Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media 9780226817477

Table of contents :
Contents
Projection and Atmosphere: An Introduction, in Medias Res
The Cultural Atmosphere of Projection
1 The Ambiance of Projection: An Environmental Archaeology of Mediality
2 Sites of Transmission: Psychic Transformation and Relationality
3 Atmospheres of Transduction: Relatedness and Sympathy
Environmentality: The Art of Projection
4 Projective Climates in Art: The Screen as Environmental Medium
5 Alchemic Milieus: Diana Thater’s Phantasmagoric Habitats
6 The Nature of Scale: Jesper Just’s Mareoramic Environments
7 The Thickness of Projection: Cristina Iglesias’s Weathered Screen Casts
8 Elemental Empathy: Chantal Akerman’s Psychic Atmospheres
9 Atmospheric Screening: Rosa Barba and Performative Projection
10 Fluid Ecology: Giorgio Andreotta Calò and Liquid Screens
11 Environmental Projection: Robert Irwin and Nebular Atmospheres
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Atmospheres of Projection

Atmospheres of

GIULIANA BRUNO

Projection Environmentality in Art and Screen Media

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative Scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by Giuliana Bruno All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in China 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-81745-3 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81747-7

(cloth) (e-­book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226817477.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Bruno, Giuliana, author. Title: Atmospheres of projection : environmentality in art and screen media / Giuliana Bruno. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021037126 | ISBN 9780226817453 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226817477 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Projection art. | Environment (Art) Classification: LCC N6494.P74 B78 2022 | DDC 709.04/07— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037126 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Sally K. Donaldson and Andrew Fierberg

Contents

P R O J E C T I O N A N D AT M O S P H E R E :

An Introduction, in Medias Res

1

The Cultural Atmosphere of Projection 1 THE AMBIANCE OF PROJECTION: 2 SITES OF TR ANSMISSION:

An Environmental Archaeology of Mediality

Psychic Transformation and Relationality

3 AT M O S P H E R E S O F T R A N S D U C T I O N :

Relatedness and Sympathy

19 61 89

Environmentality: The Art of Projection 4 P R O J E C T I V E C L I M A T E S I N A R T: 5 ALCHEMIC MILIEUS:

The Screen as Environmental Medium

Diana Thater’s Phantasmagoric Habitats

6 T H E N AT U R E O F S C A L E :

Jesper Just’s Mareoramic Environments

7 THE THICKNESS OF PROJECTION: 8 E L E M E N TA L E M PAT H Y:

Chantal Akerman’s Psychic Atmospheres

9 AT M O S P H E R I C S C R E E N I N G : 10 F L U I D E C O LO GY:

Rosa Barba and Performative Projection

Giorgio Andreotta Calò and Liquid Screens

11 E N V I R O N M E N TA L P R O J E C T I O N :

Acknowledgments Notes Index

Cristina Iglesias’s Weathered Screen Casts

Robert Irwin and Nebular Atmospheres

121 159 177 197 217 233 251 269

287 295 323

vii

0.1. Joseph-Benoît Suvée, Invention of the Art of Drawing, 1791. Oil on canvas, 105⅛ × 51¾ in. Collection Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium.

Projection and Atmosphere An Introduction, in Medias Res

B Technical images are envisioned surfaces. . . . Traditional images are mirrors. . . . Technical images are projections. —Vilém Flusser1 Projection operates in the interval between things. It is always transitive.—Robin Evans2 The history of ambiance . . . cannot be separated from that of medium = milieu.—Leo Spitzer3

ehind every book is a story, an image, a geographic space, or a space for thought. For me, this time, it all begins with an ancient myth that has long fascinated me. The story is recounted by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, circa 77–­79 AD. A Corinthian maid, Dibutades, is in love with a young man but learns he is to leave the country. In the face of this departure, she devises a way to envision, or rather envisage, his image, and in this way to keep him with her “virtually.” Using lamplight, she casts a shadow of his figure onto the wall and traces its outline. The source of luminosity has an important function in this story. A stream of light is “projected” here, cast upon the wall’s surface. It is this lamplight that enables the woman to “project” her lover’s body onto a visible plane, to draw its trace on a wall and thus cast him live for herself. Then, as the story goes, her father, the potter Butades, helps her to further materialize the projection by filling in the tracing with clay and firing this cast, creating a sculpture in relief. It is preserved in a shrine until it is destroyed, along with the city of Corinth. The story of Dibutades’s shadow-­tracing has traveled widely through history, reprised by such figures as Quintilian, Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari, and Rousseau. It has also often been considered to represent the origin of painting. Many art historians, aestheticians, and philosophers have deemed it emblematic of the act of painting as a form of imaging: the drafting of an image onto a surface.4

1

PROJECT ION AND AT MOSPHERE

2

The narrative is further recounted to explain how painting begins with a shadow trace, an outline, and how it starts not with pigment but with disegno, that is, with an act of drawing.5 At times, the myth also has been referenced to explain the beginning of the plastic arts, because Butades’s application of clay onto the shadow drawing gave it volume. Reinforcing this representational interpretation of painting, the story of Dibutades also has made its way into numerous painterly representations, often titled “The Origin of Painting.” The subject was popular and has been explored in artworks made in France and, above all, in England since the 1760s, including an atmospheric portrait of the story made by Joseph Wright of Derby.6 Although the accounts of the myth and its painterly representations are fascinating, I find it curious that this story has been widely considered simply to mark the origin of painting or the birth or drawing, for something else seems to be at stake here. The more I looked at the mise-­en-­scène, the more I became fixated on the light cast upon the surface, and on the body of light and shadow that the luminous stream throws forth and conjures. Contrary to some interpretations, it seems that the corporeal outline that Dibutades cast on the wall by lamplight cannot simply be considered a mimetic image or a double, a substitution or surrogate—­that is, a mere replacement of a body image. Looking from another perspective at the light it casts, this woman’s gesture appears to draw on a different plan. Her act, her disegno, is not mimetic but projective. This is a distinct project. What is represented here is a novel possibility of imaging, and even a future potentiality for representation. In other words, this casting of an image by way of light is an act of projection, and the narrative forecasts its origin. I venture to propose that this story traces the very scene of projection, even its atmosphere. It presents the luminous material basis of this act and the process

of its coming into being: the “becoming space” of projection. As if it were a projector, the lamp casts light upon a wall surface, and in such a way turns that surface into a screen fabric. The way in which the human figures in the scene interact with the object that projects is also a factor to consider. The overall composition of the scene—­its assembly of all elements, their position in space—­prefigures the situation that would become the operative site of the art of projection. In other words, this scene pictures the actual environment of projection. Furthermore, what is depicted here is a true projective situation with regard to Dibutates’s screen, for this plane artistically embodies a setting that contains and casts a psychic figuration: it transmits desire. This projective environment, that is, is also an affective atmosphere. And this kind of projection “projects” not only for the maker but for the observer. In this sense, Dibutades’s scene encapsulates the very operation of a projective act, understood as both an aesthetic and psychological action. And let us not forget that the scene of projection here is envisaged by a woman, and at a moment of impassioned love. It is her desire that transforms the act of casting an image upon a surface by lamplight into a virtual, imaginative enterprise—­a real act of projection. I return to the story of Dibutades in order to reconfigure the genealogy of the act and technique of projection in spatial terms, as an environment, and to define it as a transitive gesture—­that is, as a means of “transport.” Here, the scene of projection is an environment in which a transmission of affect takes place, and such transmission can materially create and transform physical forms as well as produce new art forms. In a process of retrospective projection, here painting becomes cinema. I also return to this story to place the origin of this projection back into the hands of a woman, siting it in her haptic gesture of “casting” a space of screening, in a creative act that produces atmospheric transport. In this sense, my

credit for her invention.8 This woman’s act not only has failed to be acknowledged as representing the origin of projection; her disegno is also considered incomplete, meaningless without the father’s plastic intervention. And yet, it was she who cast the light upon the wall surface, transforming it into a luminiferous screen and thus switching on the very light of projection.

PROJECTION, RECAST

If Dibutades’s gesture is to be the symbolic introduction to this book on the art and atmospheres of projection, it becomes particularly relevant to consider specifically how the scene has been represented in art. Although representations of the myth are numerous, there are two basic spatial ways in which they appear to function. The scene of casting an image by lamplight onto a surface is often shown as an interior, lending itself to interpretation as the site of a projection of a mental image, the externalization of a bodily image held precious in one’s mind and heart, or even the projection of an interior space. But at the same time there are representations of the shadow play that are set outdoors, which use the sun as a light source to project the image. These scenes are positioned in the environment as if the projection in question were itself an ambiance, an atmosphere. Let us look more closely at these two kinds of representations, in versions that best explain the direction this book takes in recasting projection as an atmosphere. For our purposes, the interior scene is relevantly represented in David Allan’s The Origin of Painting (1775), also known as The Maid of Corinth, a canvas that presents Dibutades erotically entangled with her lover’s body as she traces his image on the wall inside a space. The painting clearly features the lamp, at the left of the scene, casting the light at the distance needed to turn the wall into a screen of projection of the lover’s body. The oil lamp is placed on a piece of wooden furniture, which serves as a stand and is thus positioned

at the proper height to shed, or rather, throw light into the space in a way that will produce the shadow of her beloved’s upper body. It is as if a future technical object is represented in this image of antiquity, the very thing that would come to be invented for “throwing off ” light: a projector. Joseph-­Benoît Suvée’s own “origin” painting, Invention of the Art of Drawing (1791; fig. 0.1), reinforces this reading. Here, the illuminating object is on an iron stand, again positioned precisely at the height and distance needed to cast the light for projecting an image onto a wall, thus turning it into a screen. With a heightened play of light and shadow, Dibutades herself appears illuminated here, even “enlightened” by the act she is in the process of performing. Dressed in folds of white fabric and directly positioned in the line of light, she is bathed in the very light of her projective act. In this way, she even casts her own shadow onto the wall as an authorial trace, together with the outline of her lover, who holds her and, admiringly and lovingly, looks up at her as she stands over him, leaning toward her creation. In Anne-­Louis Girodet-­Trioson’s 1829 version of Pliny’s tale, the lover even holds the torch for her while the woman draws the projection. In Jean-­Baptiste Regnault’s The Origin of Painting (1786), the scene of the projection has been transposed to the outdoors, in accordance with Quintilian’s setting of the myth in the shadows of sunlight. Dibutades is again shown clothed in white

3 AN INTRODUCTION, IN MEDIAS RES

“recasting” of the myth joins an effort begun by others to dismantle a patriarchal reading of the story in favor of a different representational affect.7 As the myth has been passed down over the centuries, Dibutades has been somewhat overshadowed, along with her gesture of projection. Not only is she often remembered by her father’s name, Butades, but he is sometimes given

PROJECT ION AND AT MOSPHERE

4

0.2  Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The Invention of the Art of Drawing, 1830. Gouache, 10¼ × 11⅜ in. Collection Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany.

drapery, the folds erotically falling from her body as she sketches out her plan, or rather her projective act, for which the lover formally poses. Some foliage and clouds are visible in the background. Although the source of light is not visible—­it is unclear whether it is sunlight or, more probably, the shaded light of the moon—­it is clearly felt in the play of shadows and appears perceptibly responsible for the ambient projection. In Regnault, the projective

scene appears penumbral, quasi-­nocturnal, even atmospherically so. But the ambiance of projection is not always this shadowy or dark. It even is turned vividly solar by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the architect who also executed his own version of the “origin” painting with his 1830 gouache The Invention of the Art of Drawing (fig. 0.2). In his world, we are able to relish and savor sunlight, delighting and luxuriating in

In enhancing the role of atmosphere in the scene of projection, Schinkel’s painting offers important clues for us to follow up on in this book. It points us toward affirming the architectural origin of projection, its environmental agency, to see it as a design of light, and to build a narrative centered on ambiance. It also makes us recognize the public and collective aspect of an act of projection. This is, after all, a core element of the way projection has developed as a technical means of throwing off light. Publicness and collectivity, or rather what, in a previous study, I called “public intimacy,” is the basis of cinema and the receptive relationality of what we have come to know as cine-­projection.10 And yet, there is something still missing in the analysis here, a change that has gone unnoticed. Dibutades is no longer the subject but the object of the representation: she is being drawn, rather than drawing the projective space herself. The woman is cast off by the casting of shadows. As we approach the technological moment in which projection becomes possible as a technique for representation, the female subject loses her agency in the making of the act of projection. And as the ancient projective scene becomes clearly incorporated into a modern visual technique, the gender shift becomes even more evident. Think of the “machine for drawing silhouettes,” a modern phenomenon that, according to Victor Stoichita’s Short History of the Shadow, is a direct legacy of Pliny’s fable and its art historical representations.11 In this technique for drawing a shadow image the gender roles are definitively switched. In the illustration of this mechanism (fig. 0.3), produced for Johann Caspar Lavater’s 1783 Essays on Physiognomy, the female subject is immobile, passively seated on a chair, while a man performs the act of shadow-­making. Something else emerges at this point that also is relevant to our introduction of this book’s purposes. The scene shows the projective shadow play trans-

5 AN INTRODUCTION, IN MEDIAS RES

solar projections. The naked bodies engaged in the scene of projection’s origin are caressed by the sun and soaking its warmth, their skin glowing. It is this light, clearly seen as an atmospheric agent, that enables their shadows to be cast onto a wall, turning its rocky surface into a screen. An environment is therefore drawn as the very mise-­en-­scène of a projection. Schinkel prefers not to show its accoutrements, objects that shed light, but rather exposes the atmospheric agency needed to make projection possible, here in the form of solar rays that become projective rays. Ambiance, as we will see, is an essential part of the act and art of projection, itself understood as an environment. The solar instance we just described leads us to recognize one specific kind of spatial projection and, in some way, even describes its architecture. Schinkel’s representation is relevant to our narrative because, according to architectural historian Robin Evans, it portrays an actual disegno, a real drawing—­an architectural projection.9 In considering Schinkel’s representation less painterly and more architectural, this interpretation comes close to mine in recognizing that this scene makes for an act of projection, however perspectival, in which space is transformed and ambiance highlighted. It is significant as well that this projective scene is not only private but public. The representation has been extended from the secret, interior domain of the two lovers and is now set out in public, in the presence of others. The public, even choral, nature of the scene, exposes a specific architecture. In Evans’s reading, the intimate scene of the interior projection we described earlier represents the development of perspectival projection in painting, while the more public outdoor scene put forth by Schinkel is closer to the orthographic projection developed in architecture. The act of drawing this projection is crucial, for without it, there can be no architecture. What is cast from this perspective is, in some way, then, even the origin of architecture.

PROJECT ION AND AT MOSPHERE

6

0.3  Johann Caspar Lavater’s “Apparatus for Taking Silhouettes” portrayed in an anonymous engraving, after the 1783 drawing, c. 1881.

formed into a technological action. Between the seated subject and the man drawing the contour of her body, projected by way of candlelight, now stands a partition: a screen, in the form of an easel. This screen, placed in between the two subjects, “mediates” an act of imaginative projection. Furthermore, such a screen stands between two different mediums of representation: a painterly surface turns into screen fabric. This physiognomic “machine for drawing silhouettes” thus makes for an actual technique of projection, and it does so also in the sense that it purportedly projects physiognomic qualities. A person’s character, an affect, is said to become visible by way of this particular mechanism. It can even be seen as “emanating” from the projection itself. In other words, what is projected here is an imaginative action: a kind of psychic act, even a psychoanalytic action. A projective dispositif

comes into being in this way, as affect is drawn in the interstitial space of a screen-­easel/canvas-­wall. In the light of this shadow play and its foreshadowing of projection, what is forecast as well is the shadow space, the darkness that envelops spectators in the projective situation. But, I would add, if we look at this scene of projection as an actual legacy of the Dibutades myth, we can also preface our recasting of the canonical sense of darkness that projection has come to assume. In the story of the Corinthian maiden, the subject is not trapped in dark shadows or chained by the shadow of projection. In other words, as the philosopher Hagi Kenaan recognizes, here we are not prisoners in Plato’s cave, as Stoichita implies.12 In fact, as we have shown, in Pliny’s story and its art historical representations the shadow is not incorporeal illusion; it has not only a body but a particular consistency. This

the story finally makes me think of projection, and its atmosphere, as an in-­between space or, rather, as a site of intermediation. As this book aims to demonstrate, projection is 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 AN INTRODUCTION, IN MEDIAS RES

is not a scene of captivity but of captivation. Moreover, the projective play of light and shadow enacted by Dibutades, in response to her creative desire, is a thing of movement. It is the stuff of motion and emotion, not a matter of being immobilized in an illusion. And finally, the atmosphere depicted here is a nuanced space of projection, an environment in which shadow is not pitted against light. It is for these reasons that

T H E C U LT U R A L A T M O S P H E R E O F P R O J E C T I O N

In casting shadows of light, Pliny’s fable, as variously iterated in the history of drawing, painting, and architecture, condenses several of my concerns in writing this book on the atmosphere of projection in the contemporary visual arts. As highlighted in the examples so far, the art of projection has a long history, and it continues to engage us while transforming through time as an environment.

There even exist contemporary representations that reveal the relevance of this myth for our times. A pertinent one that gives credit for projection back to our “lady of Corinth” is José Luis Guerin’s film installation La dama de Corinto (2010; fig. 0.4).13 In an artwork that calls itself a study, the lamplight controlled by the woman clearly becomes a projective apparatus. Accompanied by the sound of an analog projector, the 0.4  José Luis Guerin, La dama de Corinto, 2010. Installation view, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain, December 15, 2010–August 28, 2011. Courtesy of Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia.

