Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media

Giuliana Bruno is widely recognized for her efforts to broaden film theory beyond its optical focus and to challenge the disembodied conception of spectatorship. In earlier works, she argued that the haptic, perambulatory mode of experience informed early filmmaking and reception (Atlas of Emotion, 2002), then investigated the agency of the material surfaces involved in media (Surface, 2014). In Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (University of Chicago Press, 2022), she explores the environmentality of projection in contemporary art. 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 nonhumans; that atmosphere is matter; and that elements relate through magnetic forces of attraction—Bruno apperceives in recent...