1On September 29th, 2023, the $ 2.3 billion entertainment venue, ‘Sphere’, was officially inaugurated in Las Vegas with the first of a longer run of concerts by the Irish rock band U2. The world’s largest spherical architectural structure (112 metres high and 157 metres wide), Sphere consists of two gigantic projective surfaces: the interior ‘Sphere’ and the exterior ‘Exosphere’. Whereas the interior Sphere is equipped with the latest immersive haptic, visual, and audio systems, the Exosphere’s surface, covered with 1.2 million programmable hockey puck-sized LEDs, is designed to project its ‘atmospheres’ onto the Las Vegas cityscape for artistic and commercial purposes. In both cases, Sphere is representative of a modern obsession with projected atmospheres, the topic of Giuliana Bruno’s new monumental monograph Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (The University of Chicago Press, 2022).
2Throughout her oeuvre, Bruno has sought ways to liberate us from the notion of the spectator as immobile by demonstrating the various intricate connections between motion and emotion. In Atmospheres of Projection, this is achieved through a recasting of projection as “a space of potentiality in which many forms of mediation and intersection are made possible, in an atmosphere that is itself a transitory site, an intermediate space – a moving place between internal and external, subjective and objective, private and public (7).” The ‘art of projection’ is thus irreducible to specific techniques or technological devices; rather, it rests upon a transformative capacity of the play and modulation of light to create ambient environments of atmospheric resonance and transmission (p. 15).
3Atmospheres of Projection thereby continues the mapping of visual culture laid out by Bruno in Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Cinema (2002) and Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2014), continuing her promenade through the genealogy of the projective arts. Taking cinema as a key departure point, Bruno masterfully draws together sites and milieus of a variety of atmospheric forms of projection from early modern panoramic culture to contemporary installation art. Her illuminating work provides a rich guide for not only reconsidering moving image history but also for re-approaching the supposedly ultra-modern bleeding edge spaces, such as Sphere, within a broader, airier context rich in pre-cinematic, cinematic, and post-cinematic modalities.
4The expansive genealogy Bruno offers in Atmospheres of Projection demonstrates the ubiquitous presence of atmospheric operative principles even in their most basic and elemental forms. For this purpose, Bruno employs what she refers to as a ‘transductive’ methodology designed “to think across materialities and milieus, to mediate between different modes, to connect diverse matters together, to put sites in contact with one another, in order to see how that contact can transform them (p. 21).” Aiming to overcome the reductive inscription of cinematic projection into the history of optical media alone and the understanding of it as mainly derived from the Renaissance’s linear perspectivism, Bruno shows that projection involves expansive environments that “coexist across nonlinear temporalities, in the form of strata and layers (p. 10).”
5The result is a complex weaving together of various diverse scientific discourses and theoretical traditions from 16th century writings on alchemy to modern meteorology, from psychoanalytical theories of ‘projection’ to the science of electromagnetic radiation, and from the phantasmagoria to modern moving image installation art. As such, Atmospheres of Projection provides a theoretically dense and historically expansive cartography of the art of projection. Despite its many thought-provoking digressions, the book never loses sight of its main focus: the recasting of projective spaces as atmospheric, resonant and transitory spaces. In keeping with Bruno’s ‘transductive’ methodology, this review will refrain from providing a summary of the book’s individual chapters. Instead, the focus will be upon what I believe to be the book’s two major achievements, as these relate respectively to the study of affective atmospheres and ambient spaces in correspondence with the commitments of ambiances, as well as more specifically to the emerging field of atmosphere research in film and media studies as the focus of this special issue.
6Atmospheres of Projection opens with the legend of the young Corinthian maid Dibutades, the daughter of Butades also known as Kora, who used the shadow-lines of her lover’s projection to draw his outline on a wall. Using the outline to model the youth’s face, Butades then baked it in clay to create a sculpture. Yet, of main interest to Bruno is the story of Dibutades using the lamplight to ‘project’ her lover’s body onto a visual plane, thereby keeping a luminous trace of his material presence ahead of his imminent departure. Bruno suggests that this myth, often portrayed as the ‘origin of painting,’ “traces the very scene of projection, even its atmosphere (p. 2).” Yet, Dibutades’s drawing, as Bruno goes on to argue, provides more than a mere representation of her departing lover; it enacts a “projective environment, that is […] also an affective atmosphere (ibid.).” It also demonstrates how this act of transmission involves a psychic figuration that for Bruno significantly, and in stark contrast to Plato’s allegory of the cave, embodies an expression of female desire.
7Revisiting a topic that has occupied her since one of her earliest published works, “Streetwalking around Plato’s Cave” (1992), Bruno recasts the art of projection and its modality of spectatorship in terms of feminine desire. No longer the immobile, fixed or passive prisoner-observer of Plato’s cave, whose gaze by default has been assumed to be male, Bruno’s ‘spectator’ is far more an urban flâneur (or, more precisely, flâneuse or ‘streetwalker’) breathing the atmospheres of the city: mobile, sensorially liberated and embodied. Spectatorship thus freed from its optical dominance involves a “tactile appropriation of space, in a site of public architecture” that is related “to the perception and reception of arcades and their cafes, to railway terminals and their arriving trains (p. 124).”