PROJECT ION AND AT MOSPHERE

8

originary image of a projective representation here materializes as an “elemental” projection, for in this moving-­image work, projection is a product of fire and akin to the motion of leaves in the atmosphere. Light itself moves. It shimmers and waves, pulsates and twinkles. When the flame of the illuminating oil lamp flickers, it directly recalls the projector’s own flickering of light. And, finally, the trace cast by light on the wall-­ screen projects us back into another originary shadow theater: cave painting. Here, we can really sense how an ancient act of drawing, a disegno, can be an act of projection and can design its environment. It is not surprising that we are still captivated by the ambiance of projection, and drawn to its atmospherics: the art gallery and the museum, as well as the spaces of our daily lives, are filled with screens and projective devices that are spatially arranged and that, as Dibutades foretold, project atmospheres of desire and stories of our lives. But, this book wants to ask, what is the source of this enduring fascination with the projective environment? What is the role of the art of projection in the contemporary visual arts? And what is projection anyway? How can we describe its atmosphere, and its cultural ambiance? “Projection” is clearly associated with the exhibition of moving images but, as I began to show and will continue to explore, the term has a much wider range of meanings. Derived from the Latin proiectionem, it has maintained the meaning of “a throwing forth,” which is characteristic of atmospheric elements such as light, as seen in Dibutades’s own projective action. The term was used in an extended sense in fifteenth-­ century alchemy, where it generated a complex notion of material and elemental transmutation. A “projection” involved matter, as well as matters of relation and transformation of its very substantive constitution. Moving forward from alchemy, the significant history of projection expanded, developing an extensive set of meanings that has come to permeate a vaste range of fields. These range from psychoanalysis to architecture and cartography all the way to the language of film

and moving images. This conjunction of disciplines in articulating a projective modality interests me in particular. Is it by chance that the term projection has emerged in all these fields, with apparently different courses of meaning? What does projection “project”? How is it a project? Consideration of this complexity is the springboard for this book. In asking about the term’s meaning in these different areas, I explore various avenues and propose that there are possible conjunctions of signification that need to be unpacked. Looking through the lens of projection, and seeking to define its field of operations, I thus first embark on a cultural journey, in advance of considering how projection is configured as an environment by artists today in the art gallery and the museum. This journey, both historical and theoretical, is a cultural archaeology that digs deeply and widely into projection as a territory of knowledge bound to atmosphere, traversing fields as varied as art history, film and media studies, environmental humanities, and architectural theory. It also explores currents of philosophy, such as ecomaterialism and elemental philosophy, as well as aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and the history of science. The atmosphere of projection provides me with the methodological tool not only to traverse but also to intermingle different disciplines and periods as well as artforms. As a transitive medium whose cultural construction crosses fields, projection offers the potential to link diverse temporal, formal, and disciplinary elements together, transforming boundaries in forms of active kinship and connective contamination. Such a journey is therefore not about projection per se or about how it works as a technical mechanism. It is rather an exploration of the act of projection as an “instrument” of material knowledge as well as an aesthetic modality. Projection is here considered a “cultural technique,” a process that engages technical objects or modalities whose function in our environment envisages and transmits a worldview, conveying a modern approach to knowledge.14

jective imagination across time, I treat projection as a cultural metaphor—­that is, borrowing from the Greek etymology, as a means of transport, in a wide sense. Projection is not the object of the book but is rather a mobile instrument, a vehicle, and even a methodology of transport itself. Working in this way, I wish to stress the importance of projection as a mobile cultural model that has circulated throughout modern and contemporary times, and as a positive transformative practice in art. In the first part of the book, I therefore explore the diverse processes that the term projection engages, ranging from the cartographic or architectural drawing of an image on a surface, which could also be a surface of screening, all the way to its meaning as a psychic technique, for it in fact goes so far as to envisage a mental operation. In light of Dibutades’s disegno, projection is here also considered a project, a potential plan, a mapping of possibilities. The range to cover is wide, and there are many existing views to counteract along the way. In revisiting this notion in psychic terms, I move away from a restrictive popular idea that considers projection a negative: a casting out of something from within that is unpleasant; an expulsion of qualities that are disagreeable onto another person or thing. In opening the road to a wider, more positive meaning of psychic projection, I am especially drawn to expanding the spatial sense of the projective situation, its atmosphere, and investigating how its environment can function as an ambiance of relationality. In this sense, I explore the notion of atmosphere itself, and question another restrictive view of projection, which binds it exclusively to vision and to the disciplining of light. It is often commonly assumed that projection is simply entangled with linear perspective or perspectival modes of vision. Although these are obviously related, the impact of projection in the arts cannot be exhausted by limiting its lineage to having evolved strictly from Renaissance perspective or from optical histories. These

9 AN INTRODUCTION, IN MEDIAS RES

In this vein, the book does not provide a historical account of projection in and of itself, or an analysis of historical forms of cinematic or precinematic projection, nor does it offer a history of technology, for there already are very good studies on these subjects. I rather offer a set of “projective stories,” like the one concerning the origin of projection just recounted. Although that story will not be returned to, it resonates with the others to be told, which can be interwoven together. Each of the projective narratives the reader will encounter aims to enlighten an aspect, or rather a course, of the complex, intricate network of ideas that I call the “projective imagination”—­what it has become and how it has come to foster a contemporary artistic imagination. If I explore the development of this paradigm initially in its historical manifestations in the first part of the book, it is not so much to provide a history that defines it in the past tense. I do so rather retrospectively, to see how wide and useful the notion of projection may have been in earlier times, in order to see if it can constitute a cultural and artistic resource today. I am curious to know if a form of projective imagination is still a force in the visual arts, or if it can be reinvented, and what kind of environment this creates. In fact, despite a few calls to phase out this paradigm, in view of its changing forms, contemporary artists exhibiting in gallery and museum spaces appear to be engaged by projection in the broad sense, as an aesthetic and conceptual modality in transformation. Hence, the journey back into history, driven by the course of projection in the arts, may lead us in turn to see how compelling it is to think projectively in the visual arts environments of today. Because it is through art that an aisthesis is developed, the second part of the book asks why the perception of atmosphere is particularly relevant to the act of projection, and what forms it takes in the art of our times as a boundary-­crossing medium. In narrating some stories of the links and intersections that have been created with atmosphere in forms of pro-

PROJECT ION AND AT MOSPHERE

10

are only limited factors in a much more diverse and discontinuous field of projective practices. As I show in pursuing a cultural archeology of projection, there is far more—­and especially more atmospherics—­in the act, art, and history of projection that exceeds these narrow optical views, for material forms of projection are not only expansive environments but coexist across nonlinear temporalities, in the form of strata and layers. Moreover, as we will see, they circulate in fields of connective transit in ambiance, taking the shape of magnetic currents or ambient energies, among other waves of atmospheric fluidity. In other words, the “projective imagination” is explored here as it is intricately bound with what I call “atmospheric thinking.”

As a wide-­ranging concept or, actually, process, projection thus turns out to be a real project, and it indeed projects. It is a density of potentialities, cultural movements, material transformations, mercurial energies, and hybrid contaminations. Sensing the extent of the projective imagination in cultural history has thus led me to explore not only how it operates in conjunction with atmosphere in modern visual culture but how it is reinvented in the field of contemporary art and in the environment of screen media. Projection, in this sense, is ultimately a connective and transitive modality: a processual, relational form that not only traverses and links together in time different artforms as well as disciplines but also registers “climatic,” telluric movements across their spaces.

P R OJ E C T I N G AT M O S P H E R I C I M AG I N AT I O N

I have to admit at this point that writing this book was quite a journey, one that took me all over the map to explore the “projective imagination” and forms of “atmospheric thinking” and to pinpoint the potential impact of these processes, in combination, on the environment of contemporary art. I will not recount the full itinerary of the artistic and cultural voyage I took, eventually landing at an “atmospheric screening” in art. Going on a journey is half the pleasure of writing, and possibly of reading, or at least so I hope! However, given that the subject of this book is not self-­evident, and that many different paths could have been taken across this vast and complex territory that spans atmosphere, art, projection, and their combinations, it might be useful to offer a guide, not simply to the topics chosen but to my process. I conceived this introduction as such a roadmap, and hope it serves not as a spoiler but as a preview of coming attractions. To orient the reader, I should clarify how the first part of the book provides the theoretical backbone for the exploration of the contemporary ambiance of the art of projection that follows in the second part. In outlining this foundation for a theory of both projec-

tion and atmosphere, the first three chapters traverse various fields in their histories and, in the process of this cultural archaeology, explore the context and cultural energy out of which projection arose as an intermedial space, or rather, as an atmosphere. Turning immediately to the atmosphere of projection, in chapter 1 I probe the notion of projection as a medium, or rather, a milieu. Can projection be understood as an environment, or conceived as an atmosphere? And isn’t atmosphere itself a medium, an intermediate space, a force of transmission? How, then, does an atmosphere “project”? In other words, what is the conceptual relation between atmosphere and projection? And how can we define it? Intrigued by these large questions, I go on to explore the cultural milieu of this atmospheric thinking. It is important to consider atmosphere, even at a basic level, if we wish to understand media, because both create ambiance and do so in projective ways. In the art of projection, an “elemental” atmospheric filtering takes place: a screening of light waves, a passing of forces and energies in which bodies of different species are enveloped, and by which they

pursues an environmental aisthesis; that is, it engages a shifting perceptual sensitivity to the environment, understood in the widest sense as an ecology: a mutual compenetration of the body and the body of things, of the human and the nonhuman, in hybrid mixture. Atmosphere, after all, is the “medium” in which we live, and it even defines the circumstance that makes life possible. In other words, it is a real agent. This is a mobile site, a place of sensible, resonant vibration of the energies of matter. Here, both situatedness and movement can coexist in ways that mix and bind subjects together in relation with the so-­called inanimate world, which includes a set of technical objects. And in this intermediation, interpenetration and communication can take place. This zone of activity shapes the ecology of art, for aesthetics is not an isolated affair but participates in interrelated milieus of transmission, relation, and exchange. This sense of ecology especially pervades the kind of art concerned with this particular environment: the atmosphere of projection. In developing the concept of atmosphere in this sense, a particular processual inclination emerges, and, in this scenario of environmentality, a sensing of affect, tonality, or mood becomes important. If I insist on atmosphere as an interrelated field and as the intangible yet tangible wave of resonance of a place outside and inside of us, it is because I am interested in the contact that is established in and through atmospheric conditions to which we are exposed and with which we interact. This contact often takes the form of what may be described as a “projection,” that is, a transmission of affects. This projection can occur between subjects but also between subjects and objects, and especially within objects themselves, as the phenomenon is essentially generated out of the energy of the material world. The fluid passing of atmospheric sensations, which is ever-­changing, creates an exposure, an opening, and an openness that can be felt in life as in art. It is in this sense that this book pursues an aesthetics of atmosphere and brings it to the foreground

11 AN INTRODUCTION, IN MEDIAS RES

are affected. I foreground the fact that atmospheric conceptions, including the transmission of light and energy, are at the very root of the invention of modern media. Following this trajectory, the book strives to establish an atmospheric conjunction of projection and media, especially, at first, in genealogic terms, in the cultural ambiance. I searched far and wide to be able to map an ambient genealogy for the art of projection. Challenging the optical history in which the act of screening is usually inscribed, I chose to follow the environmental road. In particular, to counter the teleological notion that cinematic projection derives solely from optical linear perspective, with its disembodied viewer and centralized vanishing point, I pursued more modern configurations of the environment in which projection arises. The course of my atmospheric thinking establishes a less linear and more ambulatory trajectory for the very ambiance of the art of projection. To this end, in chapter 1, I delve into territories such as the invention of the concept of atmosphere itself, the development of notions of ambiance, medium, and milieu, and the changing theories of light and projective geometries, and show that these are contemporaneous forces intersecting with the emergence of the art of projection. Through this exploration, a particular form of atmospheric imagination emerges as a thing of modernity, in conjunction with the invention of modern media. And thus projection becomes reshaped as an environment. Although I incorporate a discussion of climate, weather, and atmospheric elements, atmosphere is here understood to be larger than the elements that compose it, larger even than the notion of element itself. I rather develop this concept in terms of ambiance, which is not a static affair but a dynamic activity. I introduce the idea of an “environmentality” to emphasize that the formation of ambiance engages a process of material imagination. I aim to show how such a process contributes to shape the relation of organisms to their surroundings. In this sense, the book

PROJECT ION AND AT MOSPHERE

12

of visual studies. This does not necessarily mean that I am focused on atmosphere as an object of art, looking only at the representation of atmospheric agents in an artwork. It means, rather, that I explore how the agency of atmosphere is sensed through the arts, which can enhance our sensitivity and awareness, and transform our sense of experience of the environment. With this end in mind, I thus set out to explore the connections and relations that ensue from sensing atmospheric conditions in the art of projection and in screen media. In probing the (im)materiality of projection in its atmospheric element, the cultural journey aims to progressively and cumulatively create its own porous atmosphere. Let me anticipate that, in this explorative journey, the reader will encounter forms of permeability, mixing, receptivity, connectivity, relatedness, and relationality—­processes of interchange that are emphasized in my theoretical-­ historical narrative. These processual and relational forms, which are unveiled as qualities of atmosphere, are also shown to be proper to, and especially mediated by, the art of projection. In other words, I aim to show that technical operations of projection in the arts produce their own ever-­changing, hybrid, unstable, even liquid atmospheres, in a milieu of ambient mixing that is as luminiferous and energetic as a naturally occurring atmosphere. Out of this context of atmospheric mediations, projection itself emerges as a milieu of connective processes of movement: it is shown to be a vital atmosphere of transit and transmission, as well as situatedness, that profoundly transforms space and our perceptions. What I draft is, then, fundamentally a fluid paradigm that binds together the forms of “transport” that occur in technologies of projection with the energy of atmospheric forces. In this context, I argue that an environment of projection produces a formation of boundaries to be crossed, not the establishment of borders that enclose. The

cultural “instrument” of atmospheric projection is a tool that can overcome the separation of self and other, subject and object in the material world. Projection in this sense, is not only well rooted in the perception of ambiance, and developed in aisthesis, but is also able to transform it. This atmosphere of projective thinking, conceived as a network of dynamic, affecting, relational connections between subjects, objects, and space, is fleshed out in chapters 2 and 3 in a particular atmospheric way. In drafting the milieu of the projective imagination, I especially explore the psychic meaning of projection in terms of a transmission of affect. How is projection a psychic transmission? How does it function as an emotional atmosphere, that is, an ambiance of relationality? In these chapters, then, I attempt to relate the history of projection to a particular sense of atmosphere: to its psychic meaning, asking, that is, how atmosphere also engages affect, how it expresses an “air,” the pervading tone or mood of a place, situation, or work of art. This ambient sense is particularly conveyed, as we will see, in the notion of Stimmung, a term, simply translated as “atmosphere,” that was derived from musical attunement and developed in modern aesthetics as a psychic disposition, or rhythm—­in essence, as an atmospheric condition. What makes Stimmung? How do we sense this projected or, rather, projective atmospheric mood in the arts? Is projection also a form of Einfühlung, that is, literally, an “in-­feeling” or a “feeling into” space, as German aesthetics would suggest? Is it a form of experiential empathy? Or is it a sympathy affecting bodies and linking together the body of things in atmospheres of relatedness? Can we speak about the projective realm as a diffuse energy field? How, in other words, is projection an actual form of “transport”? Can we understand it as a dynamic of transduction, that is, as a force of material transformation? Such possibilities are explored in these chapters, in the effort to define projection as a

gether to create a contamination and transformation of ideas. Such a porous process is frankly encouraged insofar as projection, not unlike atmosphere, is itself a medium of relational transfer that moves things around, deeply affecting the environment and material space. When everything comes into contact with everything else in the atmosphere of aesthetic encounters, a projective act can even become a virtual form of commonality, and so in speaking of atmospheres of projection I hope also to launch a conversation on forms of “communing,” communality, and collective practices. I am ultimately interested in this open process of resonant mixing, interaction, transmission, and becoming because it constitutes a hope for sustaining forms of collectivity, and more affective, connective forms of communication and material relations, in imaginative encounters that can transform an ambiance. Through empathy with others and sympathy with otherness, an engagement with other forms of life and a sensitivity to different “climates,” an even deeper transformation becomes possible. Because the environment of projection and the milieu of atmosphere are not sites of separateness, more inclusive perspectives of interconnectedness, sociality, and admixture might emerge through “projective” actions. In the face of the world in which we live, which was already intent on global acts of walling-­off and insistent on individuality and self-­sufficiency even before measures of enforced isolation and social distancing were introduced, it is ever more compelling to think of ambiance and to engage with projective relations. In rethinking projection and atmosphere as environments, tracing their histories, and considering their expression in contemporary times, we can envisage not only how an ambiance is formed but how it can change, both externally and internally, and consider what an act of projection can do to modify a site. Most important, it can become clear

13 AN INTRODUCTION, IN MEDIAS RES

medium of ambient transmission or, put differently, as an environment of relationality. To grasp how projection can be such a medium of transmission it has been necessary to keep the scope of my research wide open, and to travel around imaginatively in search of different ideas of projection, broadly conceived as transitive relations. As I explore the process of projection as a transmission that is mediatic in nature, I am thinking of notions of transfer, transposition, and transaction, even in alchemic ways. Interested in material forms of thinking, which could be expressed via the ideas of vital materialism as well as elemental philosophies, I have not disdained theories of vitalism, animation, and vivification. I am also attracted to forms of connectivity, receptivity, and relationality such as affinity, relatedness, association, correlation, infusion, and resonance, and even come close to sensing what Goethe called “elective affinities” in his novel on the alchemy of amorous attraction.15 In following this relational trail in my exploration, I thus pursue a wide-­ranging chemistry of attractions and an intimacy of elements that exist in the atmosphere of projection, and especially consider the function this process has in the transmission of affect in ambiance. Taking an even more energic turn to explain the energy of the transmission, this study ends up reconsidering phenomena such as the currents of electromagnetism and the flow of magnetopathic energies, giving space to the world of Franz Anton Mesmer and the culture of mesmerism, as well as opening up to other forms of energy transfer and relational vitality that can affect atmospheres, which lead to acts of transduction. An act of transduction carries the meaning of the Latin verb transducere, to lead or bring across, to transfer. This is an active force that can convert energies into other forms and different mediums. In this mediatic sense, the book itself adopts a methodology of transduction by connecting diverse matters to-

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14

why we need these material and imaginative sites of intermixing that are mutual and communal. Pursuing this environmentality can, at least aesthetically, project more openness into sites of exchange. There

is artistic and cultural value in the potential for change expressed in affirming the porous contact, alchemic transitivity, and receptive relationality that atmosphere and projection produce.

ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT OF PROJECTION

If it is possible to think aesthetically in this way, it is because transmission can lead to virtual transformation in the intermingling of an atmosphere of projection. Both ambiance and projection are permeable, transitive forms of experience of material space and material relations that are also, and fundamentally, resonant sites of material imagination. And it requires the force of imaginative flights of transfer and transformation to produce them artistically and to activate them in combination. After all, the practice of transduction as a form of transmutation was inaugurated with the original projection, at the moment Dibutades envisaged a passage from corporeal to virtual manifestation, producing as well an affective atmosphere, that is, transmitting a new form, or rather, ambiance, of aesthetic contact. Her transductive gesture was then transferred into various early devices that came to be invented as projective techniques. Light, in particular, was used to “project” imaginative change and the imaginary morphing of bodies and space, as well as the situational alteration of sites and the intermingling of ambiances. Think of William Spooner’s “Protean Views,” popular around the 1840s, prototypical transparencies that would change when lit from the rear, giving the impression not only of appearance and disappearance but the sense of eventful transmutations of environments in projection. A building lit from behind could catch fire, a silent volcano could erupt, a field might flower or become a battleground. A deserted town could become populated, a theater animated, or a landscape mobilized by a train passing through. And the reversal of that animated projection could also take place by changing the direction of the light source. In this way, a form of spatial transduction was

set in motion, carried on today in the way artists work with projective modalities, change atmospheres, and affect us in our own contemporary environments of projection. Even in this minimal atmospheric sense, by way of the ambient, luminiferous transformation of space, the projective apparatus continues to produce creative geographies, displayed imaginatively in film theaters and in art spaces to create communal encounters that modify an ambiance and affect the general climate. Despite the many technological changes that have transpired, we are, as it turns out, not just attracted to but even mesmerized, galvanized, by what the projection of moving images can do—­what they can activate—­even beyond representation, in public spaces of exhibition. Often, visitors to art galleries even find themselves in the place of early Japanese spectators, who did not simply watch the events on the screen but watched the activity of projection itself, favoring film theaters that bared the dispositif in action.16 If it reflects on its own dispositif and even displays the functioning of its mechanism, the art of our times continues to produce such effects for the viewer. Projection can provoke a renewed sense of material presence and connection in an audience. A pulsating force that moves through and across bodies and the bodies of things, the art of projection can still not only produce affect but effect change, and this includes the transformation of forms and mediums in the arts. To reaffirm this transformative force of projection, then, in the second part of the book I explore the fluid atmospheres of contemporary art and visual culture. History plays a part in this discussion as well, for atmospheric aspects of historical forms of projection,

with the creation of an understudied yet fascinating public exhibition space: the “atmospheric film theater.” The atmospheric tendency has since expanded, articulated through a wide range of contemporary art practices and enacted in a panoramic body of artistic endeavors that ranges from the ambient works of Anthony McCall to those of Julio Le Parc, from Stan VanDerBeek to Joan Brigham, Alfredo Jaar to Cildo Meireles, Ann Hamilton to Sarah Sze, Christian Marclay to Camille Henrot, Aldo Tambellini to Philippe Parreno, Trisha Baga to Hito Steyerl. In traveling through the practices of these artists and of others who engage ambiance, multiple projective transfers may be experienced, as when “solid light films” meet projections onto steam. I like to think closely, along and through the work of contemporary artists who perform analytical gestures that are “operations” of projection, and the individual case studies presented here follow this panoramic excursus. In the reinvention of art forms in the contemporary atmosphere of projection, even the atmosphere of history can become reactivated, in forms of “projective imagination” dense with “atmospheric thinking.” It is in this sense, and joining the two parts of the book together, that a particular version of media archaeology comes into play: in the present, in the presence of contemporary art. I show that the current phenomenon of the rearrangement of screens, in site and as expansive sites, engages a previous history that enhanced the very ambiance of projection. Several contemporary forms of screening in art reformulate projection as an environment and inventively reinterpret earlier conceptions of how the screen emerged as a space. A historic “atmospheric screening” is engaged when Diana Thater transmits the energy of natural environments and restages the ambiance of phantasmagoria in enveloping atmospheric installations that function alchemically to transform space, even psychically. Media archaeology is relevant as well in analyzing how scale functions in contemporary projection, because the large-­scale,

15 A n I ntroduction , in M edias R es

described in the first part of the book, are explored here as they feature, reimagined, in the art of cinematic projection in our times. The archaeology of the screen’s invention as a material object, its architectural lineage as an atmospheric medium, and its environmental character are called upon to explain current uses of a surface of projection in art. The ambient architecture of the screen is explored intermedially in chapter 4, which shows this luminiferous surface of design transfer from space to art, even dissolving along the way into an actual atmospheric screen. We will see a projective screen emerge through other art forms—­painting, photography, and sculpture as well as architecture—­and become dispersed as an environmental medium across various material terrains. In tracing the material process of “becoming screen,” I am concerned with its objecthood. In this vein, I especially turn to the art of 1960s, where the screen became a new art object. In the practice of artists such as Lucio Fontana, Fabio Mauri, Mary Corse, or Doug Wheeler, screenlike canvases and ambient installations produced a plastic dialogue with the art and atmosphere of projection. The history of projection has thus been reshaped across a terrain that includes but also supersedes cine-­projection in creating and transmitting ambiance. Absorbed in this atmosphere of projection, sensing environmental conditions, I listen in particular to the rhythm of light. To become attuned to this ethereal atmospheric element, a material condition of living, is also to grasp the basic substance of projection. After all, from the “Origin of Painting” to our current techniques, projection relies on light to come into being. Paraphrasing the artist László Moholy-­Nagy, the art of projection is essentially a “light-­space modulator” that creates milieu and experiential atmosphere and activates nuanced spaces of resonance and transmission. Here, we watch light thicken into vital matter—­energy, a relational medium. This atmosphere of projection turned into architectural atmospherics in the pivotal decade of the 1920s,

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16

along with miniaturization, has returned to the scene of projection, as we see when Jesper Just makes use of monumental projection, exploring not only the magnitude of nineteenth-­century panoramic culture but the movement of the mareorama, a very atmospheric, fluid form of precinema. The objecthood of the screen, as sculpted by Cristina Iglesias, stands in dialogue with contemporary environmental architecture, but it also reworks older atmospheric paradigms such as an Arab-­ inflected ambient sense of screening space. In primarily considering contemporary art, I thus explore refashioned forms of cultural history, though not those that involve simple nostalgia for or fetishization of obsolete mediums of projection, dusted up for spectacular effect or revamped for digital delight. I rather try to identify artists who pursue a conceptual and aesthetic exploration of the act of screening and the art of projection, in close relation to atmosphere, exposing the quality of a projective environment in new, performative ways. If understood artistically as a potential space, as a disegno, the history of projection in general, and of cine-­projection in particular, offers avenues for expressing what has not been expressed previously, including the unrealized potentialities that were left out of the canon of film history and its view of spectatorship. In doing so, we might project a future design for the ambiance of reception and for the transmission of material relations in projection. A contemplation of the relational quality of projection can produce a different atmosphere when one considers, as well, the way space itself projects affect. When the filmmaker Chantal Akerman makes “ambient cinema” in installation form, the landscape of projection takes on the full meaning of that “feeling into” space that is Einfühlung. In this empathic form of projection, empathy is felt with lived space, as a vibrating feeling generated by the space itself. As the artist and filmmaker Rosa Barba deconstructs the ma-

teriality of the apparatus of projection and re-­presents it in geologic and atmospheric form, what is felt is the infusive, sympathetic quality of contact with the very things that make projection. The life of objects that is projected in the work of Thater also can resonate in forms of sympathy, in kinetic passages and projective communication that alchemically transform states of matter in an environment. This sensing of a projective ambiance can even dissolve to the point of liquefying. As states of matter change from solid to liquid in the technological alchemy of projection, the atmosphere of projection itself can liquefy, as we will see in the work of Giorgio Andreotta Calò and other artists who pursue projective liquefaction in forms of material imagination. And finally, the atmospheric element can present itself as an opacity, a gray zone of transmission, for projection and atmosphere share a particular in-­betweenness, a space of nuance that is a gaseous tonality and nebular gradation. Atmosphere is, after all, the veil that shrouds the space we live in and filters its perception. In this translucency, pursued by Light and Space artist Robert Irwin, the atmosphere of projection displays all its nebularity. Here projection, vaporously mixed with other elemental mediums, itself becomes a cloud. And so, in this light, in the midst of this ambient intermingling, we can begin to approach a set of cultural movements and sense “what goes around” in the atmosphere of projection. It is my hope that in this process of exploration we may come to experience how ambiance itself can be felt as an ecology of interrelationality: in other words, as an environment of projection. If we can sense that atmosphere is such an ecology of projective, interrelational movements we might become more capable of reclaiming this essential element of our environment, thus affecting the cultural climate in which we live.

The Cultural Atmosphere of Projection

1.1  Illustration of the medium of projection in Fritz Kahn, (Stuttgart: Franckh’sche Verlagshandlung, 1922).

1

The Ambiance of Projection An Environmental Archaeology of Mediality

S Atmosphere is . . . the air and the aroma that pervade every work of art, and that lend distinctiveness to a medium and a world.—Béla Balázs1 The Projection Screen. Here is to be found the interpretation of Malevich’s last picture—­the plain white surface. . . . The surface becomes a part of the atmosphere, of the atmospheric background.—László Moholy-­Nagy2

hould we put an end to projection?” the art historian Dominique Païni has asked provocatively.3 As we look around, it seems unlikely that we could do so even if we wished to, for the art of projection has become ever more vital as pervasive screens, whose forms are constantly morphing into different surfaces and functions, transform the spaces of the contemporary art gallery and the museum as well as the environment of our daily lives. What is the root of this phenomenon, and how does it manifest itself in contemporary art? What exactly is projection, or rather, how does the “projective imagination” operate in our environment? And, finally, how does projection as a historical concept relate to the invention of atmosphere and to the atmosphere of cine-­projection? These broad questions need to be asked if we wish to grasp the material function of ambiance, continue to assert its relevance in life as in art, and understand the role of the projective space in the artistic ecology of our time. And so, to access our contemporary ambiance of screens, we will first perform a cultural excavation into the genealogic environment of projection, exposing an imaginative conceptual apparatus that has circulated in the culture and exploring how it relates to a form of “atmospheric thinking.” I am motivated to pursue this archaeological inquiry into the atmosphere of projection in part because of the historical spectrum of meanings the term has encompassed. Denoting etymologically

19

chapter 1

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1.2  Illustration of the construct of projection, in Brook Taylor, New Principles of Linear Perspective (London: R. Knaplock, 1719).

a “throwing forth,” the term projection has come to identify a range of diverse processes, from the drawing of an image on a surface, to the configuration of a surface of screening, all the way to a psychological device or operation. Furthermore, to “project” implies a plan, a charting of possibilities and potentialities. It connotes ways to conjure or envisage even a mental image. At the turn of the last century, a fundamental concept of projection was developed in psychoanalysis, where it was articulated in psychic terms, while at the very same time, cinema—­the art of projection—­was invented. Projection has notably been used as a term for a technique of drafting or charting in the history of architecture and cartography, among other areas of endeavor. Puzzled by this cultural conjunction that arose around the idea of projection in different fields, especially in the modern era, I asked myself if it were simply a coinci-

dence. Are the different meanings of projection possibly related? Could they be connected? Are there resonances, or shared processes and circumstances, in this diversity? The meaning of projection in psychoanalysis gives us a clue for a possible answer to these questions. As we will discuss, it was Sigmund Freud who first articulated the idea of projection in psychic terms.4 In the definition of psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-­Bertrand Pontalis, projection designates “an operation whereby a neurological or psychological element is displaced and relocated in an external position, thus passing either from centre to periphery or from subject to object.”5 The notion of projection was developed in psychoanalysis in an effort to define the ego and its relation to the external world, and it has played a crucial role in this sense, especially in the definition of boundaries. As a mechanism of expulsion, a throwing forth

especially “to effect its transmutation.”6 Projection acts on matter alongside “calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation, cibation, sublimation, fermentation, exaltation, [and] multiplication.”7 In this material sense, it defines a fundamental alchemic function: the transformation of materials, the transfer of substances, and their mediation into other forms. From alchemy, a figurative meaning of projection emerges that is elemental. Here, the operation is linked to environmental processes. And thus, in time, projection would come to define a “process” of transmutation that acts upon matter, “one resulting in change from one thing to another.”8 Projection, in other words, came to flow, via alchemy, into a notion of “transduction”: a process, derived from the Latin transductio, meaning a leading across, that indicates a transfer of materials, and even a form of transubstantiation that can transpose matter.9 Projection, that is, was bequeathed to us as a wide-­ranging material instrument of transformation. We should note that transduction is a transformative phenomenon, for, as the philosopher Gilbert Simondon argues, it “denotes a process—­be it physical, biological, mental or social—­in which an activity gradually sets itself in motion.”10 It is in this sense a useful notion for inquiring into the meaning of a cultural milieu as an active territory of change. Or to put it in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “transduction would be the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another,” builds upon it, or even “dissipates in it.”11 In a larger sense, then, to think in transductive terms means 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. This book itself proposes to adopt a transductive methodology by connecting diverse areas together through the idea of projection, putting them in contact to create contaminations and change the meanings of sites. In this spatial way, it seeks to demonstrate how a

21 T he A mbiance of P rojection

of qualities onto another person or thing, projection is also related to the opposite dynamics, that is, to the operation of taking things in, known as introjection. Articulated in this way, as a two-­way dynamic, projection stands at the center of an important process: it contributes to charting the borders of the modern subject, and to envisioning how these borders may be negotiated as fluid boundaries. The process of expulsion, and also that of entering, inhabiting, animating, or bringing to life another person or thing, could not be articulated without the concept of projection. In some ways, then, we might venture to propose that projection, understood as a transmission of forms, has a “mediatic” quality. It can be set in motion as a process of mediation, not only to configure but also to overcome the boundaries of the self. As a psychic operation, projection also has the potential to navigate the distinction between inner and outer phenomena, and to cross divisions between inside and outside. It even can function as a conceptual means of eroding the borders between subject and object. If conceived in the processual sense that I propose, projection does not arise as a means of constituting a barrier or an ejection, as is sometimes contended, but as a way to investigate how relational dynamics come into being, and especially come to be mediated, thus enacting potential transformation. In this sense, it is important to underscore that this mediatic elaboration of projection occurred historically at the very moment of the rise of cinema—­a medium that pursued the modern dreams of projection in technological form. This is not a coincidence. But how so? Is there another layer to be uncovered in this concurrence? Is there something else in the idea of a “projective imagination” that leads to medium and mediation, and to transformative relationality? The answer, I think, lies in exposing yet another conjunction. It should be emphasized that an early use of the term projection dates back to the chemistry of alchemy, beginning in the fifteenth century. Here, it described “the throwing or casting of an ingredient into a crucible,”

chapter 1

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processual dynamic of morphing and transformation is conceptually at work in projection. At the root of projection, I claim, is a material process of porous mediation, in the sense that has been developed as well in the fields of processual philosophy and media theory.12 A materially transformative, transductive process historically marks its emergence in the culture and forges the notion as a hybrid field of transitive operations that affect the environment. To further this hypothesis in this and the following two chapters I explore various cultural histories in which a wide-­ranging notion of projection emerges, especially in conjuction with atmosphere, beginning here with a spatial inquiry into the concept of medium as a projective operation, and considering its relation to milieu and ambiance. Such an inquiry into the projective imagination, in fact, would be complete only if we fully considered the impact of spatiality and atmospherics, and this “environmentality” necessarily includes a foray into the field of architecture. In conjunction with geometry and cartography, the realm of architecture contributes an important meaning and additional aspect to the operation of projection. Here, projection indicates the representation of a figure on a surface according to a system of correspondences that can convey a sense of space. Projection is used in architectural drawings in the creation of perspective, to translate and transform an envisioned volumetric three-­dimensionality into two dimensions, and to design the passage of light in space, rendering its shadowy effects. Architectural pro-

jection is thus, essentially, linked to a process of mediation that is spatial, atmospheric, and “superficial.” And isn’t this particular character and environmental function of projection envisaged by architecture also a fundamental cinematic modality of projection? At an elemental level, cinematic projection makes use of representation on a flat surface plane that renders a sense of spatial depth in luminous fashion. In technical projection, the cinematic process operates this dimensional passage from three to two dimensions in an environment that is itself molded, transformed, and morphed by the passage of light. With this premise in mind, then, and in order to further unveil aspects of these cultural conjunctions, let us turn to investigating the space itself of projection—­ its atmosphere. If the invention of cinematic projection actualized the possibility of a projective screen, it was because a cultural ambiance enabled this to occur, and, on this terrain, transitive forms of mediation and currents of resonance took place across different fields. In exploring the ambiance of projection in this way, sites of transmission will emerge, including those forms of conduction and mixing that enact psychic transformation such as “projective” empathy and sympathy engaging material objects and the configuration of space itself. In the end, we will see the energy of projection come into being as a mediatic, vibrant process that creates an ambiance of receptive relationality—­that is to say, a transformative atmosphere, in the largest sense of the term, including its affective dimensions.

MEDIUM AS AMBIANCE

Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-­frequency currents cursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology.—Walter Benjamin13

In his writing on the planetarium, Walter Benjamin vividly describes how the environment became pervasively and electrically mediatic in the modern

era, using “electric” words that inspired me to recognize the concurrent energies that were “in the air” at the time and to think of the rise of technical media

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1.3  Cinéorama, a planetarian projection, as illustrated in Scientific American Supplement, no. 1287, September 1, 1900.

in relation to this ambiance. How is the projective screen a mediatic environment? What does it project into and from the viewer, and out of and into the world we live in? How does it make, and respond to, ambiance? In framing this environmental aspect of our cultural archaeology, and in order to see how projection develops as a medium of communication, it is useful initially to consider the cultural root of the term medium, and then to excavate the root of ambiance to connect it to the atmosphere of projection. A world often emerges from a word. This is certainly the case for both medium and ambiance, terms rich in layers of meaning. Unpacking their etymological and cultural histories reveals archaeological strata that set us on a geological path, which will be extended, in the second half of the book, as

we explore sites of projection in the environment of contemporary art. This itinerary—­an archaeology of the contemporary—­w ill lead us to navigate conceptual waters and to breathe the air that blows around in a field of connections that I have named “atmospheric thinking.” It is well known that the term medium stands for that which is in the “middle,” and indicates in-­betweenness and intermediary states.14 As media theorist Alexander R. Galloway shows in his text “Love of the Middle,” each type of middle has its own historical avatar and messenger, from Hermes to Iris, Aphrodite, and the Furies, and each one stands for a transformation of the historical arrangement of media.15 From Hermes, the god of messages and crossroads, the medium develops its characteristics of messaging, circulation, trading,

