Giuliana Bruno
· Professor of the Practice of Visual and Environmental StudiesHarvard University · Landscape Architecture
Active 1987–2024
About
Giuliana Bruno is the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University and a faculty affiliate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is internationally recognized for her research on the intersections of the visual arts, architecture, the environment, and media. Bruno has published seven award-winning books and over two hundred essays, which have been translated into more than fifteen languages. Her recent book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (2022), explores the relationships between projection, atmosphere, and environment, linking art to ecological concepts of ambiance. Her earlier works, including Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2014) and Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (2002), have significantly contributed to visual studies, with Atlas winning the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award and being recognized as an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association. Bruno's scholarship also encompasses cultural memory and modernity, as seen in her award-winning book Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (1993). She has contributed to numerous monographs on contemporary art and has written extensively for exhibitions and museums worldwide. Bruno regularly lectures at international universities and museums, and she serves on the Steering Committee of Fondazione Prada, fostering cultural innovation through multidisciplinary research and contemporary arts. Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship, a Ph.D. honoris causa, and residencies such as the Louis Kahn Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Mathematics
- Operating system
- Law
- Physics
- Thermodynamics
- History
- Algorithm
- Composite material
- Media studies
- Geometry
- Environmental science
- Aesthetics
- Visual arts
- Art
- Materials science
Selected publications
2024-09-18
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAs an art of viewing the city, film was born out of the geography of modernity and its visual culture. The invention of cinema is set at a transformative moment in the cultural panorama of modern life. A new spatiovisuality was being produced as film emerged. The city was the center of this transformation. Alongside the urban aesthetics of panorama paintings and dioramas, architectural venues such as arcades, department stores, the pavilions of exhibition halls, glass houses and winter gardens, along with the railway, incarnated the new geography of modernity. 1 These were all sites of transit. Mobility – a form of cinematics – was the essence of these new architectures. By changing the relation between spatial perception and motion, the new architectures of transit and travel culture prepared the ground for the invention of the moving image, the very epitome of modernity.
Environmentality of Immersive Projection
AN-ICON Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] · 2023-12-28
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingHow does an artwork express an “environmentality?” Can we redefine immersion, in critical terms, as a form of environmental projection? In taking up such questions from my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, my text addresses the relation between projection and environmentality in the visual arts in order to question immersivity. Confronted with the phenomenon of environmentalization, we need to re-imagine the ecology of representation. Positing ecology as an environmental relation, I will consider its artistic imagination both historically and theoretically. I propose that we revisit the environmentality of media archaeology to understand how this impulse is furthered in current moving-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. I will especially address environmentality as it relates to movement and scale, questioning the relation between immersion and magnification. I will advance my argument by presenting the large-scale moving-image installations of the Danish-born, New York artist Jesper Just. Does magnification always, only imply spectatorial immersion? Other forms of experience arise when confronting an ecology of scale in art. What else happens when we scale? Can immersion be understood, more critically, as a form of environmental absorption? In recasting immersion in environmental terms, I propose that we consider absorption as empathic projection with space. In shifting from the human subject’s own immersive identification to this critically aware, enveloping field of empathic projection with the non-human, we can discard the prevalent human-centric position that pervades most immersive discourses. A different ecology of immersivity rises to the surface by relating the empathic “projective imagination” to “atmospheric thinking.”
Significação Revista de Cultura Audiovisual · 2023-12-13
articleOpen accessSenior authorEm antecipação à sua visita a São Paulo em dezembro de 2023, a Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual realizou uma entrevista online de duas horas com Giuliana Bruno, com foco em Atmospheres of Projection e em suas outras contribuições inovadoras. Bruno é palestrante convidada do workshop interdisciplinar organizado pela Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (Fapesp) em dezembro de 2023. Antes disso, ministrará uma Masterclass na Universidade de São Paulo (USP), evento promovido pelo Laboratório de Investigação e Crítica Audiovisual (Laica) e pela Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual, com o apoio da Fapesp, do Instituto de Estudos Avançados (IEA-USP), do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Meios e Processos Audiovisuais da Escola de Comunicações e Artes (PPGMPA-ECA) e do Programa de Pós-Graduação e m Multimeios da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (PPGM-Unicamp).
Significação Revista de Cultura Audiovisual · 2023-12-06
articleOpen accessSenior authorGiuliana Bruno is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, situated in the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts. For over three decades, her 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. Bruno's interdisciplinary approach has fostered connections between these fields, enriching our understanding of visual culture. Her work anticipated the field of ‘media archaeology’, uncovering and analyzing historical layers and traces embedded in visual artifacts for deeper contextual insights. She has also contributed significantly to spatial theory, particularly in relation to the intersection of architecture, art, and film, exploring how spaces and places shape our experiences and perceptions. In anticipation of her visit to São Paulo in December 2023, Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual conducted a two-hour online interview with Bruno, focusing on Atmospheres of Projection and her other groundbreaking contributions.