8In bestowing images with motion, cinema has played an important role in the history of projection, yet it is not movement the myth of Dibutades highlights but the luminous, projective play of light. This allows Bruno to posit a continuity between cinema and other atmospheric practices of light modulation and to understand it within a larger ecology of projective media and practices concerned with the manipulation of light that not only includes pre-cinematic forms of projection such as the Phantasmagoria, the camera obscura and panoramic forms of screening but also the non-cinematic ensemble of practices concerned with the staging of light. As Gernot Böhme writes in a piece on the phenomenology of light, “everything,” from architecture, urban planning and interior architecture to theatre, museums, marketing, cinema and advertising, “is illuminated with aesthetic intent (p. 203).” To this, Bruno adds the crucial point that the luminous act of projection is not simply a site of sensory mixture. Far more, it should be understood as a form of worldmaking as it “creates, and is, a milieu (pp. 24‑25).”
9Addressing how we become aware of the atmospheric powers of the built environment, Böhme (2016) turns to the cinematic metaphor of the cut. When we cross the hectic street and enter the tranquil space of a church, we are confronted with a sudden switch in the sense of place and its atmosphere analogous to that achieved by the filmic cut (p. 73). Reflections on cinema and screen-based forms of mediation have, however, been conspicuously absent within the growing interdisciplinary literature on atmosphere (for a noticable exception, see Griffero, forthcoming). In an age dominated by the circulation of moving images, this is a significant oversight to which Atmospheres of Projection offers a welcome correction. By conceptualising cinema and the art of projection more generally as atmospheric practices, Bruno demonstrates the continuum between these and those concerned with the natural, built or staged environment.
10Atmospheres of Projection partly achieves this by highlighting the elemental nature of projection in both the literal and figurative senses of the word. In this respect, the book has strong affinities with what Nicole Starosielski (2019) has observed to be an increased preoccupation of film and media studies with the notions of the elements and the elemental. In parallel, and following on from the media philosophies of, amongst others, Aristotle, Goethe and Walter Benjamin, Böhme has demonstrated the importance of the concept of ‘medium’ to the philosophy of atmosphere. Understood in its elemental sense and prior to its modern connotation of ‘technologies of mass communication,’ the notion of medium was associated with “natural elements such as water and earth, fire and air” (Durham Peters, 2015, p. 2; see also Hörisch, 1999, p. 134). Material substances such as ‘air’ can then be considered as a medium both in providing the surrounding environment that is the life-giving blanket for terrestrial beings but also as the ‘atmosphere’ in and through which sensory experience can be manifested (cf. Horn 2018). Chapters 10 and 11 on the liquid and nebular works of Andreotta Calò and Robert Irwin, respectively, are examples of this approach.
11Bruno’s most important impetus to this discourse on elemental media theory is her cultural genealogy of projection, which allows the connection between elemental and modern information-technological forms of mediation to be outlined to an unprecedented degree. To achieve this, Bruno draws inspiration from Antonio Somaini’s (2016) work on Walter Benjamin’s ‘media theory’. For Benjamin, the concept of medium is not to be equated with the technological instrument or a device for communication. A medium, as Bruno recaps this argument, is rather to be understood “as a perceptual field of mediations and conceived as an ambiance, a field of connections (26).” The notion of medium therefore indicates “the spatially extended environment, the milieu, the atmosphere…in which perception occurs (Bruno, 2022, p. 26; see also Somaini, 2016, p. 7).”
12The notion of medium broadly conceived as the ‘atmosphere in which perception occurs’ is equally applicable to elemental and modern media. A true intellectual gem of her genealogy of projective media is the bringing together of this Aristotelian tradition of media diaphana – also at the core of Böhme’s philosophy of atmospheres – to reveal and expand the environmental and relational potentialities within the work of contemporary artists and filmmakers. In line with her own media archaeological sensibility, Bruno is attracted to artists who investigate “old or obsolete projective apparatuses” without nostalgically fetishising their historical difference from our digital present. The chapters on Diana Thater (#5), Jesper Just (#6), Chantal Akerman (#8) and Rosa Barba (#9), respectively, demonstrate Bruno’s fundamentally relational methodology. Again, countervailing readings that would prioritise issues of domination, alienation, or dematerialisation, Bruno instead “thinks closely, along and through the work” of these artists, drawn in by their own “analytical gestures” that interrogate and reinvent the operations of projection and substantiate the practice’s material and affective dimensions (p. 15).
13Thus Diana Thater’s multimedia installations enact a projective imagination that not only invites spectators to “see the way projectors see,” but also, through Bruno’s drawing on alchemical roots of “projection,” activates the transmutation of space and substance through light (p. 164). The potentially daunting scale of Jesper Just’s dual-screen This Nameless Spectacle is instead posed as a generative environment, a recent point on projection’s cultural itinerary that mobilises the distinction of interior and exterior to re-adjust sensory and spatial orientation. Rosa Barba’s material foregrounding of the “pulsing” of the projector and the porous layering of screen space restores both the overlooked contributions of women in the history of astronomical observation as well as embodied and public spaces of projection (p. 249). Among Bruno’s most insistent interventions is to prioritise the installation work of Chantal Akerman. In dialogue with her rightly celebrated theatrical films, Bruno praises Akerman’s “specific ambient sense,” discernible in her “borderline” works like South (1999), From the Other Side (2002) or A Voice in the Desert (2002), and interrogates the screen’s aesthetic, physical and political tensions. Acknowledging its potentially divisive, territorialising function, Bruno instead highlights the screen’s ability to act less as a physical barrier than as an environmental and “transitional object,” a complex material ensemble that paradoxically and powerfully “relies on distance as a way to achieve closeness” (p. 230).
14Atmospheres of Projection no doubt is a monumental work in environmental media studies that should be considered a key source for those working on the cultural production of atmospheres and ambient spaces and seeking to understand their projective and luminous modes of being and the ‘environ-mentality’ it fosters.
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