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and exchange but also of deceit. Forms of mediality continue to embody these fundamental aspects of the messenger model in their modes of transmission.16 The figure of Iris makes her own contribution by introducing the elemental qualities of water and the atmospheric quality of air in figuring the character of medium. With her iridescence, Iris contributes the sense of tangibility, nearness, and affect in transmission—­“communication as luminous immediacy”—­while Aphrodite pushes medium closer to liminality.17 But ultimately, for Galloway, it is the Furies that embody the “infuriated” media of today, with their networks and multiplicities of information and data. Reflecting on this fascinating history of mediation, I wonder whether Iris’s iridescence has been largely obscured in our times by total mediatic infuriation. Yet in exploring contemporary visual media exhibited in the art gallery and the museum, I find a wealth of haptic, affective ecologies, and an elemental intimacy, expressed as well in the arrangements of such works and their spaces of circulation. Iris’s emanation is still present in the ambiance of visual culture, and actively transmits atmospheric waves. In elemental terms, it especially accounts for the lustrous, electrical qualities of atmosphere that result from the refraction of light waves, which is a basic “element” of the art of projection. This magnetic energy is the generative quality of the modern medium. Iridescence is the luminosity that elementally defines the material condition of the film medium, refracted from screens and emanating in its ambiance. It permeates as well ambient works of light in contemporary gallery spaces that make use of projection, reinventing its apparatus in their environments. In other words, these haptic qualities of iridescence pervade the “air” and the atmosphere of projection across the ages. We might ask, then: What if the distinctions between different phases in the development of media were not so distinct? And what happens in the middle, in the intermediation? Does medium denote only

a middle or an in-­between or is it, rather, a form of mixture? With the aim of developing a more hybrid view of the configuration of technical media, one can usefully turn to the philosophy of Michel Serres, who suggests that we emphasize the mixing of forms in a medium, and even that we put aside the term, for, ultimately, “mixture is a more accurate term than medium,” a concept that is too abstract, homogeneous, concentrated, and stable.18 A mixture is a form that can more easily fluctuate. While the medium is entangled in solid geometry, a mixture favors forms of fusion and tends toward the fluid. “The medium separates, the mixture mitigates,” he contends; “the medium creates classes and the mixture, hybrids.”19 Hybridity and fluidity are indeed useful propositions for our purpose of exploring the mixing of mediums in the visual arts. One may wish to think of any medium as always mixed, in the sense that it is related to, and mediates, our sensory experiences, and is as mixed as our sensorium.20 This is because, in the words of philosopher Roberto Esposito, “every movement of our body and every sound of our voice is technological.”21 Such basic mediation between subjects, objects, and spaces, further set in motion by technical media, produces a field of imaginative relations that are “infrasensible realities,” in the definition of the geographer Nigel Thrift, “means of imagining the world” as well as spaces of inhabitation.22 Mediation is a process that intermingles and integrates screens, technology, and bodies in sensory mixing that creates a particular geography: planes of connection and surfaces of communication—­that is, haptic projective relations. Mixtures, in the poetic words of Michel Serres, create “veils of proximity, layers, films, membranes.”23 In this sense, a projective screen functions as a medium that is intermixed with resonant layers of sensorial conditions. After all, a screen frames, displays, and veils perceptual sensorial situations, creating an intermixture. But I would go even further and claim that the projection screen is not only

substantive medium had a twofold spatial reference: the midpoint of an object, and the intermediate point (region, substance) between two or more objects.”28 In this material and geographic intermediacy, a perceptual milieu is formed, which can be understood as the atmosphere of a site. This atmospheric milieu is not only intermediary but also, by definition, intermedial. It is a space filled by vital forces, ethereal and fluid, and also contains a flux of bodies, encompassing their boundaries and connections. The “tenuous substance” that makes up space understood as atmosphere takes center stage as “Milieu and Ambiance” takes us through the history, from Descartes onward, of matière subtile. In this kind of milieu, contact is created in surface encounters. In such material, “superficial” mediation, the stability of matter is dissolved in favor of pliability and flexibility, of solid melting into air or fluid. Air is an important factor here, for it is, after all, the breathing substance of atmosphere and the medium through which rays of light pass. It is no wonder, then, that Isaac Newton would highlight this intermediary agent and describe medium as “sensation, electricity and light,” attributing “qualities of transmission to the ether,” which he calls “the aethereal, fluid, vibrating medium” (see fig. 3.9)29 From Leonardo’s mezzo, “whence is born the impetus of movement,” we thus arrive at a medium that is an “element” of transmission, a “transparent, refracting, ambient medium,” in a scene atmospherically permeated by light, air, and movement.30 An ambient medium is a conveyor of forces of attraction surrounding bodies and other objects in lived space. A rich history of how medium relates to milieu and ambiance thus emerges from Spitzer’s elaborate cultural archaeology, a voyage across philosophy, literature, and the history of science that moves from mechanics to biology to physics. The conclusion is that ambiens and medium “have come to have a strange and indissolvable relationship: indissolv-

25 T he A mbiance of P rojection

a medium, or simply a site of sensory mixture, but rather creates, and is, a milieu. In looking at screen surfaces in works of contemporary art throughout this book, a space of relational connection and fluidity will clearly emerge not only in but as an environment. There are forms of atmospheric passage that come to be sensed, and transformed, in the act and the space itself of projection, understood as a zone of activity. To contextualize this ambient view of projective spaces conceptually, let us then continue to investigate sources of this material relation between medium, milieu, and ambiance, looking further back into history. In the seminal text “Milieu and Ambiance,” first published in 1942, the literary critic Leo Spitzer provides ample material for this reflection.24 Spitzer proposes that the link between medium and ambient space goes back in history to an orbit of relations that, with Lucretius, almost becomes a form of embrace when the Roman philosopher establishes the “caressing” quality of space with respect to surrounding objects.25 Tracing this history, a fascinating cultural archaeology of the terms ambient and ambiance emerges as we follow the evolution of their semantic traces in relation to the history of ideas. This archaeological trajectory shows that “the history of this word cannot be separated from that of medium = milieu.”26 As we have known since the time of Hippocrates, in fact, a milieu is a medium that affects the body as well as the conditions for its existence. It is the space, the elements, in which organisms exist, live, and move. This is a transformative site, full of motion of every kind. For instance, as Spitzer notes, “To the Greek atomists, air represented the space in which the atoms moved.”27 A milieu can be quite an encompassing site. It is as embracing as air, sky, atmosphere, and climate, and, indeed, is perceived as such an envelope. In this sense, a milieu is not deterministic but, rather, develops as a concrete medium of perception. In classical Latin, for example, Spitzer maintains that “the

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1.4  The atmosphere of projection in Stereorama. La Nature, no. 1408, May 19, 1900.

able surely, yet never constant or restful.”31 Indeed, they have danced together throughout the course of history. But how does this relate to the medium of film and to the ambiance of filmic projection, which are the focus of our study? One can turn back to Benjamin’s text on the planetarium for an elaboration of this matter. It suggests that we recognize the sensory ambiance of modernity in the forms of electric projection that pervaded the “climate” of the time, and that we further pursue the relation of medium to milieu and ambiance in this context. Benjamin’s concept of medium is in fact not restricted to a technical instrument or communication device or even to an apparatus of representation. Rather, a medium is understood as a perceptual field of mediations and conceived as an ambiance, a

field of connections. For Benjamin, as film historian Antonio Somaini shows, medium indicates “the spatially extended environment, the milieu, the atmosphere . . . in which perception occurs.”32 These mediums of perception include “media diaphana: the material, intermediary, diaphanous substances (air, vapor, smoke, clouds, water, glass),” which with their shades of transparency, translucency, and opacity mold the lived environment of our visual experience.33 This reading of a modern, atmospheric medium relies on the ancient Greek term metaxy (translated to the Latin medium by Michael Scotus in 1225): a term used by Aristotle to identify the intermediary entities that enable sensory experience. In this sense, a medium is a milieu for its potential capacity to activate a haptic experience of the surrounding world, including its atmospherics.

ity, and conduction. And in modernity this surrounding elemental space in which we exist has evolved to become a veritable medium. With the invention of cinema, among other forms of screening light, we have come to inhabit an environment that is a technological ecology: our sensory field is an actual mediatic field of transmissions and luminous projections. We live in a space of mediation in which technical media are activated in interconnected environments.

P R OJ E C T I V E PA S S A G E S

In this sense, a filmic screen is not a simple artifact or technical item or an isolated phenomenon but rather a kind of medium that operates both in and as a space. The art of projection is part of a material network of mediatic operations that pervade an electrical ambiance in modern times. In an act of screening, a specific milieu is created: an atmosphere of transformative energies inhabited by the intermixture of persons and things. The art of projection thus unfolds as a real space: the hybrid and fluid matter of connections between subjects and technical objects that creates an environment. Furthermore, the luminous transmission of projection occurs not only between elemental substances but also through them. And in this passage of luminous matters, a transformation occurs. As the artist László Moholy-­Nagy demonstrated with his kinetic sculpture Light-­Space Modulator, which looked like a film projector and became the subject of his 1930 abstract film Ein Lichtspiel schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Gray), projected light is not only a space per se but something that can transform—­modulate—­sites. It is a plastic medium that can itself be molded and, at the same time, mold space. When making his photograms, Moholy-­Nagy also used light—­“projected” upon a surface that absorbed it, rendering the shape of objects—­as a sculptural and haptic technique of modulation. The photographic surface thus turns

into a kind of “projective paper,” acting as if it were a screen of light. Far from being the object of optical dematerialization, then, light, when projected, takes material shape in plastic spatial modulation as a tangible material of artistic experimentation that can involve various ambient conditions and mixed forms of projection. Following along this path of “atmospheric thinking,” I would propose that projection is not a medium per se but rather a “cultural technique” that interfaces with ambiance. It is an “actor-­network” process that, in the definition of media theorist Bernhard Siegert, involves technical objects and chains of operation creating effects that are the product of human and nonhuman interaction.34 A cultural technique is an in-­between, understood not as a middle but rather as a foldable object or a “becoming” operation that has the ability to produce modulation and enact transmutation. A prominent spatial example of this kind of technique is the door: an object of interaction with human bodies, whose material configuration embodies cultural processes and forges a milieu.35 The door is not simply an object, then, but, rather, what we may call a “dooring,” a mediatic operation that results in the transformation of space. What is relevant about the function of the door, for our discussion of the art of screening, is its operative architecture: this is a folding object whose operations can virtually modify corporeal

27 T he A mbiance of P rojection

Ultimately, then, the term medium can be understood as an atmospheric space in which cultural, experiential mediations occur as elements, matters, and surfaces come into relation with one another. This sensorial space is always already mixed in its natural settings, because it is full of ethereal, fluid, and luminiferous elements that conduct and transmit energies. Air, water, and light have always acted as mediums. They provide a milieu for communication, relational-

1.5  Ann Hamilton, bounden, 1997–­98. Installation view, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France, November 26, 1997–­February 6, 1998. Dimensions variable. Photo: Blaise Adilon. © Ann Hamilton. Courtesy of Ann Hamilton Studio.

space. A door both defines the distinction between inside and outside and also mediates it, creating a connection between the two insofar as it enables a passage that changes an ambiance. Taken as such a cultural body-­technique, the function of the door is not limited to architecture alone but extends from it to other fields that represent potential doors in the milieu of cultural space at large. There are mediums that can function as if they were doors. I would argue that a projective screen

can be understood as such a door, that is, architecturally, as a folding space. As I demonstrated in Surface, a screen surface unfolds as a cultural “fabric” that engages a process of becoming: it is a vital, hybrid matter that contains movement.36 Endowed with nuanced textures, its fundamental quality is transitive. A screen is a passageway: it is a door that enables us to traverse not only different cultural sites but also sensual and affective spaces. Such an in-­between place can be occupied not only

mental transformation. In the midst of screening operations, elements of space themselves are transformed, creating alchemic and mesmerizing forms of magnetic projection. The mediatic traversal that hinges on the projective screen produces a mixing of forms in the space of projection: a milieu that is itself mixed. Projection is thus more than in-­between space, or even an intermediary. The space of projection unfolds as a place of mediation that produces a variety of encounters. Take, for example, the effect of Francis Alÿs’s moving-­image work reel–­u nreel (2011), in which the camera follows a reel of film, taken from a destroyed film archive, as it is unrolled through the old part of Kabul, Afghanistan, pushed by children like a hoop, to create an improvised narrative of the city. Here, the materiality of cine-­projection takes on a particular significance, transformed into a means of unfolding space and reimagining urban relations. As Alÿs shows, to explore the apparatus of projection is a question not of exhibiting materials but of revealing the substance of material relations it creates. In the space of projection, in fact, persons and things not only jointly come into play but form relations and connections in forms of becoming. The act of projection, whether in a film theater or an art gallery, involves both a situational state of affairs and a situatedness. In spectatorial situations, through the mediation of screens, space is experienced materially, through corporeal presence and interconnectedness, in what I have called a milieu of “public intimacy.”38 The art of projection not only relies on but magnifies corporeal qualities that exist in space, such as feelings in and of the surrounding space. A viewer is not passive in this transitive environment but responds to being in space in forms of projection that are even empathic. One becomes sensitive to an atmosphere, that is, to the affect or tonality that is exuded and irradiated from space, in and off screen, and in the site of projection itself.

29 T he A mbiance of P rojection

physically but also in and as liminal space. A door that actually “hinges” spaces, the projective screen creates passage not only between inside and outside but also between interior and exterior space. In its haptic, sensory, affective unfolding of time and space, the space of projection processes ways of transitioning between these realms and can even blur their boundaries. In this sense, then, projection can really be understood as a cultural technique that has the capacity to initiate a “dooring,” that is, a folding operation of access and passage, which can be interconnected in transforming ambiance. Think of an artist such as Ann Hamilton, who often works with fabrics and textures and has made a number of screenlike objects of projection that engage access, transformation, and atmospheric modulation. In an ambient sense, screen fabric made a particularly architectural appearance at her installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2012–­2013. For the event of a thread, Hamilton constructed an elaborate environment that features a massive, billowing curtain hanging and swinging in space, like a screen-­door.37 This elastic architecture functioned both to partition the space and to connect people together in an ambiance that was changed by the refraction of light onto the screen surfaces. With a fabric texture that was illuminated and could be moved by the spectators, this installation of a curtain-­screen thus promoted a “dooring,” for it materialized access, constructing a screen of projective motion in ambient space. In this way, an act of screening, acting as a folding doorway or curtain space, can create a spatial form of mediation that produces access in both a material and immaterial encounter. Such a cultural technique is a processual event that can create a threading, weaving, and mixing between worlds, and this can lead to further interchange. Understood in this transitive, liminal way—­as a complex threshold and site of traversal—­a projective screen is not a stable entity but a place of real environ-

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AT M O S P H E R O LO GY A N D M E D I A R O LO GY

This is why I insist on the idea of atmospheres of projection, and wish to explore the notion of atmosphere further, for it affects the way we mediate our relations with the world, and also because it is integral to the constitution of media forms, and their reception. As we continue to explore a mode of atmospheric thinking in this chapter, and articulate atmosphere as a concept in history, we will see it further materialize as a mediatic milieu and, reciprocally, will experience forms of projection that are ambient. A reflection on the etymology of “atmosphere” suggests the concept that we will flesh out. Composed of atmos, meaning vapor, and sphaire, or sphere, atmosphere is, elementally speaking, a medium of life, its material base, the condition that makes life possible. Its medial nature is also cultural and social. Although atmosphere is a positively vague and cloudy concept, it defines, in broad terms, an ambiance of “spatialised feelings,” resulting from the material assemblage of different organisms and from the intermixing of forces in space.39 This is a milieu that, according to the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, is not simply indeterminate but mixed.40 Constituted as a live medium, it provides the very basis for sentient mixture and connection between diverse life forms. In fact, as the “atmospherology” of philosopher Tonino Griffero explains, an atmosphere is always “‘an in-­between,’ made possible by the (corporeal but also social and symbolic) co-­presence of subject and object.”41 Neither a discrete element nor an entity, it is ungraspable in singular or individual form. This is rather an in-­between that is also in balance between presence and absence, the definite and the indefinite. That is to say, to dwell in an atmosphere is to interact with living beings of various kinds, and to be affected by this varied ambiance. To sense an atmosphere is to grasp a volatile feeling in the surrounding space—­an “air”—­perceiving a situational mix of live forms that is subject to change. As a microclimate, an atmosphere evolves continually, and even dissolves: it is a force field in a constant state

of becoming. And in this ambient midst, subjects are corporeally involved. Ultimately, to experience an atmosphere, one must be engaged, open to, and in resonance with the phenomenic character and lived quality of our ever-­shifting surroundings. To sense this idea and experience it concretely, think of how tonal atmosphere is imparted in a film such as Wong Kar-­wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000). Here atmosphere is something pervasive and enveloping, and it unfolds and enfolds as an infinitely connective fabric.42 It wraps around the characters, whose carefully chosen attire matches the texture of the environment they live in. It is sensed as persistent but also elusive, evasive, unattainable, and intangible, just like “an air.” Atmosphere, that is, is an affect. It is a subtle psychic environment that also engages the formation and transformation of mood. Here it is a fleeting state of becoming, like a love that is fugitive. A vague presence, this mood of love has the texture of vapor, haze, or fog—­or perhaps more accurately, of mist. An atmospheric affair, it parallels the light rain that constantly falls upon the moody couple in love. A slow drizzle often envelops them as they move about the city. This architectural atmospherics thus drapes around the entire space, from dress to address. It resonates with the city itself, which has an air that is wet and fluid, as if it were an immersive sea. An atmosphere, as this film suggests, is a lived as well as a living phenomenon. It results not simply from the co-­presence of the subject with the material world but also from his or her interaction with that world. It is in this sense a transitive, relational affair, a form of receptivity—­in other words, an encounter. It is also in this sense that ambiance and medium can be fully understood to be connected, for they share fundamental qualities insofar as both are situated, fluid spaces of hybridity, mixture, and interaction. Both are sites in which different, mixed forms of mediation and interconnection take place, in (im)material and fluc-

or even becoming environmental, and in considering environments as constituting media as well, from the perspective of an atmospheric thinking of art, which aims to enlarge the scope of ecocriticism in its approach to the environmental humanities as well as to visual and media studies.44 If visual media are to be considered not only always mixed but living, and “an environment for the living,” it is relevant to engage their meteorology and even to pursue a study of what has been called “mediarology.”45 As the materiality of media is being affirmed, media ask to be seen in culturally environmental terms, for they are not simply a pervading element and enveloping substance in the culture but, to my mind, zones of activity that produce forms of relationality and interconnectedness that are spatially expressed and located. In this sense, I consider that the growing cultural awareness of atmospheric or “elemental media” directly engages the ecology of art, for aesthetics participates in interrelated milieus of exchange and communication.46 After all, as Gene Youngblood put it, “For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships.”47 So let us further explore this reticular milieu of projective spaces as an “environmentality,” from an art historical perspective open to visual culture movements, and attentive to how ecologies relate to sites of observation and circulation.

