Material Encounters: Surface Tension, Screen Space – Giuliana Bruno

Friday, October 7th 2016 – 09:00-10:30

What is the place of materiality in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms?
Professor Giuliana Bruno, the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, will discuss these elements in her talk based on the her latest research and book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Bruno examines how material relations appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. Showing how technologies of light produce new forms of materiality, the lecture will focus on the historicity of the screen. The screen surface is a site where different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. On the surface, new object relations and material connections are revealed, across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media.

GIULIANA BRUNO is the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Professor Bruno is internationally known for her research on the intersections of the visual arts, architecture, film and media.
Her new book Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014) revisits the concept of materiality in the contemporary world. Her seminal book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002) won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in Culture and History – a prize awarded to „the world’s best book on the moving image“ – and has provided new directions for visual studies. Her recent book, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, published by MIT Press in 2007, has been translated in Europe and Asia. For Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 1993), a journey through modernity and cultural memory, she won the Society for Cinema and Media studies annual award for best book in film studies.
Professor Bruno has contributed to numerous monographs on contemporary art, including Isaac Julien for The Museum of Modern Art (2013), Jesper Just for the Venice Biennale 2013 (and MAC/VAL, 2012), Jane and Louise Wilson (2004), Cristina Iglesias (2013), Chantal Akerman (MHKA, 2012), Diana Thater (LACMA, 2015), and exhibition catalogues of the Whitney Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

She also writes frequently on art and architecture for international books such as Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2009), Space (MAXXI Museum for 21st Century Arts, Rome, 2010), and Ruins (MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery, 2011).
Professor Bruno lectures at universities and museums internationally, including, recently, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, The Museu de Arte in Rio de Janeiro, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Dia Center for the Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern and the Louvre Museum.
She is featured in Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers as one of the most influential intellectual working today in visual studies (Sage, 2008).