Bringing together cultural history, visual studies, and media archaeology, Bruno considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment.
Projection has long been transforming space, from shadow plays to camera obscuras and magic lantern shows. Our fascination with projection is alive on the walls of museums and galleries and woven into our daily lives. Giuliana Bruno explores the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture and their continued importance to contemporary artists who are reinventing the projective imagination with atmospheric thinking and the use of elemental media.
To explain our fascination with projection and atmosphere, Bruno traverses psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, the history of science, visual art, and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time. She reveals how atmosphere is formed and mediated, how it can change, and what projection can do to modify a site. In so doing, she gives new life to the alchemic possibilities of transformative projective atmospheres. Showing how their “environmentality” produces sites of exchange and relationality, this book binds art to the ecology of atmosphere.
Bringing together cultural history, visual studies, and media archaeology, Bruno considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment.
Projection has long been transforming space, from shadow plays to camera obscuras and magic lantern shows. Our fascination with projection is alive on the walls of museums and galleries and woven into our daily lives. Giuliana Bruno explores the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture and their continued importance to contemporary artists who are reinventing the projective imagination with atmospheric thinking and the use of elemental media.
To explain our fascination with projection and atmosphere, Bruno traverses psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, the history of science, visual art, and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time. She reveals how atmosphere is formed and mediated, how it can change, and what projection can do to modify a site. In so doing, she gives new life to the alchemic possibilities of transformative projective atmospheres. Showing how their “environmentality” produces sites of exchange and relationality, this book binds art to the ecology of atmosphere.
Projection and Atmosphere: An Introduction, in Medias Res
The Cultural Atmosphere of Projection
1 The Ambiance of Projection: An Environmental Archaeology of
Mediality
2 Sites of Transmission: Psychic Transformation and
Relationality
3 Atmospheres of Transduction: Relatedness and Sympathy
Environmentality: The Art of Projection
4 Projective Climates in Art: The Screen as Environmental
Medium
5 Alchemic Milieus: Diana Thater’s Phantasmagoric Habitats
6 The Nature of Scale: Jesper Just’s Mareoramic Environments
7 The Thickness of Projection: Cristina Iglesias’s Weathered Screen
Casts
8 Elemental Empathy: Chantal Akerman’s Psychic Atmospheres
9 Atmospheric Screening: Rosa Barba and Performative Projection
10 Fluid Ecology: Giorgio Andreotta Calò and Liquid Screens
11 Environmental Projection: Robert Irwin and Nebular
Atmospheres
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Giuliana Bruno is the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of
Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the
author of several books, including Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in
Art, Architecture and Film, winner of the Kraszna-Krausz prize for
best Moving Image Book; Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, winner of
the Society for Cinema and Media Studies book award; Public
Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts; and Surface: Matters of
Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media.
"Bruno proposes to rehabilitate the concept of projection by
tracing a new genealogy that may overcome the restricted definition
produced by postmodernism. . . . To project is to throw forth, to
transform, to draw, to plan, to move forward. Existing long before
the cinematograph and surviving the transformations of this medium
in the digital era, projection is too pervasive to be
forgotten."
*BOMB Magazine*
"Atmospheres of Projection is thus a rare book. It is not only
a timely contribution to the study of moving images of our age but
is also a work that can be said to invent what has always been
there, what has been overlooked like a constellation obstructed by
poor air. Through Bruno’s research, we come to see glowing, cleanly
now, all these traces connecting so many different stars, from
Pepper’s ghost shows to contemporary art, with the impression that
this has always been the case."
*e-flux*
"Atmospheres of Projection builds on recent scholarship on the
agency of matter to make a case for the agency of atmosphere, then
elaborates art’s capacity to engage with that agency to transform
our experience of the environment. From her analytical
foundation—that agency is shared among humans and non-humans; that
atmosphere is matter; and that elements relate through magnetic
forces of attraction—Bruno apperceives in recent art an affective,
haptic engagement with the world that is a paradigm shift away from
modernism’s preoccupations with optics or the flat surface. . .
. The methodical, dynamic deployment of intellectual and
material history together with formal analysis throughout this
volume makes Bruno’s analysis convincing and compelling. . .
. This effort contributes significantly to a growing body of
work interested in reciprocal relations between the environment,
mediating matter, and the subject."