T H E M AT E R I A L M I L I E U O F P R OJ E C T I O N

Technical images are . . . projectors. They draw up plans on deceptive surfaces, and these plans are meant to become life plans for their recipients.—Vilém Flusser48

The perspective I propose to adopt, which considers medium as milieu and in relation to ambiance, can lead us to reshape specific artistic notions of medium and site, traditionally pitted against each other in art history, and to do so in view of an expanded and diverse ecology of images. Such a mediatic perspective

can challenge the restrictive art historical definition of site-­specificity, expanding it to embrace larger notions of environmental setting. It can also move us further away from the discourse that posits medium specificity and toward acknowledging what art historian David Joselit calls a “population” of images,

31 T he A mbiance of P rojection

tuating ways. And let us not forget that, in the form of ether, atmosphere even enables the transit of media in its midst, for it transmits and conducts luminous and aural mediatic waves. Finally, one may speculate that a change of atmosphere can not only affect people, marking their views, imaginations, and memories, but also produce different outlooks and projective regimes as well as forms of representation. And vice versa: art objects can reciprocally affect an atmosphere, understood as an interactive ecology. To advance these hypotheses, the cultural archaeology we have outlined linking medium and ambiance is thus a fundamental theoretical move, for it sets the stage for this book’s effort to map a cultural, environmental milieu of projective relations and aesthetic encounters, traveling across various disciplines and connecting their findings to reimagine the atmosphere of projection. In this ambient sense, my work has elective affinities with the field of media studies, if we are open to considering what new-­media theorist Jussi Parikka calls “a geology of media” in constructive dialogue with new materialisms and elemental philosophies, and if our curiosity leads us to consider the ambiance in which media are deployed or, likewise, their very constitution as an ambiance.43 From my perspective in the visual arts, sensitive to “site-­seeing,” geography, and material space, it has long seemed vital to explore the materiality of the media arts in relation to environment. I am now interested in thinking further of these media as constituting environments,

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which are “configurations of forces” that “establish a pattern of links or connections.”49 An example of such a site of mediation and hybrid passage is the “architectural promenade,” a modality of the traversal of space in which light is experienced as changing in a series of views, and where relations and encounters with human and nonhuman forms are configured and experienced spatially in the change of ambiance.50 As it relates to the medium of film, an “architectural promenade,” as I have argued elsewhere, is inscribed in the sequencing of montage as well as in the space of reception, and is therefore a particularly fitting path to pursue as we consider the hybrid material space in which this medium is sited.51 This critical material move that engages the architecture of projection—­its siting—­can help us address the relocation of moving images in contemporary art to various sites outside of the cinema, where the art of projection is today not only in place but in motion.52 Such spatial mobility informs my inquiry, which considers projection a space of activity and explores its artistic milieu and environment, all the while considering that it takes place in situ, in forms of location and dislocation.53 To get to the root of the milieu of projection in this exploration of archaeologies, and following a long-­ standing interest in mapping and architecture as well as in screening space, I propose to investigate projection—­a notion central to all of those disciplines—­in specifically spatial, environmental terms. In turning to architectural, ambient, and cartographic aspects of projection, I intend to disentangle projection from the bounds of optics in favor of a more material, processual view. With specific regard to the dispositif of cinematic projection, I want to revise the diffuse opinion that it is simply an optical medium and merely a direct heir of the visuality of linear perspectival representation and rather affirm a different “perspective.” The view that the technological constitution of the filmic camera is strictly modeled on Renaissance perspective was particularly popular at the time that film studies developed an “apparatus theory.”54 This theory had the great merit of

addressing film as a medium early on, to shift from medium to dispositif, and to highlight the working process of the filmic apparatus, drawing attention not only to technology per se but also to its ideological and psychic effects. There nevertheless were some flaws in its form of coding, which over time has endured criticism, in primis from the philosopher Hubert Damisch in his grand remapping of “the origin of perspective” as a vast and more diverse paradigm, and within film theory itself because of the overall construction of a disembodied view of spectatorship that ensued.55 The latter was the effect of some applications of the theory that maintained a limiting view of the more complex perspectival mode, implying that it “projects” an ideal and centralized viewing position, a visual construction that ended up collapsed onto the “gaze” of the film spectator.56 A dematerialization resulted as well from apparatus theory’s notion that Plato’s cave metaphorically represents the origin of cinema and envisions, or rather projects, its spectatorial modality.57 In time, a restrictive, parroted adaptation to film of the myth of Plato’s cave ended up privileging illusionary terms to account for cinematic projection and resulted in reducing it to a shadowy illusion of reality, staged for an immobile spectator-­prisoner locked in an enclosed space.58 Despite the motivated critique that this disembodied, illusory scenario received, and a rising interest in rethinking the notion of dispositif, projection and optical paradigms are still critically entangled in ways that obscure other “elements” of the history of projection: its diverse range, atmospheric modality, and ambient features.59 In particular, projection and linear perspective are tied together in some contemporary areas of media studies to the detriment of other “perspectives”—­ projective scenarios—­that might function alongside or as an alternative to a visual mode of linear operation.60 In the narrative that charts the development of “optical media,” prominent media historian Friedrich Kittler most clearly and extensively privileged linear perspective as the sole structuring logic for visual media.61 For example, in describing the emergence of the visual

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media that preceded the invention of filmic projection, he claimed that the issue is “how to take the geometrical automatism of the camera obscura and transfer it to other media.”62 Kittler affirmed that the projective “revolution of seeing” is “nothing other than the introduction of perspective in general,” and also linked this directly to the emergence of firearms.63 Although cine-­projection and perspective obviously do share a history and modes of representation, I am not convinced by the linearity and ordering of this historical narrative, which outlines the development of the art and dispositif of projection as a simple transfer of perspectival codes, or as a chain of military inventions, reducing the screen to a shield. Lines of connection are not always so linear. In Atlas of Emotion I began to question the emergence of the apparatus of

filmic projection as tied solely to optical histories and Renaissance perspective, and pursued different histories of projectival representation that do not “screen out” the environment, ultimately opting to foreground haptic, spatial mobilization as the genealogic root of precinematic forms of projection.64 Drawing on the cultural history and archaeological map of media that I drafted there, I continue to articulate cine-­projection in terms of haptic spaces of movement rather than as optical toys and, over the course of this book, emphasize alternative histories of the environment of projection that exist in tension with any ideal, visual ordering of space or simple disciplining of light. While the book’s introduction moved the origin of projection away from Plato’s cave and into the hands of Dibutades, to further this sense of a material history of

1.6  Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 2014 (at right). Installation view, Centro Arti Visive Pescheria, Pesaro, Italy, 2014. Tempera on wall and brass, 137¾ × 39¾ in. Courtesy of the artist.

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projection, one can also consider how contemporary artists use old or obsolete projective apparatuses, such as the camera obscura, phantasmagoria, panoramic forms of screening, or other historic forms of projection, for they reinvent them as practices that operate in and as ambiance, and often atmospherically.65 In such works, one can sense how even perspectival positions can change. Consider, for example, Marco Tirelli’s Untitled (2014; fig. 1.6), an artwork that materializes a space of projection.66 Attached to a large, screenlike black canvas is a projective object, conceived to resemble both an actual film projector and a device used in observatories of atmospheric conditions. This observational projective device appears to shed light onto the black space of projection, but in doing so does not reproduce linear perspectival unity. Tirelli rather “projects” a different, moving perspective. When it imaginatively lands on the painterly surface, the light emanating from the atmospheric projective device creates a graphic, cinematic movement. Projected onto the canvas are lines in motion that resemble the kinetic graphics of a precinematic experiment by Étienne-­Jules Marey, whose chronophotography was sensible to atmospheric phenomena and even made use of wind tunnels and smoke machines to create a sense of motion.67 Such a work suggests we think of cine-­ projection transhistorically and across mediums, in relation to multilinear perspectives and atmospheric theories of light and air. Reflecting in this way, I see multiple forms of screening coexisting across nonlinear temporalities in the forms of strata, layers, sheets, and veils, and imagine them circulating as fields of connective transits and energies. Projection, in other words, is a project, and it “projects.” It is dense in potentialities, cultural movements, and hybrid contaminations. To implement this more malleable way of envisaging projection and projective screens in conceptual terms, it is useful to turn to the philosopher Vilém Flusser, whose media theory goes beyond opticality

in recognizing that “technical images are envisioned surfaces,” that is to say, surfaces, rather than images, which can express visionary power.68 While “the universe of traditional images consists of walls,” he contends, technical images can open doors, just as keys do.69 This spatial observation acknowledges the power to envision—­that is, to imagine and project—­ that screen surfaces possess insofar as they are “cultural techniques” that function architecturally as doors. In Flusser’s words, “Traditional images are mirrors. . . . Technical images are projections.”70 Screens here are not simply to be likened to mirrors, as they have been in the perspectival view of apparatus theory, which, restrictively adapting the model of the Lacanian gaze and mirror-­stage, equates cine-­projection to the mirroring that produces a subject’s identification. Rather than simply functioning as mirrors, screens present themselves materially, as different kinds of “reflective” surfaces. Consider, for instance, the way the African American artist Karyn Olivier used the mirror as a potential screen for her 2017 installation The Battle Is Joined (fig. 1.7). Here, a large monument in Philadelphia commemorating a Revolutionary War battle was wrapped in a mirroring surface that reflected neither an identity nor identification but rather projected a form of resistance to these tropes as well as to monumentality. This surface projected a different environmentality as it reflected upon these issues as well as upon the social changes in the neighborhood by incorporating the surrounding landscape, people passing by, and activities in the environs. As this mirrored surface also reflected the atmosphere of changing light, time of day, and season, it transported with it a material sense of ambiance, transmitting a different way of thinking of screens as reflective surfaces of access. This work ultimately suggests that their form of mediation is not simply mimetic but fundamentally transitive. In their form of spatial projection and superficial envisioning of environmentalities, screens of projection are, indeed, closer in function to doorways, as

well as to other passageways functioning as cultural portals. It is also useful to emphasize that the envisioning surfaces of projection are, as Flusser puts it in Vom Subjekt zum Projekt (From Subject to Project), “concretions of possibilities.”71 In other words, to project is to develop potentials. An imaginative force is at play in this action, for only a novel imagination enables one to project potentially different scenarios, and this, in turn, can create different projections. In this sense, projection is a transformative process: it is a rearrangement of paradigms that creates new images, models, or concepts, and vice versa. Moreover, as it concretizes

potentialities, offering the potential transformative access that is a “dooring,” the act of projection has a material effect. This “concretation,” as one critic puts it, is a process whereby a subject “uses apparatuses” in order “to shape them into dialogical networks of objects, and project them into the world.”72 And in such concretation, subjects can reverse this imaginative flow—­their thrownness into the world—­becoming themselves a “project,” to project. Hence, as a novel act of imagination and a process of concretation, projection is a dynamic that engages experiences of material space. It also has a collective

1.7  Karyn Olivier, The Battle Is Joined, 2017. Installation view, Vernon Park, Philadelphia, PA. Mirrored acrylic, plywood, and studs, 20 × 14 × 5⅜ ft. Public art commission, Mural Arts Philadelphia and Monument Lab. Photo: Steve Weinik. Courtesy of the artist.

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dimension, for it makes “a nexus of intersubjective networks.”73 Ultimately, then, this way of defining the act of projection and the apparatus of projection of moving images not only entails material imagination but implies an imaginative design of potentialities: a

sketch, a drawing, a form of drafting. In this sense, it gets us closer to an architectural process and cartographic act, and proves useful in our effort to foreground a more haptic, spatial, material “gesture” of drafting projection as a milieu.

ARCHITECTURAL AND CARTOGRAPHIC PROJECTIONS

To further our environmental understanding of a projective “design,” we would be well served to reconsider as well the work of Rudolf Arnheim, the art and film theorist and perceptual psychologist known for his “visual thinking.”74 His essay on “The Perception of Maps” conceives the map as a configuration of forces, which can be transformed into a play of corresponding forces in the psychic act of reception. Although Arnheim does not say this explicitly, the way in which he figures the art of mapping as an environmentality tells us something about the art of projection, and its own capacity to project—­that is, to “envision.” As in an act of projection, a cartographic representation “can arouse visual images in the mind” that have been conjured up “from the reservoirs of the viewer’s memory.” And, of course, “it takes imagination, fed by experience, to generate visual imagery.”75 This line of imaginative and mnemonic visual thinking enables us to recognize that there are cartographic and architectural dimensions involved in filmic projection. Cartographic projection shares properties with the object it represents, as does cinematic projection. There is also resonance with architecture’s own configuration of projection and mode of rendering space. In architecture, projective drawing is a technique that trains an architect to think three-­dimensionally through two dimensions, and this “projective” aspect is also at work in the language of cinema, which constructs a similar form of dimensional conversion. The film medium, in Arnheim’s words, is about the “projection of solids onto a plane surface,” and it is “neither absolutely two-­dimensional or three-­dimensional, but something in-­between,” as it

is subject to a process that mediates not only visual but also nonvisual sense experiences.76 There is no flatness in filmic projection because “components of three-­ dimensional bodies” are present in the sense perception of spectators even if they “become elements of the surface composition only through being projected on a plane.”77 An almost sculptural sense of volume thus emerges from an architectural act of filmic projection, which reconfigures the object’s form and its corporeal materiality in space. We should consider as well, in this sense, that projection is defined spatially as the core of light’s construction and production of visual space. The question of light is, indeed, an important factor when considering cinematic forms of projection. To project, light must be guided through an aperture to reach a screen across a space or from behind its surface. But such light technology is not devoid of shades of darkness, for the “casting” of shadows plays an important part in the construction of the material projective space. Since the time of Leonardo’s drawings of projection, as art historian Victor Stoichita shows in his history of shadows, we have been able “to assume that the projection of the shadow and the perspective projection are identical processes.”78 In the screen media art of our times, images, transmitted to a screen surface by light, are explored within this surface space volumetrically, as shadows of light, cast in a dark space of projection. Such a luminous yet shady view of projection can be further enhanced in light of Sean Cubitt’s exploration in The Practice of Light, which, though addressing projection largely in terms of perspective, goes beyond a narrow codification of the phenomenon.79 Projection

the seer and the seen? When seen through contemporary eyes, this framed, veiled surface clearly functions as a screen, and the textured projective scene anticipates the filmic fabric of cinematic projection. It features the very material architecture of a screen surface and even shares its “architexture.” In other words, here, the act of projection is pictured as an act of screening. As such, it is very concrete, performed as it is upon the volume of a gendered figure, the body of a woman, which is, in many ways, “rendered” in projection. This veil of projection represents one of the layers of an act of screening, which engages the casting and veiling of light forms upon a material surface. In this sense, the luminous yet shady passage that takes place in cine-­projection can be genealogically traced back to the architectural act of projection.82 Here, in fact, the line of perspective is fundamentally a connective line of light. Such is the argument made by Robin Evans in The Projective Cast, a seminal history of spatial projection in which he argues that “in architectural projection space is nothing other than pictures of light” and shows that “images drawn as if transmitted to a surface by light” are “explored within the surface by simulacra of light that have been flattened into a comb of drafted lines.”83 Although privileging light over shadow, such an account of projection interestingly goes beyond the strictly luminous line of linear perspective, providing another, more mobile perspective, for in this narrative the projective modality interacts with elements that can disrupt geometric systems. The forces that have this destabilizing projective capacity clearly belong to the realm of atmosphere. Such discordances are “reflection, luster, refraction, luminosity, darkness, color, softness, absorption, liquidity, atmospheric density, instability of shape.”84 These are the actual elements of an ambiance, and their manifestation can create the instability of the projective cast. In this particular light, then, we get a sense of the “elemental” aspect of projection, which passes from architectural forms of mapping to filmic space. As we access this projective ambiance, we can begin to

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is here a larger technique of “the world projecting itself into the eye, of a human psyche projecting itself on the world, or of the free mind traveling through virtual space,” even if still linked to techniques that exert spatial control over the physics of light, including searchlights or laser technology.80 Rather than this tendency toward ordering time-­space and disciplining light, what accords with our transitive view of projection is Cubitt’s cartographic turn, which relates the kind of projection contained in maps and graphs to the visual design of cine-­projection. What emerges from this history of picturing light space cartographically suggests an important elemental factor. At a basic level, a projective act of drawing is a process of inscription. The gesture of drafting is mediated by a tool or technical apparatus, and is materially inscribed upon a surface. If the mark, the inscription, was once made upon a paper surface, this material support in more recent times has become a screen surface. In spatial projection, surface materiality has thus always been at stake. This is because in projective drawings, simply put, surface matters, dimension is material, and scale counts, and this is also the case, precisely, for cine-­projection. Following this line of exploration, a less visual and more haptic understanding of projection can be conjured, in light of the dimensional forms of architectural and cartographic mapping of space that lie at the origin of cine-­projection. Reconsider, in this projective light, Leon Battista Alberti’s famous device of perspectival projection, as popularized by Albrecht Dürer in The Painter’s Manual in 1525.81 Between the draftsman and a female model’s body stands a tangible material: a thin woven veil with a loose texture, a surface that is stretched and framed. It is hard not to see this apparatus of geometric projection, which scales and transforms a body from three-­dimensional to two-­dimensional appearance, in filmic terms. After all, as we have claimed, this precise dimensional passage is the volumetric transition and translation that form the basis of cinematic projection. And what to make of the partition standing between

1.8  Sarah Oppenheimer, S-­337473, 2017. Installation view, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 2017. Steel, glass, and architecture; total dimensions variable. Photo: Serge Hasenböhler. Courtesy of the artist.

taste its atmosphere. Projection is a medium that is a real ambient milieu. It relies on a passage of light but encompasses other elements of a transitive, reflective, refractive, absorptive, unstable, and fluid experience of material space. In these elemental terms, the atmosphere of projection is transitional, as is the case in architecture. Architectural “projection operates in the intervals between things,” as Evans puts it, and, as such an interval, “it is always transitive.” It is the actual “means of translation.”85 This transitive view of the atmosphere projection, which we are developing in relation to cine-­projection, can be fleshed out further in light of Evans’s 1978 text “Figures, Doors and Passages,” an inspiring study that anticipates by a few decades Siegert’s treatment of doors

as cultural techniques and folding operations in art.86 In Evans’s treatment of cultural operations of passage in the visual arts as well as in architectural spaces, social relations and transformations materialize, fundamentally inscribed in the configuration of objects and things that mold them. They are theoretically “hinged” upon material techniques, such as doors and other forms of passageway. In this view, one can hear echoes of sociologist-­ philosopher Georg Simmel’s own essay on “bridge and door,” which, in 1909, suggested that attention be paid to architectural techniques.87 Early on, then, passageways were conceived as particularly connective cultural structures, able to overcome “separation between the inner and the outer” and to create linkages between the space of human beings and that of material objects.88

discuss presently.89 Projection also can be considered a process of transduction because it harbors an imaginative element, a mental project of transposition: it can transport properties from the mind out into things and vice versa. In a fundamental sense, then, projective space is intimately related to both mobility and imagination, as it too is an imaginative force for making space that, in Evans’s view, “is potentially active in all the areas of transition from persons to objects or pictures.”90 This envisioning force of spatial projection also encompasses such matters as states of mind, for in order to be established, the space of subjectivity and intersubjective passages requires interior projections. Interestingly, then, we can observe that a psychic idea of projection is implanted in spatial discourses, precedes the formulation of this notion in psychoanalysis, and is not restricted to this field of inquiry. Psychic projection presents itself already in the architectural “drawing” of this concept, and pervades the geometric rendering and transformation of space. As Evans ultimately puts it, “Between geometry and architecture we have somehow hopped from inside the mind to outside. . . . We seem to be dealing with this route or doorway between mental and real.”91

F I AT L U X : T H E A M B I A N C E O F L I G H T

I am interested in the physicality of light, in our being irradiated by it. . . . As human beings, we do drink light . . . through the skin, so we are literally light eaters.—James Turrell92

