Part of the exhibition “ERASE / REWIND”

The German Film Office and Goethe-Institut New York are pleased to present a screening of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 film World on a Wire in conjunction with the exhibition ERASE / REWIND by artist Jonathan Joosten. Joosten will be joined by exhibition curator Emily Pretzsch to discuss the film.

Based on the 1964 science-fiction novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye, the two-part film follows cybernetics engineer Fred Stiller, who takes over a mysterious research project after the sudden death of his predecessor. Set in a near-future society, the project simulates a virtual world populated by conscious “identity units”, raising questions about reality and control. As Stiller investigates, people around him begin to disappear, suggesting that his own reality may itself be a simulation. The film combines a film noir atmosphere with early cyberpunk themes of artificial worlds, surveillance, and unstable identities. The same novel later inspired the Hollywood film The Thirteenth Floor (Josef Rusnak, 1999), which reinterprets its ideas for a late-20th-century audience and functions as a remake of Fassbinder’s earlier adaptation. Joosten examines how categories of time and knowledge can be destabilized across shifting levels of reality.

ERASE / REWIND is on view through June 25 at Goethe-Institut New York.

Welt am Draht
Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
West Germany, 1973
204 min. (99 + 105 min.)
With Klaus Löwitsch, Barbara Valentin, Mascha Rabben, Karl-Heinz Vosgerau, Wolfgang Schenck, Günter Lamprecht, Ulli Lommel, Ingrid Caven, Margit Carstensen


Jonathan Joosten is a German-Dutch artist living and working between Berlin and New York. His artistic practice can be read as resistance to chrononormativity—the linear structuring of time—as it is linked to capitalist productivity and historical continuity. Joosten works with residual or fragmented materials: industrial prototypes, discarded architectural elements, and other forms that have become obsolete. Instead of imposing a logic of progress or completion on these objects, he emphasizes incompleteness, delay, and repetition. Joosten’s works suggest an ongoing becoming, a refusal to settle into past or future, memory, or vision. His recent solo and duo exhibitions include We are all the weakest link. Goodbye!, Neuworkshop, Munich (duo, 2025); Buck up – never say die. We’ll get along, GlogauAir, Berlin (duo, 2025); and TRADING POSTmodernity, Kunstraum Potsdamer Straße, Berlin (solo, 2024).