*Leonardo*
"In [Bruno's] new book Atmospheres of Projection, she considers the
interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment,
reclaiming the concept of 'projection' as a positive creative
force."
*Harvard Gazette*
"Monumental . . . as theoretically ambitious as it is historically
and artistically expansive. . . . In a world modified by
projection, Bruno vitally centers the aesthetic creation and
transmission of atmospheres, generating new ways to think about the
political valence of spectatorship within artistic spaces in a
post-cinematic era. . . . Through nuanced and inquisitive case
studies, highlighted by evocative descriptions of each artist’s
ambient, atmospheric work, Bruno’s volume serves as its own site of
intellectual transmission. . . . Atmospheres of Projection is a
call to attunement: in a world of omnipresent projection, of
inescapable screens, Bruno guides her readers to become more
observant of the ambience, sensation, and empathy generated by
these atmospheres and worlds."
*Film Quarterly*
"For over three decades, [Bruno's] critical thinking has been
characterized by sophistication, rigor and originality,
placing her among the leading world academics exploring
intersections between visual arts, art history, architecture, film,
and visual culture studies.. . . Her latest book, Atmospheres
of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen
Media, considers the interrelations between projection, atmosphere,
and environment, binding art to the ecology of ambiance."
*Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual*
"Bruno's aim is to liberate projection from the
functional conception attributed to it within the history and
theory of the arts, so as to investigate and enhance its
potentialities . . . Addressing the question of projection
constitutes, now more than ever, a way to reflect on the
relationship between the capacity of media to construct
environments and the medial character of the natural elements
themselves. . . . It is a way to reflect critically and
ecocritically on the environment considered as a 'projective' and
'relational' space. . . . Reading Atmospheres of
Projection is an exciting journey that most of
all pushes us to come to terms with an archaeology of light
and water.”
*Fata Morgana (translated from Italian)*
"Absorbing and, frankly, quite unforgettable . . . Bruno goes
deep into history, philosophy, science and (contemporary) art to
re-think and rejuvenate ‘projection’ by reconnecting it to its
origins in alchemy, magnetism, cartography, and architecture. What
she brings back from her archeological expedition is a dynamic,
wide ranging and most of all humane re-description of projective
practices. Projection, Bruno shows, is a supreme technique to
overcome walls, borders and defensiveness. . . . Atmospheres
of Projection is like a space ship taking us on a journey through
the expansive universe of the arts of projection and
screening."
*Division/Review*
"Bruno’s Atmospheres of Projection conducts a virtuoso
excursion through the poetics and phantasmatics of the projective
imagination. Moving with mercurial fleetness and animation across
alchemy, geometry, mathematics, psychoanalysis, architecture, and
ecological thought, Bruno reveals how projection is bound, not to
the sharply defined planes and angles of perspective thinking, but
to the dispersive permeations of environments and milieux. Her
scintillating and fine-spun readings of the atmospheric
architectures of artists, designers and filmmakers show how
irresistibly the locked, locative relations of the ‘at’ or the ‘on’
give way to the shifting dispositions of the ‘through’, the
‘between’ and the ‘amidst’.”
*Steven Connor, University of Cambridge*
“In this exhilarating book, Bruno asks not only ‘What is an
atmosphere?’ or ‘Toward what ends has the concept of atmosphere
been put?,’ but also ‘What do atmospheres do?’ What comes to
light is how these ethereal, powerful clouds act upon and with us,
carrying affect, enabling artistry, enacting creativity, inflecting
mood. Atmospheres project, as that verb too
is radically refigured: Bruno lets it float beyond a
psychoanalytic frame to become an activity of crossing boundaries
between self and other, subject and object.
Atmospheres of Projection is lyrical and learned, provocative
and inviting — and makes a significant contribution to
materialist philosophies, to film theory, to art criticism and
aesthetics, and to anyone who breathes in the atmospheres of our
time.”
*Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins University*
“Bruno’s extraordinary book is a capital redefinition of the
boundaries between art, reality and ecology. We are used to
thinking of art as a representation of the real: an immaterial
duplication of it that transforms matter into image. This book
shows us that art is always atmospheric projection: transporting
the real out of its proper place that image with the world instead
of separating it from it. To make art is always to traverse the
cosmos, to make atmosphere with it. Art, then, is the first form of
ecological construction of the world.”
*Emanuele Coccia, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales*
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