Giuliana Bruno: Atmospheres of Projection

Giuliana Bruno presents her new book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment.

"What is an atmosphere? What do atmospheres do? How do they create an environment? Atmospheres of Projection explores the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture and their continued importance to contemporary artists and architects who are reinventing the projective imagination with atmospheric thinking and the use of elemental media. 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. 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.

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.”

—Steven Connor, University of Cambridge

Speakers: 
Giuliana Bruno, Emmett Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University
Jane Bennett, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University.
Martino Stierli, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

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