Reviewed by Katarzyna Balug

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 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 first part of the book is a cultural archaeology that binds the histories of projection to atmosphere. Bruno first excavates the foundations of these historical terms. The first chapter opens with a genealogy of concepts that enabled “atmospheric thinking” (10) in the nineteenth century. Bruno traces projection’s capacity for transduction, one materiality’s ability to contaminate another, to fifteenth-century alchemy. An archaeology of terms such as milieu, medium, and ambiance links them to the emergence of atmosphere and theories of air in modernity. Once we understood the universe as electromagnetic, we learn, it became conceivable that light as a wave endowed with force mediates relations between subject and environment, creating material interconnectedness. In this way Bruno pinpoints cine-projection as an environment with blurry edges that operates as a cultural technique: an operation always in flux that is both a partition and a space.

Subsequent chapters attend to projection’s psychic and transformative capacities. Chapter two opens with the 1908 Méliès film Long Distance Wireless Photography, which introduced projection both as a medium of animation in the trajectory from painting to photography to film, and as psyche-revealing, X-ray-like seeing device. This chapter elaborates the concurrent evolution of projection and psychoanalysis, from the Claude Glass through hypnosis, mesmerism, and phantasmagoria. Bruno probes projection’s boundaries and its embodied, receptive porosity that produces an immersive and absorbing environment. She registers empathy as reciprocal: we both project vital feeling onto aesthetic form and sense its vital energy. Chapter three develops atmosphere through the historical concept of Stimmung and considers ideas like immersion and sympathy, via Jane Bennett, as receptivity to the contagion of another, including the non-human. In perhaps the most politically salient point in the book, she reminds us that swimming in the waves doesn’t make one water but modifies both the environment and the swimmer (112). Bruno’s meticulous historical analysis and poetic, at times difficult, prose in the early chapters situates projection as forging an immersive, transductive environment in which the boundaries blur between subject and object, viewer and artwork.

In the second half, shorter chapters on contemporary artists who exhibit "atmospheric tendencies” (23) activate the concepts developed in the first half. Each details a case study that reimagines projection as a haptic environment or envisions “the objecthood of the screen in a gallery space” (136). A bridging chapter between the two halves traces the media archaeology of the screen. Here, Bruno’s intimate knowledge of film history shines in dialogue with a succession of contemporary visual artists, adding historical depth to often-familiar works. Throughout, Bruno reminds us that material experimentation with atmospheres of projection has been present since the birth of cinema. This chapter addresses contemporary politics of the screen, highlighting artists who reflect on how visual culture and communication work in contemporary society. For example, Alfredo Jaar omits figuration and reveals the apparatus of projection to comment on image overload; Camille Henrot and Christian Marclay test the boundaries and layers of the digital frame. However, unlike the carefully curated content projected from her objects of analysis, the everyday screen presents a barrage of overwhelming content designed for grabbing attention. One wonders how the theoretical apparatus developed in the book might serve to make sense of the uncurated screen environment beyond the gallery setting.

The remaining chapters dive deeply into individual contemporary practices. A chapter on Diana Thater’s projective works, installed in specially constructed environments, revisits alchemy’s transductive capacities. In a chapter on Jesper Just’s projections across wide spans, Bruno sees the moving panoramas of the 19th century. Through Cristina Iglesias’s latticed screens of wood, iron, or metal that filter existing light and other elemental forces, Bruno reiterates the architectural origins of the screen. Here, no generated image is projected but rather the atmosphere emerges as the screen filters available light. Where does projection begin and end?

The last chapter, written in the most accessible tone of the book, both clarifies and problematizes the limits of projection. Through Robert Irwin’s screen installations, we return to the architectonic quality of the screen which, in the modern environment, is as pervasive as it is indistinguishable from a canvas, wall, or window. Bruno references Hubert Damisch’s meditation on clouds (2002) to suggest that clouds, conceptualized like a sheet by modern painters, as well as Irwin’s translucent white scrims, express the modernist’s play with the flat surface. However, the clouds 'and screens’ material evanescence, the text clarifies, denies the possibility of enframing that flatness, making them immersive, environmental media. In recent works like Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Blur Building (2002) or Transsolar and Tetsuo Kondo Architects’ Cloudscapes (2010) the screen has no edges; it has become nebulous, coextensive with the environment. Recent architectural theory has grappled with questions of facade and envelope in the digital age; Bruno’s concluding chapter insightfully articulates an enveloping, absorbing tectonics that merits further examination.

The methodical, dynamic deployment of intellectual and material history together with formal analysis throughout this volume makes Bruno’s analysis convincing and compelling. The plentiful, exquisitely printed images are not always referenced in the body of the text but are left to operate on their own, reminding the reader of Rosalind Krauss’s use of imagery in The Optical Unconscious: they contribute their own atmospheric projection.

Atmospheres of Projection is a relevant work for students and scholars that theorizes how we engage mediated space and how the world moves us, which stretches well beyond the discipline of film studies. In this book, visual, cultural, and media studies are environmental humanities, deploying an environmental mode of analysis to analyze subject matter that may not be concerned with ‘the environment’ at all. This effort contributes significantly to a growing body of work interested in reciprocal relations between the environment, mediating matter, and the subject.