The Ruined Map, Relinked: A Postscript
2023-06-30
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2022-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Rosa Barba is an artist whose work explores the materiality of projection. From fabricating screens to transforming museums into physical instruments of projection, Barba's artistic practice dissects the projective apparatus and reimagines the very nature of projection, both in and beyond the purview of cinema itself. As Bruno explores in Chapter Nine, “Atmospheric Screening: Rosa Barba and Performative Projection,” Barba's installations keenly stage how cine-projection works, not just mechanistically or technologically, but also materially, historically, spatially and psychically. For Bruno, Barba's attention to questions of atmosphere and environmentality – as plays out across both the content and form of her work – is of especial note. Barba geologically excavates into the landscape of projection, all the while performing its luminous atmospherics in the art gallery.
2022-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Chapter Eleven, “Environmental Projection: Robert Irwin and Nebular Atmospheres” centers on the work of artist Robert Irwin. In her close reading of one of Irwin's most important artworks, Excursus: Homage to the Square, first exhibited at Dia Chelsea in 1998 and refashioned for Dia Beacon in 2015, Bruno emphasizes Irwin's use of fabric screens to create environments that shrink the perceptual distance between the viewing subject and the space around them. In his deploy of screens to create cloud-like ambiences, Irwin champions a form of “nebular aesthetics” – that is, an aesthetics of indeterminacy and atmosphere – also found in the work of such artists as Olafur Eliasson and Afredo Jaar, and architects like Peter Zumthor. Like Steven Connor and Hubert Damisch, Bruno's scholarship recognizes the theoretical force of air, its perceptual haze, and the affective potential of clouds and cloud-like environments to catalyze new ways of thinking about and being in the world.
2022-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract In the work of artist Diana Thater, viewers experience the very process of projection itself as atmospheric. In Chapter Five, “Alchemic Milieus: Diana Thater's Phantasmagoric Habitats,” Bruno conducts a close study of Thater's work, emphasizing the way in which it harnesses projection as an alchemic form of transmutation between different material and geometric realms, fusing them into atmospheric, immersive environments. Thater's employ of projection, in this ambient way, situates her within a much longer media history of phantasmagoric spectacles. Bruno conducts a psychoanalytic reading of Thater's projective installations, emphasizing how Thater's immersive installations create affective, embracing atmospheres that induce sympathy with inanimate forms like animals and landscapes. Hers is a form of projection into the ecology of natural, animate worlds.
2022-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Chapter Seven, “The Thickness of Projection: Cristina Iglesias's Weathered Screen Casts” highlights the sculptural screens of artist Cristina Iglesias. Iglesias's screens, Bruno argues, constitute physical thresholds that call attention to what is an essential function of all screens and, in turns, all environments of projection: mediation. By troubling distinctions between interior and exterior space, Iglesias‘ work makes us sensitive to how screens function architecturally, reproducing the ambience of screening in both psychic and spatial terms. Iglesias's acts of screening sensitize us to, and projects us into, the surrounding world. Working with organic materials, her sculptural interventions often integrate into nature, and transform the ecology of the spaces in which they are sited.
2022-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract In “The Ambiance of Projection: An Environmental Archaeology of Mediality,” Bruno excavates a conceptual and etymological history of projection itself, locating its roots in “atmospheric thinking,” and across domains of architecture, environmental philosophy, film, psychoanalysis and (historical traditions of) alchemy. Projection, Bruno argues, is a dispositif that far exceeds the material frameworks of cine-projection. It is a process, or cultural technique, that, like a door, develops potentials and links across spaces, persons and entities. Insofar as projection extends across spaces and creates environments, it is closely related to the notion of ‘atmosphere’, which Bruno emphasizes to be not just a form of physical environment, but psychic environment and imaginative space. While most histories of projection, Bruno notes, foreground its visual, perspectival origin, her conception of projection, as defined in this chapter, considers it to be a primarily haptic and environmental construct.
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
T. J. Demos
- 4 shared
Eyal Weizman
- 4 shared
Maria Nadotti
- 4 shared
Jeff Dolven
Princeton University
- 4 shared
Brooke Holmes
University of Pittsburgh
- 4 shared
bill brown
University of Chicago
- 4 shared
Mel Y. Chen
- 4 shared
Esther Hamburger
Universidade de São Paulo
Education
- 1993
Ph.D., Visual and Cultural Studies
Harvard University
- 1989
M.A., Visual and Cultural Studies
Harvard University
- 1985
B.A., English
University of California, Santa Barbara
Awards & honors
- Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in Culture and History (2003)
- Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual award for best b…
- Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Associati…
- Book of the Year by The Guardian (2003)
- Fellowship from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Vi…
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