If projection in architecture is bound up with the design and practice of light, this is indeed also the case for cine-­projection, which, at a very basic level, is a medium of pervasive and transmitted light. A current of electromagnetic vibrations, the light of projection does not simply coexist with the image but rather produces it, forging a plane of moving images and modulating the sensible world in its own rhythm. In the art of projection there is a subtle double passage of energy, for, as art critic and media

theorist Boris Groys notes, “The electrical light in which media images are shown simultaneously emanates from them,” and thus the reception of film, video, and new-­media art involving the projection of moving images, despite all technical differences, “is, above all, a contemplation of electrical light.”93 To experience this projective ambiance in contemplative ways, as it is activated by the modulation of light in technological forms, consider the ambient art of Doug Wheeler, an artist associated with the

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It is important to reflect further on these kinds of “hinges” as forms of material cultural passage—­as Sarah Oppenheimer does in her installations (fig. 1.8), with luminous projections of sculptural volumes that hinge together the architectural and the cinematic—­because this hinging, to my mind, is essential to gaining a deeper understanding of the ambiance of cine-­projection. A door between elemental states of matter, cine-­projection is indeed a form of passage, and, as it enacts a “dooring,” it acts as a vehicle of transmission. This medium is not only a milieu but also a means of transportation. In elemental terms, it transports luminous images. Furthermore, it can transform these images along the way, changing the experience of an ambiance. In this sense, an act of projection can be said to operate as a transduction. In its basic meaning, derived as we have noted from the Latin verb transducere, transduction embodies an action, the act of leading across, and such ferrying across provokes a transfer, resulting in a transformation. An act of projection itself leads to such a process of passage and material transformation that can be called transductive. It can operate as such a transductive passage because it contains an element of spatial luminosity, conveys magnetic forces, and conducts electrical energy—­phenomena that we will

1.9  Frederick Kiesler, Light and Image Projection Presentation for the Film Guild Cinema, 1929. Tempera and pencil on illustration board, 21⅝ × 28 in. MS Thr 729. © Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Light and Space movement that includes Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Helen Pashgian, and James Turell.94 Back in 1965, with his “light canvas” Untitled, a white painting that was backlit by neon tubing, Wheeler created a transmission of light that produced a transition between mediums. In the passage of light, this work effectively transformed the material support of painting into screen fabric, as did subsequent pictorial works of light that he produced. Wheeler’s later light ambiances, which abandoned painting altogether, further expanded these transitive potentials while

exploring the atmospheric sense of what a projective screen consists of and asking viewers to become contemplatively immersed in the atmosphere of projection. For DW 68 VEN MCASD 11 (1968/2011), Wheeler created a luminous silhouette in neon light that reads like the frame of a screen geometry, deployed in a diffuse ambiance of projection. In this artistic milieu, light becomes fully a transformative, (im)material element that moves between art forms and mediums. The density, thickness, and materiality of light is ethereally sensed in a transmedial experience

But rather than being immersed in such a projectively imaginative space, here the viewers were “projected out” into it, experiencing the site from a viewing platform. Wheeler’s transformative ambient work that engages the vital matter and energy of light points to the material imagination that is present in projection. Light is here activated as a space modulator. It is employed as an atmospheric condition that not only itself morphs but also acts upon and transforms other vibrant matters that make up an environment. Transiting from natural light to projected light, the works affirm the environmental quality of projection. After all, the projective irradiation of light is itself an atmosphere that is perceived not only by sight but rather in site. This sensing of space is not only optical but also haptic, olfactive, and auditory, because it engages the entire physical body and its full sensory perception of the environment of projection. Such a form of sensing is also sensitive to the particular “climate” of a space. In other words, as an ambiance, the art of projection produces a tonal feeling of change, increasing the variable, fluctuating, shifting nuances of an atmosphere. An opening of space and an expansion of the body—­a site of contact—­projected light creates moving, tangible experiences of ambient transformation.

THE DESIGN AND AMBIANCE OF MODERN MEDIUMS

In the end it all comes down to . . . a question of design.—Jean Epstein97

While it may be evident that cinematography is a medium, or rather a milieu, of luminiferous projection, to further understand the ambient impact of the character of electric light, its generative sources, and the current modes of expansion of the atmospheres of projection in the visual arts, we must now peel off an extra layer of environmental history. Returning to our cultural archaeology, we will reflect upon the conception and the practice of light that were embedded at the

time of the invention of cine-­projection.98 The restrictive codification of perspectival line as the privileged way to understand the art of projection, as we have argued, is not enough to account for the conductive, luminous energy that is diffused and circulated in the ambiance of projection. We then need to look deeper into the design of light space, beyond the disciplining of light and the disciplinary drawing of lines of light, to account for a different kind of luminous history.

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that is temporal and phenomenological, absorbing the viewer in its midst. The atmosphere of the space itself is transformed as it is modulated by the vibrancy of the projective light that frames the screen and diffuses in the ambient surroundings. This atmospheric transformation of space is pushed even further by Wheeler’s experiments with “infinity environments,” initiated in 1975 and instantiated in 2012 at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York with the title SA MI 75 DZ NY 12.95 A rounded white room with no corner or angles is light-­saturated in such a way as to make the borders of the room disappear, as if the space were infinitely expansive. As the projected light atmospherically changes in tone, the perambulatory viewer, unable to fix her gaze on any specific surface, is offered the experience of an enveloping, ever-­shifting surface environment. Such environmental aspects of light projection were further explored in Wheeler’s large installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, PSAD Synthetic Desert III (1971/2017).96 Here, the space of the museum gallery was so transformed by the projection of electric light and the modulated reduction of sound to a “pink noise” that one felt the silence of a natural environment and could even listen to the quiet, as if projected into the calm atmosphere of a vast desert or mountainous space.

1.10  Anthony McCall, Face to Face, 2013. Installation view, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, 2013. Photo: Jason Wyche. Courtesy of the artist.

In historical terms, as Benjamin expressed in his writing on the planetarium, cine-­projection emerged in the modern era along with electricity and other forms of electrifying movement. And, we should add, its apparatus developed alongside a theorization of light, which became understood as a form of energy. It is significant to note that Thomas Edison developed both the lightbulb and the motion-­picture camera. Around this time, and just as significant as Edison’s inventions, the articulation of various theories of light began to change the way that light was perceived, in the arts as well as in science. That is to say, a modern

notion of light was discursively designed at the very moment moving images themselves were conceived. An energy field surrounded the birth of the art of projection. Despite the significance of these phenomena, the context in which the design of light emerged in the photographic media has received insufficient attention in visual studies. Noting how little art historical scholarship had been generated on this subject, art historian James Nisbet set out to connect early photography’s fascination with landscape and atmosphere to the notions of light emerging at the time, focusing on Ead-

was exploring the material qualities of light and its potential of transmission. In this sense, it is useful to underscore the transition that took place concurrently from the idea of a “mechanical universe of matter in motion” to “an electromagnetic universe.”101 After the exploration of new forms of power, both electric and magnetic, and through the research of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, the ground became ready for the electromagnetic conception of light. It was ground that had been prepared by an understanding that matter is not inert but comprises currents of energy. The physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had extended the range of this energy field from biology to the heat of thermodynamics, electricity, and magnetism. In 1865 Maxwell published his influential text “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” concluding that “light and magnetism are affections of the same substance, and that light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagating through the field according to electromagnetic laws.”102 In this way, Maxwell transformed both the image of light and the medium of its propagation. As the physicist Arthur Zajonc states, “Light, electricity, and magnetism would now, and forever after, be entwined” as light became established as an “electromagnetic wave whose vibrations rippled through space.”103 Interestingly, it is the field, the ambiance itself, that possesses energy, for, in Maxwell’s words, energy “resides in the electromagnetic field,” that is, “in the space surrounding the electrified and magnetic bodies, as well as in those bodies themselves.”104 This conception of light as a wave and its theorization as wave theory, which developed alongside photographic technologies and their atmospherics, unveils mediatic qualities of movement and energetic dynamics that have been obscured by the visions of codified linear perspective that have pictured a disciplining of light. We will continue to pursue this concept of energy movement throughout our cultural archaeology, considering in the following chapter the propagation of magnetic energies and expanding, in chapter 3, on

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weard Muybridge and the emergence of “atmospheric cameras.”99 The desire to photographically capture elements of the atmosphere, including clouds, formerly present in the atmospheric painting produced by Turner, is positioned historically in the context of a transitional era: it stands “between a conception of light as a particle stream and its formulation as wave energy.”100 The period that generates photographic atmospherics is characterized by a gradual move away from Newton’s corpuscular theory of light particles. Its trace and the emerging theorization of light in the form of waves of energy is palpable, and can be felt in the picturing of material space and its atmospheric motion in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The articulation of energy waves fostered a form of mediation between the environment and the body that was itself on the move, in a cultural and aesthetic process that was as mobile and transformative as light itself is. As this moving medium of energy was transformed by different readings of its constituent parts and forms of circulation, so too were the representational regimes that were informed, and even created, “in its light.” This, of course, was the period when cinematography itself was developed, with its own moving pictures, from the protocinematic experiments in capturing bodily movement that were pursued by Muybridge as well as, among others, in the work of Étienne-­Jules Marey, especially, as mentioned, with his wind tunnels and smoke machines. It is therefore crucial that we understand the invention of cine-­projection in relation to this “energy” surrounding the atmosphere, and the screening of light in particular, and put it in dialogue with their shifting, evolving theorization. To further distance the art of projection from the direct line of a Renaissance heritage, I would suggest embracing this other current of thought and its coterminous “atmospheric thinking,” which reflect a more contemporaneous design of light. Projection emerged not only from perspective per se but also out of this surrounding cultural context—­research that

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the subject of the particle-­wave debate regarding the design of light, electromagnetism, energy transmission, and the motion of transduction. For our purpose of building a notion of “atmospheric thinking” at this point, however, it is important to stress that in these conceptions of energy waves, light itself is a medium that moves. It can move between mediums. And it can even travel through a medium, like a sound wave. Moreover, in mediating the relation between subjects and the environment, moving light waves create material interconnectedness. This transitive, mediatic quality is an important factor to underscore in my effort to redefine cine-­projection as an environment, a luminiferous ambiance of interaction. In recognizing projection as a milieu in which energies are transmitted, the energy itself of this field of inquiry—­a “wave” of transitive mediations—­requires foregrounding,

for this is indeed a constituent of the atmosphere of projection. In this sense, one should also consider the concurrent development of “projective geometries,” which issued from Renaissance perspective but had to wait until the modern era to break fully from Euclidean models and produce a new “projective imagination,” as well as a novel spatial thinking. In projective geometries, essentially, an infinity of metamorphic change can be envisaged. Geometric patterns, as Zajonc puts it, can now be seen as “crystallizations born from light,” and “rays” can “be imagined in motion, the figures ever-­changing, so that all stasis disappears.”105 Ultimately, then, in this modern projective view, the space in which forms exist is mobile, shifting in constant flux; it is “a geometry of streaming metamorphic life, and mathematics is alive with the vital force of the modern imagination.”106

I N L I G H T O F T H E I N V E N T I O N O F AT M O S P H E R E

The whole marvelous panorama of life that spreads over the surface of our globe is, in the last analysis, transformed sunlight. —Ernst Haeckel107

This modern, fluctuating, transformative wave of atmospheric imagination, which was produced in experimental projective geometries and in the scientific exploration of light, developed concurrently with the imaginative ambiance and fluid space of the art of projection. The luminiferous atmosphere of cine-­projection is equally modern, born as it was out of the rays of modernity—­that is, in its very light. And in light of this “atmospheric thinking,” we should note another historical conjunction that emerged around the notion of ambiance, which further supports a more expansive, environmental, energetic view of the “projective imagination.” Cine-­projection developed at the same time that the term ambiance was established as a noun, appearing in French dictionaries in 1896. This factor is relevant in our archaeologi-

cal mapping of the energy of the cultural context that surrounded the emergence of projection. Let us follow, then, the semantics of ambiance and the course of its subtle passages and contaminations. Before the noun, the adjective ambiant was used in mostly scientific contexts to mean “what goes around” in space, having developed from the Latin verb ambire, which defined ambulatory activities as well as the kind of encircling that we have said is proper to an atmospheric embrace. The modern term ambiance was used predominantly in relation to artistic matters but also in philosophical, sociopolitical, and anthropological discourse, in part as a synonym for the more positivist notion of milieu. But it also came to carry different, multiple inferences and associations, referring, as one art critic recaps, “to light, brightness, air, limpidity, mixed with the dynamic sense of a fluid matter en-

veloping and embracing people and things.”108 Milieu maintained more empirical connotations; it developed, as the philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem explains, from the mechanics of physics, moved to biology as a behavioral notion, and ended up encompassing sociological implications in defining an anthropological and geographic setting or surrounding.109 Ambiance would expand the meaning of milieu, understood as a mid-­place, medium, or in-­between, as well as its connotation of environment, or Umwelt, as developed by Jakob von Uexküll.110 This biophilosopher resisted the more deterministic aspect of milieu

and, as film theorist Inga Pollmann suggests in a study of vitalism, was also interested in the technical medium of chronophotography, which captured motion through multiple images.111 His Umwelt defines the character of the world surrounding organisms as being subjective as well as objective, with correspondences between the two. Uexküll even sought to expose the more subjective environment that encompasses every living form and being. This expanded notion of surroundings builds on the idea of the existence of an ambient element first formulated by the ancient Greeks and subse-

1.11  J. M. W. Turner, Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water, 1840. Oil on canvas, 36¼ × 48⅛ in. Collection Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

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quently reprised by modern science to define “what goes around.” Such motility refers in particular to the (im)material consistencies of fluids or air, that is, to the space surrounding and encircling living bodies and the bodies of things. Ambiance, then, further develops that notion of “ambient medium” discussed by Spitzer, via Newton, as a field of forces, connoting the fluid movement of the sensible world. And so it goes that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the connotations of ambiance shift from the biosociological sphere to a realm closer to that of atmosphere, with its affecting elements, or to “climate,” arriving finally to be understood as “an air,” even in the spiritual sense.112 In other words, with modernity, the era in which the technical reproducibility of media creates atmospheres of projection, ambiance itself becomes more atmospheric. It takes on the character of a more elemental, ecological, evanescent, and affective “technical medium.” The term atmosphere, as understood in the scientific realm, likewise emerged at a particular historical moment.113 Combining the ancient Greek words for vapor and sphere, the idea of atmosphere made its appearance in early modernity, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. A concept of natural philosophy, it spread rapidly from astronomy and mathematics to multiple areas of research, ranging from meteorology to cosmology, medicine to botany. Discussions arose in various fields about the aerial region—­the pneuma or vapor—­surrounding the earth, and especially about the composition of the substances that permeate the earth’s surface and extend all the way to the stars, often described as blankets of air, effluvia, exhalations, or emanations. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even climates were widely spoken of as circumfusa, that which sheathes and flows around organisms. The idea was to grasp an ethereal form of circumnavigation that, as Eva Horn puts it, “engulfs and

transports the bodies of living beings, be they plants, animals, or human beings, in an ever-­ moving, ever-­changing medium.”114 As for the sciences proper, these discussions also involved light, as historian Craig Martin shows in his study of “the invention of atmosphere,” especially the quality of twilight and the refraction of sunlight.115 Because luminous refraction requires light to pass through a substance, atmosphere was engaged, analyzed, and mathematically measured. Interestingly, it did not emerge as ethereal, nor as pure air, diaphanous or transparent. It was rather assigned degrees of limpidity and deemed opaque, turbid, or even gloomy, in more affective terms. And, with this material consistency, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the concept of atmosphere changed in scientific circles, in even more fluid ways, with the advent of the pneumatic experiments of Pierre Gassendi, Walter Charleton, and Robert Boyle. The atmosphere of the mathematicians was transformed, with added characteristics not only of weight and gravity but also of pliability and fluidity. The nature of vacuity and the possibility of assigning weight to air or its particles created disputes about the borders and extent of the atmosphere, and its capability for expansion, seen as curling in waves. Its density or rarity, qualities implicated in its capacity to refract light, suggested a morphing matter of condensed air or gases. By the rise of modernity, then, the earth was seen to possess an encompassing, layered atmosphere, which surrounded and moved around everything, including flora and fauna, other planets, and everything solid. The concept resulted in the idea of an elastic blanket, a pliant, “fluid substance made of corpuscles and effluvia.”116 Thus comprised of fluid bodies and layers that are not fixed but rather unstable, atmosphere became defined by flux and movement. In such a way, it became more closely connected to ambiance—­the space in which we breathe and move.

As ambiance developed as a term in modernity, joining the fluid strata of atmospheric research, so did the ambiance of projection, even as an actual environment. The transitive qualities of transmission we described as belonging to this conceptual milieu of an ambient body are also active elements in the creation of mediums such as film, and its forms of spatial projection. “What goes around” is, precisely, the atmosphere of light and sound passing through air, circling and embracing things and people as they view moving pictures projected onto screen fabrics. Hence, as far as ambiance is concerned, “what goes around” describes not only the medium of diffused and refracted light but also the different forms of sonorous movement that occur and resonate in the luminiferous ambiance of projection. This environment includes the perambulatory activity of spectatorship, that imaginative “architectural promenade” that constitutes filmic viewership, reprised today in the path of mobile reception of moving images projected in art galleries. Ambiance, which at its root is an ambulatory concept, in turn, becomes generative of various other forms of atmospheric perambulations.117 It is in this spirit that I insist on connecting the conception of ambient light as energy to the energy expressed in the art of projection, making a theoretically ambulatory move. This transitive gesture that conceives ambiance as passage is also a move away from the idea that a light medium is an inert element. The ambiance of projection is, indeed, a vital matter that is electrically charged. Light transmits through space that attractive, iridescent, haptic lure of Iris as it radiates and irradiates in the atmosphere, “in the air,” of the technical media of projection. Its substance can be considered a “vibrant matter,” that is, a component of the “vital materiality” that, for the political theorist Jane Bennett, runs through and across the body of things.118 In a different way, light’s vitality can also be read in light of the environmental ideas of “elemental philosophy.”119 But

what particularly concerns me here is light not as an element or entity, but, rather, as an agent of ambiance, of that active, conductive force that affects perception. Wary of the positing of a primordial existence for elements or claims for their stability, I am interested in environmental substances such as light, that can shift and that, because they move—­that is, because they “go around”—­can embrace people and things. Since the time of Aristotle, we have come to understand that visual perception depends on this diaphanous medium. In De Anima, introducing the idea of media diaphana, or translucent media, the philosopher sheds light on the role played by diaphanous substances such as light, air, clouds, smoke, water, glass, and crystal in configuring—­with their different consistencies and degrees of transparency—­the environment in which our sensory experience takes place.120 As light passes though air it creates a state of excitation in space that is shared by persons and objects.121 Lightedness is indeed an ever-­changing quality of surfaces, as it reflects and transforms all superficial matters, from skin to screens to sites. An energy space per se, it is able to make space energetically shift as well. To recognize this is to acknowledge the force that light exerts in the world, not only in terms of speed but in its capacity to displace objects in its path and to accrue residues, deposit sediments, and leave traces.122 Moreover, light is a vibrant substance that not only moves but also morphs and mutates in time, as part of an environment of “temporal” change. As light morphs into darkness with the cycle of the day, we perceive space differently and also perceive different aspects of a space. As things appear in a different light, literally and metaphorically, diverse views can emerge. To sense light as energy is also to be tuned to the moving materiality of the energy that surrounds us. It is to be attuned to the many forms of mutability of an atmosphere, to the subtle changes that occur in the environment, and to reflect on how they are not only registered but also transmitted in the

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L I G H T S PA C E A N D E L E M E N TA L P R OJ E C T I O N S

1.12  Latifa Echakhch, Cross Fade, 2016. Installation view, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2016. Commissioned by the gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris/London; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; and Kauffman Repetto, Milan.

framed landscape, whether mobilized by an airplane, a car, or a train, produces atmospheres. Furthermore, atmospheres change, as do moving images in the frames of projection. In both, the exposure and absorption of external phenomena happen in mobile (and moving) form. And as acts of projection of moving images perform various forms of modulation, including the modulation and vibration of light, they too enhance the character of our surroundings and the feeling of their shifting tonal characteristics. Insofar as they act as doorways, projective screens are indeed elements of such “intermediated” passage—­the actual vehicles of transits and transitions, the points of contact and mediation between worlds.

