna povijest Oktobarske revolucije - sto godina kasnije, Danijela Lugarić Vukas ed., (Zagreb, 2017), 73-90.
  • 2013 “Yugonostalgia and Yugoslav Cultural Memory: Lexicon of Yu Mythology,” Slavic Review, Vol. 72, No 1, (Spring ), 2013: 54-78.
  • 2011 “Performing Authority: Manifesto Genre and Literary Theory,” Jezik, Književnost, Kultura – Novici Petkoviću u spomen, J. Delić, A. Jovanović, eds., (Belgrade: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2011), 481-503.
  • 2008 Pesnički Humor u delu Vaska Pope [The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s œuvre], Institut za književnost i umetnost, Belgrade, 2008, pp. 280.