Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media

by Giuliana Bruno

Overview

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.


 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226817477
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/20/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	24 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

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.
 

Table of Contents

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
 

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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

"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

"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)

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

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

"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

"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

"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

"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