Surface

“In this finely crafted and evocative book, Bruno weaves a deep archaeology of the screen. Architecture, art, fashion, film, and philosophy find themselves embedded in the folds of a single sensuous fabric. Vision itself becomes tactile, and we begin to grasp the digital.” –Beatriz Colomina, Princeton University“This is a unique book, in both form and content. Ranging from essay to diary to the epistolary, and from the work of Wong Kar-Wai to Walead Beshty, architects Herzog & de Meuron, Sally Potter, and Issey Miyake, Bruno traces a cultural about-face regarding our tendency to denigrate surfaces as superficial. Surfaces here are instead meeting-places, zones of encounter and admixture–the precise site that painting, cinema, architecture, fashion, or even the body all share, and where increasingly today they are transformed.” – “George Baker, University of California, Los Angeles”“Beautiful and complex… . The readings in the book become a way of revealing hidden relationships between different forms of media, relationships that currently shift and that negotiate the question of the dividing line between work, world and viewer in ways that prompt us to re-consider the nature of those very divisions… . Hugely impressive.” – “Architectural Histories”“Bruno’s latest book is that rarest of gems: a patient and profound intellectual engagement, sweeping in scope, which is nonetheless a pleasure to read… . Give[s] us a critical vocabulary for engaging with the growing conflation of screen practices and screen architectures.” – “Art Journal”“Material ways of understanding visual culture through synesthetic embodiment, the modalities of movement that relate to philosophical ways of elaborating spectatorship, and the sort of post-phenomenological vocabulary that was visible in how for example some of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy entered academic debates in the 1990s. In Atlas of Emotion, this is visible in notions such as texturology that also reappears and becomes more central years later in Bruno’s later book Surface. Textures–including architextures–are part of both the artistic materiality of collections, museums, maps, but also fashion/textiles where cinema finds itself articulated before and after its ‘birth.’” – “Leonardo”“Screen theory–the use of screens specifically in technology-rich applications such as personal computing–has been the primary domain of new media scholars. Bruno extends and enriches the discourse by both carefully considering the material qualities of digital manifestations of the screen and integrating discussion of nondigital equivalents.”– “Choice”

Giuliana Bruno is the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Her books include Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts;Streetwalking on a Ruined Map; and Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film.

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