I N T E R M I X I N G P R OJ E C T I O N A N D AT M O S P H E R E

The more we think about atmosphere in this transitive sense, the more we see qualities of intermedial connection with projection take shape, and this correlation circles back to the question of medium explored at the beginning of this chapter, offering an occasion to develop a notion of the projective imagination in tune with atmospheric thinking. We have already discussed how atmosphere is itself produced as a processual medium or, rather, as a sensing mixture. This is a particularly mixed form of medium-­milieu: a mediated environment with a spatiality that is transitive yet bound. Because it operates between subject and object, it also mediates between the subjective and the objective realms. Considering atmospherology fundamental to a new aesthetics, philosopher Gernot Böhme suggests that atmospheres, insofar as they are spatially discharged feelings, or perceptions of “an indeterminate spatially extended quality of feeling,” are not “something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and yet they are something thinglike.”123 In Griffero’s view as well, atmospheres can be understood as “quasi-­things,” a notion that echoes Michel Serres’s construction of “quasi-­objects,” adopted by Bruno Latour.124 Quasi-­things have “their own phe-

nomenic character” but also consist of “aggregations of objects” and can produce further connective interactions between the subjective and the objective.125 In other words, these are processual forms that produce a receptive relation. A heightened sense of atmosphere is an aperture that creates access, and it makes for a “dooring”: it is an opening to the organisms that constitute the living sociocultural environment. And such a receptive attitude is capable of prevailing over firm distinctions between different species of organisms, in favor of creating interconnectedness, mixtures, and exchanges between the animate and the inanimate, the human and nonhuman. In recognizing this open, processual form of mixed materiality in the formation of ambiance, I would like to emphasize the genealogy that links it to atmospheres of projection. If atmosphere has become conceptualized as a mixture or in mixed form, it is also because it is a product of modernity. The nineteenth century saw a rapid development in atmospheric research and the meteorological sciences, and, as literary scholar Steven Connor explains, “Around the turn of the twentieth century, the air acquired a new accent.”126 Most importantly, when it culturally emerged in mod-

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visual arts, especially on the surface of the screen in forms of projection. Consider, in this respect, how an artist such as the Moroccan-­born Latifa Echakhch makes us aware of “what goes around” in ambiance. In her atmospheric installation Cross Fade (2016; fig. 1.12), which explores the materiality of the sky and the perception of clouds, one experiences in luminous traversal how passage and modulation are generative matters of atmosphere as they are of projection. Here we grasp that it is in moments of passage from one space to another that one becomes more receptive to spatial and climatic qualities, to the sense of an atmosphere. Perception in perambulatory movement, on foot or in viewing any

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ern times as a sphere of interest, atmosphere signaled a shift in the concept of spatial corporeality. In his 1813 Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena, Thomas Forster argued that “the effects of atmospheric peculiarities” can be registered “on every organized body.”127 A permeable surface that affects the condition of every being—­be it vegetable, animal, or human—­this “air” can also function as a medium to connect them. Modern metereology, as cultural geographer Peter Adey shows, furthered this idea, conceiving atmosphere as “a cycle of interchanges and exchanges of matter and energy.”128 Conceptually envisioned in modern times as such a porous space of transits, atmospherics, as Connor puts it, became “the sphere in which a new conception of mixed and mutually pervasive bodies was worked out.”129 In essense, the idea of a mixed and pervasive atmospheric corporeality is a modern idea, and so is thinking atmospherically. Such an approach has an important social potential, for it enables us to conceive of overcoming divisions and barriers in favor of mixture and interchange. Atmospherics is the sphere in which boundaries between bodies, and distinctions between bodies and matters, human and nonhuman, can be not only negotiated but crossed. As one imagines the possibility of “mixed and mutually pervasive bodies,” a different conceptual universe becomes possible: one open to change and exchange. Atmosphere thus developed as a concept in the midst of, and as an agent of, a major paradigm shift that ended up recognizing different, positive techniques of admixture, fluidity, and hybridity in ambiance. In this sense, atmosphere, as a modern concept, can itself be fully understood as a site of mediation and, as such, recognized to act as a mediatic sphere. As we have noted, the term ambiance developed in close proximity to the emergence of “atmospheric cameras,” and this modern attention to atmospherics also coincides with the invention of the art of projection. This is not only a historical coincidence but also a conceptual conjunction. If atmosphere is conceived

as a mixed, transitive, and fluid milieu, it is because it developed in the midst of modernity’s creation of a modern, hybrid space, activated by sites of motion, including cine-­projection. And let us underscore the fact that projection itself is an environment, a space of atmospheric perception. It places viewers in a lived sensory space, pervasively and porously populated by a mix of people, objects, and quasi-­things, like colors and sounds, lines and shapes, lights and shadows, vapors and clouds. Such spatialized feelings are experienced in the space of projection as well as conveyed and modified through screen space, which is itself moving ambient space. In other words, projection puts us not only in a situation but also in contact with its hybrid dynamics, unstable modification, and constant perturbation. Atmospherics is, here, the “element” of a perturbing projective ambiance. “Atmospheric thinking” thus provides a fundamental way of understanding how modern mediatic environments are established, precisely because it is at the root of their creation. As our archaeological excavation shows, there is an atmospheric conjunction of ambient media in genealogic terms, and the tension of their forces produces a less linear perspective and a more ambulatory route with respect to the course of the atmosphere of projection and its receptive impact. Additional ambient possibilities of this kind become opened if we consider the particular form of apperception that is established in an atmosphere: a mode of viewing space that is not static or focused but rather attuned in subtle ways to “what goes around.” This environmental aspect emerges clearly in studies of atmosphere in architecture, which emphasize a diffuse sense of “whereness” that is connected to weather, light, and sound.130 In exploring that architectural phenomenon, Böhme shows that in this kind of milieu “the form of a thing . . . exerts an external effect. It radiates as it were into the environment.”131 What is experienced in architectural atmospheres is thus not a linear apperception of space but rather a “being in” a situation. Architect Peter Zumthor, known

linear. Atmosphere and projective media create their own elemental environment, in a constant process of change that engages the margins. They are sites that surround us, or border us, producing a state of flux and a sense of becoming. Though somewhat intangible, they do appear to possess material qualities, and this surrounding effect can be felt as enfolding and enveloping, as a sense of connection and even relatedness to other beings or forms. As environmentally charged modes, projective media, like atmospheres, are sensitive to such elements as light, which they transmit, yet they convey as well the shadowy, the nebular, and the vaporous. Furthermore, an “air” here suggests a diffuse tonality of spatialized feelings. Neither directional nor centralized nor linear but rather elusive, these are tones to be felt in situations, on the periphery. As a quality of diaphanous surroundings, of the mediums of light and air, such perceptual, “peripheral” sensations are truly mutable. They can expand laterally and tangentially, swerve and diverge, amble and ramble, drift and stray. Finally, the projective space is an atmospheric ambiance also in the sense that it is a transitive climate in which “mutually pervasive bodies” mix. In an atmosphere, as in the space of projection, much goes around; encounters happen, and such transitive movements not only transmit but are transformative.

A M B I E N T M E D I U M S : P R OJ E C T I N G A C L I M AT E

The cultural conjunction we have developed of atmosphere and projection as modern concepts could not be complete without paying more attention to weather, understood in its wider connotations. As the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō shows in his book A Climate: A Philosophical Study, weather participates in the creation of a “climate,” conceived as the processual agency of time and space.135 Climate invites a process of rediscovery of our existence as social beings in close relation to the materiality of an atmo-

sphere. Art participates in the collective formation of a climate that is as meteorological as it is social.136 This is because a climatic character shows through a work of “projection” out of and into the material world. Thinking in this particular atmospheric light, one recognizes that the art of projection itself has the capacity to express weather conditions, and to bring the weather inside. It can make us experience the characteristics of climatic conditions, sense their materiality and specificity, and become aware of environmental

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for his design of atmospheres, also speaks of a situational mode, created not only through materials but through the arrangement of objects in space as well as the diversity of spatial composition.132 The resulting experience is not simply visual but includes olfactory qualities as well as noise and sound, color and hues. One can call this a form of absorption, which is not dependent on a centralized mode of reception but rather a diffuse peripheral awareness. “Peripheral perception is the perceptival mode through which we grasp atmospheres,” claims architect Juhani Pallasmaa, with our sensory perception of “temperature, moisture, air movement”—­that is to say, through “non-­directional senses and their embracing character.”133 Atmosphere is thus sensed as a decentered space, even unfocused or hazy, and, in turn, it sensitizes us to the periphery and to peripheral forms of perception, inviting tangential, oblique, divergent, and lateral moves.134 In this sense, to recognize “what goes around” peripherally and laterally in a fluid, mixed ambiance leads to the theorization of a less stable and more hybrid, even “nebular” concept of mediation. Thinking atmospherically in this way, we can now fully recognize medium as an actual atmospheric ambiance. Atmosphere and projection are linked in that both perform a diffusive act of “screening” space and convey its process. They mediate, transmit, and project physical, temporal, and emotional states that are not fixed or

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mutability. In the broader sense, it can enhance the “climate” of a space and make us sensitive to how each space has its own specific affect or atmospheric character. Sensitivity to atmospheric movements can furthermore mobilize our sense of how landscapes are constructed and our notions of their temporality and volatility. When experienced within the space of projection, this atmospheric sensing of a climate can produce further forms of mutability and transformation of an environment. In emphasizing how important actual weather is in cinema, film scholar Kristi McKim proposes thinking of weather as not only a prominent subject of film but a powerful metaphor for the filmic medium.137 Weather, like cinema, is a language that engages indexicality and memorability as well as time and movement. It is also a spectacle of sorts that can be shared in states of both distracted and fascinated attention, sometimes even experienced in enveloping embrace, as if immersed in the sea. Going beyond identification with characters, such states of spectatorial behavior can establish a form of atmospheric identification, and even absorption. Screening a film, one “can rewind the rain shower, pause the snow, skip forward through the tumultuous storm, frame-­ advance the lens-­flared facial close-­up.”138 In other words, watching a film is an experience that can be compared to watching the sky and meditating on the clouds passing by. It is perhaps not by chance, then, that screens became readable and were exposed to a mass audience at the same moment the skies were.139 The publication of the first International Cloud Atlas, in the late nineteenth century, coincided with the birth of film exhibition. 1896, the year that the photographic atlas was published, was deemed the “International Year of the Clouds” by the International Meteorological Society when it held its conference in Paris. These events occurred, following the experiments of the “atmospheric cameras” discussed earlier, just as the Lumière brothers began to show their first films in the

same city, rendering on celluloid and in projection the atmospheres of daily modern life. This period saw the conception and exhibition of many mediatic atmospheric phenomena. The sky, in particular, loomed large in the imagination of early forms of projection. The surface of the sky, itself always a screen for light, turned into the plane of a modern media environment. It became the ultimate atmospheric screen. In fact, the media archaeology of the screen, as Erkki Huhtamo shows, is full of imagined, fictional, and actual attempts to turn the sky into an actual screen.140 Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, the modern era produced an expanded screen of veiled light: atmospheric, outdoor projections changed the landscape of the city in ventures that ranged from advertising to more artistic purposes such as projecting lights onto buildings, monuments, and natural sites, shooting up into the sky. Electric, gaseous projections, engineered by scientists as well as artists and magicians, made the screen into a cloud. Creating the cultural atmosphere for the projective screen of film to come into being and, in turn, reading the sky as an atmospheric surface for projection thus represents a conjoined product of modernity. Emerging from a shared cultural terrain, the clouded sky and the screen veil established their own intersecting modern discourse. Sheets of white clouds resonated with the white sheets that hung in space as makeshift screens as a meteorological common denominator connected atmospheric phenomena to the art of projection. In tune with atmospheric thinking, a language of media emerged that was itself ambient. As anthropologist Tim Ingold puts it, “The meteorologist looks for the common denominator of breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and the sky,” and that denominator “is what we call the atmosphere.”141 It is also, indeed, the sensory landscape that emerges in the atmosphere of projection. This is a site in which time and breath, mood and memory, sound and color pass by on screens as do clouds on skies.

Italian, an aria, that is, an attitude or an appearance as well as an atmospheric character. This is an air that can pass freely from bodies to an atmosphere, connecting the two in quivering action. We can recognize in this airy movement of surfaces the breezy resonance of movere, which, as derived from the active Latin verb, is an affective stirring. Such movere of things in space is also an emovere, a “moving out.” The power of motion, that is, is also an emotion. This breezy atmospheric emotion is an act of projection, itself a moving out and in of qualities of character, from bodies to space, reciprocally. An enveloping air is not always an embracing one but can be abrasive or erosive. There is “wear” inscribed in “weather.” In other words, atmospherically speaking, a material relation can unfold between weather and weathering.145 Weather is an atmospheric agent that is forcefully active. It can permeate and penetrate the surface of objects, affect the shape of materials, and corrode their fabric. It can oxidize, eat away, decompose, crumble, and disintegrate a surface. Weathering connotes, in this sense, an atmospheric process of decay. It can become a palpable, ambient form of ruination. The observation of such ruinous phenomena has strong expressive potential in the art of projection, where weather and weathering can converge. How can one not think of Blade Runner in this regard? Here, rain has a particular “air.” The emblematic 1982 film by Ridley Scott is veiled—­or should we say screened?—­by a constant rain that appears to eat away at the city. This rain makes the entire ambiance corrosive. It falls persistently, veiling the landscape of the city and further obscuring the neo-­baroque lighting. It is an eroding rain that wears things away.146 Such a rain is indeed an atmospheric agent—­one that actively resonates and interacts with the kind of “accelerated decrepitude” that this film stages as the expressive, affective, distressing disease of the times. Such corrosive atmospherics are further explored in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), under the direction of Denis Villeneuve. An entire neo-­noir, mnemonic ambiance

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This subjectively felt sensibility is thus fully an “air,” the expressive tone of a place experienced as an elusive, transient phenomenon. And this passing quality of an atmospheric phenomenon has a strong temporal dimension, as do time-­based media. After all, the transience is part of the cycle of the day, produced by the changing of light over time. It has its own rhythm: a pulse that is felt in the environment and in the bodies that inhabit it. The temporality of ambient sensing is exuded in the very ambiance of projection, in the cycle of filtering light into darkness, but can also be expressed on screens by certain modes of image-­making that enhance atmospheric transience. In the early films of Wim Wenders, for example, as melancholic wanderers travel through landscapes or meander through cities for seemingly endless days, with no real plot to anchor their intentions, situations transpire in which a person, like time, simply goes around. This wandering mode creates thresholds of slow temporal passage as it opens up a space for ambient, situational experiences to be observed in and over time, in environmental awareness. In this way, Wenders lets the air in, while making ample space around people and things.142 As viewers inhabit this ambiance, the tone or the air of a place transpires on film. And the “breath” of this gesture can be felt in the very air that it creates in the atmosphere of projection. This kind of air can be described, in the words of art historian Georges Didi-­Huberman, as an “imaginary breeze.”143 In early Renaissance painting, it used to take the shape of a wind that animates the surface of a canvas, and we can experience such an airy sensibility transferred to film when movement activates the fabric of the screen. This kind of breeze “causes all that it touches to quiver or stir, to be moved or convulsed,” and it “also sends a quiver through bodies.”144 The ability to send a quiver through space and time is the force that animates all things that can move superficially, including the folds of dresses, draperies, and hair but also foliage, twigs, and branches. Such an air is a breeze that is both climatic and affective. It is, in

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1.13  Nathaniel Dorsky, Alaya, 1976–­87. 16mm, color, silent, 28 min. Film still. Courtesy of the artist and Harvard Film Archive, Harvard University.

is designed here, with enhanced digital effects that generate an imaginative moody atmospherics and sense of weathering. As it creates an ambient sense of the wearing away of things, the film reveals ever more clearly that this superficially eroding process is the texture of memory itself, the effect of its material course, the passing of time. One can call this “weather cinema,” or describe “atmospheres of the self ” in terms of actual “ambient media.”147 This ambient modality especially pervades the history of experimental film and video, where instances of the effects of weather as a form of weathering are numerous.148 Nathaniel Dorsky’s film Alaya (1976–­87; fig. 1.13) is a particularly affective example of how media can express the agency of atmospheric surfaces and environmental decay. A film that presents

no human characters, it is made entirely of light, wind, and sand. Dorsky’s camera closely observes the activity of these elements and further activates their states of matter. In the act of projection, over the course of time, the film not only brings out their surfaces but brings them together, as if they were intermingling with the film emulsion itself. This cinematic reflection on weather and weathering emphasizes density, texture, and grain—­that is, tonal atmosphere—­ultimately producing a transformative show of granular and luminous particles. Atmospheric meditation thus becomes an active agent of projection. Here, the screen transmits a modulation of mutable environments and textural atmospherics. A form of weathering, then, can take place in forms of projection that not only register the textural char-

acter of landscape and render atmosphere but actively transform environmental elements. And this process of ruination can also disclose a dangerously ruinous side. Climate conditions can transform the condition of life itself and affect how we project ourselves into this depleted environment. This is made particularly evident when we approach the work of Tomás Saraceno, an artist who treats the matter of air as an ecosystem in becoming.149 In a polyphonic dialogue between human and nonhuman universes, the movement of air becomes a vehicle to unveil the fragile networks of connections, rhythms, and trajectories that precarious-

ly link them together. In this way, air can also become a space for change, if atmosphere is treated, as Saraceno does, as a site for the coming together of interconnected cultures: a space for new modes of knowledge production, open to the debate and global challenges posed by the state of our ecosystem. As Pierre Huyghe also suggests with his environmental installation After ALife Ahead (2017; fig. 1.14), an atmospheric reflection on the elements of our surroundings is particularly necessary in our times. This affecting work, made for Skulptur Projekte Münster, was set in an abandoned hockey

1.14  Pierre Huyghe, After ALife Ahead, 2017. Installation view, Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2017. Photo: Ola Rindal. Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Hauser & Wirth, London; and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

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rink on the outskirts of the historic center of town. In a gesture that echoed Hans Haacke’s Germania (1993), for which the artist smashed the floor of the German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, Huyghe slashed the concrete grounds of the ice rink, cutting it open. But while Haacke’s shattered marble tiles architecturally broke apart and cut open the grounds and wounds of German history, here destruction went hand in hand with forms of growth and decay that feel elemental. As the video that captured the installation reveals, Huyghe’s version of Land Art excavated the ground to create a live, mutating environment with the aid of technology. As archaeological layers of earth emerged from this broken ground, the site began to teem and swarm with various organic growths and molds. Archaeology was thus transformed into geology, and in this layered way, environment was turned into ecological atmosphere. Glass tanks dotted the earthy geological strata of the site, and these too were alive, in this case with bacterial species. Connected to the energies of these tanks—­to the vital material forces that were everywhere activated—­motor systems activated the ceiling vents of the rink, causing them to open. These “cuts” in the ceiling stood in relation and response to the cuts in the floor. They too “screened” the space, creating a further atmospheric filtering. Not simply a means of “projecting” light into the space, the cuts offered a particular ambiance as the openings allowed every kind of atmospheric agent, including the weather, not only to enter into but also to act upon the environment. Rain fell and further corroded and transformed the environment that visitors were asked to walk through. As moving spectators of these environmental projections, they became active participants in the ecosystem projected within. Here, as in the atmosphere of projection, one could sense an environment and experience a form of weathering that was not only a textural effect but a transmutation of energies, both material and virtual,

organic and mediatic. One could further experience a systemic shift. Going beyond simple environmentalist politics, Huyghe’s topological installation gestured toward a broader phenomenon: the “ecologization” of contemporary art.150 This work addressed how ecology functions within the larger ecosystem we now inhabit, and offered a diagnostic account of how this affects the production of art. It especially did so by forging relations that invested intermingling, living materials of nature and culture, projecting change not only in aesthetic form but in artistic habitat. This kind of aesthetic milieu reflects upon an “ecological turn,” which was turned into an even more living and breathing technological Umwelt in Huyghe’s following large-­scale project, an installation aptly titled UUmwelt (2018–­19).151 For this site-­ specific installation at London’s Serpentine Gallery, hailed as an example of “ecosystems aesthetics,” Huyghe collaborated with Japanese computational neuroscientists to translate MRI scans of brain activity into images projected on screens, working on a conjunction of neurobiology with artificial intelligence.152 As these visions of neural networks pullulated on the screen, ten thousand flies swarmed and buzzed around the ambiance. The images “screened” from the brain were not only in perpetual motion but constantly modified in clusters throughout the time they were projected in the space. Triggered by sensors that responded to atmospheric conditions in the galleries—­to its light, temperature, dust, and humidity—­and enhanced by the motion of insects and humans in the space of projection, the images reacted in response, morphing and mutating with the ambiance itself. In Huyghe’s UUmwelt, then, climate becomes an actual environment, and Umwelt is revealed as a cultivated milieu: a biological “culture.” The gallery space thus turns into a biotic site that is also abiotic, in a mixed form of ecological environment that is inherently technological. In a projection of moving images that act as if they were reacting or self-­

becomes an entire biosphere, in an atmosphere of projection that critically exposes the diverse subjective and objective elements that can produce it, and affect its change.

T U N I N G I N TO A F F E C T I V E AT M O S P H E R ES

Insofar as they consist of climatic impressions effused into space, atmospheres, as we have shown, are surroundings of morphing sites, habitats of mixed and diverse forms, pervaded by diffuse textural matters, including “spatialized feelings.” That is to say, they possess the capacity not only to create but to pervasively transmit transformative states of matter and “feelings poured out in the space.”153 In this latter sense, then, an atmosphere is a sphere that bears a tone, a tonality of sensations and even a disposition within its space. In other words, this “climate” is also a sphere of affect. After all, air—­a veritable medium—­can be perceived as heavy or light, biting or enveloping, suffocating or uplifting. A sense of cloudiness may refer to the emotional climate of a space, that is, to the very “air” of a site. A foggy atmosphere can convey an effusive sentiment. Which is to say, as I suggested in an earlier volume that presented a cartographic study of emotion, the spatiality of affect engages atmosphere, which is tied to mood and has its own moods, or rather modulations.154 Atmosphere is a particularly haptic and textural perception of space as an element in itself: a sensing of affect not only in but of a site. There are indeed such things in places as “affective atmospheres,” as cultural geographer Ben Anderson puts it.155 Theories of atmosphere, when understood as affect, may sometimes focus on “transpersonal intensity,” while others stress “environment, or the transmission of the other’s feeling.” Still others account for atmosphere as “qualified aura,” “tone,” and “waves of sentiment” or, finally, consider it “more broadly a sense of place.”156 A common thread among these definitions is a relational modality, for as atmospheres continually form and dissolve, manifest and disappear, they affect bodies

and the bodies of things that enter into relation with one another. Always in the emergent process of transformation, they exceed the assemblage of the living bodies from which they emanate and traverse divisions between people, things, and spaces. As a form of experience, in fact, affective atmospheres “occur before and alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human and non-­human materialities, and in-­between subject/object distinctions.”157 In this sense, atmospheres can be further understood as “quasi-­objects” that possess interactive and transformative agency, which can even blur distinctions between categories. Insofar as they are the transitory modes of existence of sentient beings in lived space and, most importantly, the ability of objects, things, and matters to affect one another, atmospheres are, indeed, fundamentally processual and relational. As an experiential mode, they rely on a process of tuning in and attuning to—­an openness or receptivity that occurs within and through the elements that form it. We should pay close attention to these “atmospheric attunements,” as anthropologist Kathleen Stewart proposes, and tune in to the way in which they “attend to the quickening of nascent forms, marking their significance in sounds and sights.”158 In this attunement, one can hear echoes of Stimmung, the notion of tonal atmospherics that circulated in aesthetics from the mid-­eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, to which we will devote more attention later.159 What is important to note here in relation to our atmospheric thinking is that the German term Stimmung, untranslatable in English though often rendered simply as “atmosphere,” originally referred to the musical practice of attunement, and encompasses from there ideas

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generating, not only do images change their artistic form and format but the sense of projection is itself modified. In this activity of screening and projecting mental images, a living, morphing ecosystem

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of resonance as a transmission of mood. In this sense, and in tune with the philosophy of Jean-­Luc Nancy, one can advocate for a kind of “tuning up” in haptic,

elemental ways and, in Stewart’s words, reach for “a sentience to a world’s work, bodies, rhythms, ways of being in noise and light and space.”160

A T M O - ­S P H E R E S , O R “ M E D I A T E M A T T E R S ”

As we reach the end of our archaeological excursus, linking the history of the visual arts and culture to the history of science and technology, this kind of elemental attunement returns us, with a final twist, to the etymology and material root of the term atmosphere, linking atmos (vapor, exhalation) to sphaire (sphere or globe).161 Elementally speaking, atmosphere is a “surrounding,” in the largest sense of the term. It is also environs that can encircle bodies and matter as a gas does. After all, atmospheric air radiates and emanates in the manner of gaseous matter. It also can be perceived to be filling a space as if it were itself a gas. Its operational mode is airy, vaporous, misty, and hazy. Vapors envelop, and are indeed seductively enfolding, if not plain immersive. In many elemental, spherical ways, then, rounded and orbicular, it can be seductive to think of the sphere aspect of atmosphere, as the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk suggests, in making (atmo)sphere prominent as the modality of human existence and enhancing “atmospheric explication,” in the effort to account for the transformation of the givenness of an environment.162 But if, while affirming the relevance of atmospheric ecologies, one restricts the metaphor of the sphere to a dyadic spherical enclosure, to a form of encircling or coupling, this can end up constricting the sense of a sphere composed of fluid and nebular forms and whose status and borders are in a constant state of becoming.163 A sphere that surrounds and encompasses in this way is not a tight circle but rather the unstable, intimate configuration of “what goes around.” An “atmo-­sphere” is in fact generated in the variable assemblage and aggregation of bodies of multiple types in forms of mixing and intersections that affect their very boundaries. Ecology is a complex, tangled,

and subtle notion of interrelations.164 The becoming, aggregative dynamics of atmosphere, as I have argued, is produced by discursive bodies as well as by the technical objects and cultural operations that make up everyday space. This is a field of interactions that, as media theorist James Ash claims, produces not harmony or unity but discordances and, we should stress, in all senses of the word, “perturbations.”165 In this processual sense, then, atmospheres are not inherent qualities or fixed properties of objects but rather constitute the mutable relations and perturbations that occur between objects. They are actively designed and transmitted by perturbed, atmospheric cultural techniques, such as the art of projection, that operate in and transform material space. It is in this sense that it is important to insist on the relation of medium to milieu and ambiance. “Atmospheric thinking” articulates ambiance as a form of mediation and as itself a “perturbation.” Recall the creation of atmospheric climate in architecture, with its way of perturbing unified order and its decentered construction, attuned to the peripheral. Atmosphere, as an architectural character, is a tuning up of the built environment itself, which is drafted by technical operations, executed on surfaces ranging from paper to screen, and transmitted through their variable material forms. And the specific design tools used to render the perturbation of an ambiance can, in turn, project their own view. Atmosphere is therefore a real form of processual mediation engaging various forms of projection. As we have aimed to show, atmosphere and projection are linked in that they share various qualities of intermediation and transmission that lead to transformation and transduction. And such forms of “screening” space

derstood as “mediate matter,” that is to say, not simply as intermediary, or medium but, rather, as a mediator—­a composite milieu.166 Exploring the milieu of affect in the next two chapters, we will touch on forms of contact, return to Stimmung as mood, and explore the transfer of empathy, the resonance of sympathy, the receptivity of vibrating forms, the vitalism of things, and other magnetic modes of transport, emphasizing forms of transduction that make up the energy of felt space.

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also include the perturbing force of the transmission of affect. Taken in this affective sense, the operation of projection is a passage that hinges on various “doors,” which mediate relations of exteriority and interiority in forms of creative material imagination that affect ambiance. We will continue to explore this particular attunement of projection in order to redefine projection as the relational transmission, transfer, and transport that creates and transforms an atmosphere in psychic terms. Let us then turn to this side of projection un-

2.1  Georges Méliès, Long Distance Wireless Photography, 1908. 35mm, black and white, silent, 6 min. Film still.

2.2  The process of mediation in projection, as illustrated in Étienne-Gaspar Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques (Paris: Librairie Encyclopédique de Roret, 1840).

2

Sites of Transmission Psychic Transformation and Relationality

I That we smell the atmosphere of somebody is a most intimate perception of that person; that person penetrates, so to speak, in the form of air, into our most inner senses.—Georg Simmel1

n 1908 Georges Méliès dreamed of “wireless” com­ munication, exposing the act of projection as a tran­smission of energies in an astonishing film. Long Distance Wireless Photography exhibits the force of projection as a medium of transfer while imagining a magic screen display. Screens featured prominently in early cinema, as objects to be traversed or even as touchable surfaces, long before they became literally touchable in the digital age. Think of Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902) as exemplary of the desire to reach out to and through the projective surface, to grasp the atmosphere of projection.2 But something even more compelling about the object of a transmission appears in this particular film conjured by Méliès. Here, a scientist-­magician has invented a new dispositif and is showing off the working of his apparatus to an elderly couple. The projective machine is running, its wheels spinning, when a black screen is brought up before it. A photograph is positioned in front of this screen. After a moment of suspense, the portrait of three women in flowing garb posing in this framed picture is “transmitted” onto the screen, eliciting a gasp from the observers (fig. 2.1). “Wirelessly” transferred onto its framed surface, the image becomes animated and live. In this projection, the very transition from painting to photography to film comes alive, even prefiguring a digital situation. And there is more to come in terms of envisioning as Méliès further explores projection as a medium of animation. A living model

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now poses statically in front of the screen, and she, too, becomes wirelessly projected onto the screen, her image transmitted and “virtually” enlivened. At this point, the curious old lady who has been observing the phenomenon is ready to try out the projection device. She is seated on a chair, with her back to the black screen, but, as the apparatus is turned on, something she meant to be hiding appears. On the screen, as her image is projected, a set of physical imperfections that had been covered by her voluminous hat is revealed: a ridiculous topknot, farcical facial contortions, and a toothless grimace. The invisible becomes visible on the plane of this projective screen, as if it were the plate of an X-­ray—­a “screen” itself, whose capacity to capture and transmit high-­energy electromagnetic radiation was discovered just as early film came to life. And finally, a mesmerizing apparition takes place as the last of the experiments of projection is performed. The elderly gentleman tries the new device, and as his image is wirelessly transmitted, his projected physiognomy reveals his personality. Transferred onto the screen surface, his face becomes a grotesque simian mask, and his character and inner soul become mani-

fested and transmitted to us, the spectators. In this early film, affects become visible in projection, and psychic states can be transferred and circulated by the projective mechanism. It is no wonder, for projection, as we will see, is not only a mediatic mechanism but also a psychic apparatus. It is a conductor of energies that, as Méliès shows, can be revealed, transmitted, projected, and even “moved” on and across screens. This field of projective transfer, an actual form of conduction, is quite a revealing zone of transmission. A transport of energies can take place in this process, from one form and one place to another, through and across bodies and spaces. In this conductive way, a space of synergies and sympathies can be created, in relational forms of empathic connection and elemental relatedness that can transmit across life forms. Projection, in other words, can be a transformative site, a form of transduction that modifies atmospheres and their constituents. Let us thus further explore the varied and complex history of the “projective imagination” with the aim of broadening its conceptual range, with a nod to the psychic and an eye to its ambiance of transfer and atmosphere of exchange.

PROJECTION AND ITS MILIEU

A dream is, therefore, among other things, a projection: an externalization of an internal process.—Sigmund Freud3

To further our exploration of the field of interactions termed “affective atmospheres,” let us turn first to the way ambient qualities relate to states of mind.4 Expanding the line of atmospheric thinking pursued thus far requires digging further into the realm of imaginative forms of projection and “atmospheric attunements.”5 This is because the atmosphere of projection in art cannot be fully grasped without exploring the process and the project of imaging, understood in the broadest sense as an envisioning, which engages a form of material imagination. After all, to put it in the words of the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, “Atmosphere is an exchange between

the material or the existent properties of the place and our immaterial realm of projection and imagination.”6 Such imaginative exchange thus guides our unfolding inquiry into the atmosphere of projection, and its affective modality as a form of environmentality. Close attention will be paid in this and the following chapter to the psychic dimension of projection, whose history, meaning, and range of action will be expanded beyond conventional views. Let us recall that projection emerged as a psychoanalytic concept, coinciding with the birth of cinema as itself an art of projection. In reconsidering psychoanalysis, I intend to broaden the function of the projective act

Teresa Brennan has suggested, we should not overlook the range of functions of the “transmission of affect.”11 This does not mean simply that “one feels the others’ affects” but rather that “the ‘atmosphere’ or the environment literally gets into the individual” because “we are not self-­contained in terms of our energies.”12 Affects are indeed “in the air.” They are ambient matters, transmitted not only in but also as atmosphere, receptively and by way of a cultural dispositif, including technologies and technical operations. It is in this sense that I seek to launch a wide-­ ranging pursuit of projection as a form of relational transit, which can be transformational. To expand this relational range, I will review various conceptual histories and psychoanalytic formulations in order to explore the context and cultural energy out of which this broader idea of projection arose. This inquiry will suggest that projection emerges as a formation of permeable boundaries, not as the establishment of enclosed borders. Projection, here, is construed positively as a mediatic “instrument” or, rather, a vehicle for crossing border walls between self and other, subject and object. It arises as a form of translation as well as transmission and transduction—­in other words, as a relational, connective cultural technique that, in its receptivity, produces a process of transformation. The notion of transmission is not only an aspect of the psychic meaning of projection but also, as we have argued, a factor in the formation of atmospheres as transitive ambiances; and it is equally a feature in the invention of cultural techniques that create milieu.13 In continuing this inquiry here, projection will be probed as a processual movement, a fundamental dynamics that can effect the relational transformation of subjects, objects, and space. To put it clearly, in the words of the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, “The most primal relation between the living being and the world is a reciprocal projection: a movement.”14 In this view, a projection occurs when the living being offers to the world its own corporeal potential, while ambiance “entrusts the

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and enlarge the scope of its cultural project. In a very restrictive, popularized view of Freud’s notion, projection is commonly considered a defense mechanism: a casting out of something from within that is unpleasant; an expulsion of qualities that are disagreeable onto another person or thing.7 But, as this and the following chapter aim to show, there is much in the act of projection that exceeds this narrow view. An act of projection is a wide-­ranging process, and need not be limited to an expression of negative affects. Psychoanalysis must therefore be probed in a different way to enhance broader, more positive aspects and affirm various forms of relatedness and exchange, which are social in nature. To this end, other psychic meanings of projection must also be explored, unveiled, and circulated, to reclaim the element of relationality, which, to my mind, is the “environ-­mental” force of projection, and of its technological forms of transmission. While interested in the psychic dimension of projection, I do not in fact consider it an individual modality. Nor is it the matter of an individual operation of expelling troublesome sentiments. Continuing the course of speculative thinking first proposed in my Atlas of Emotion, rather than locating affect within the body or originating in it, I want to emphasize the processual relation between motion and emotion in space.8 In rethinking the concept of psychic projection here, I will pursue matters of the movement and circulation of affects between and through bodies and the body of things. To put it in the terms developed by philosopher Gilbert Simondon, the sphere of affect is what mediates between the individual and the milieu.9 Transindividuality is the expression of a relational being. And so, as David Scott asks in reading Simondon, “Might we see each starting point . . . as only already a relation-­to-­another starting, which is then another relation-­to, potentially, ad infinitum?” In other words, “Might we imagine that relations come first?”10 These are provocative questions. What if we imagined that relationality, not individuality, comes first, and reformulated the idea of projection accordingly? As the psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher

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living being with the realization of a movement that should have been external to it.”15 Ambiance, then, plays an important role in this material dynamic of interior and exterior projection, which is relational at its elemental, environmental core. Affect, after all, is a pervasive mood, an atmosphere, and its transmission can reciprocally connect the subject to the environment in receptive ways. In this atmospheric sense, projection, then, implies something other than an individual expulsion of undesirable feelings, or a dumping of negativity onto another individual. The concept implies a subtle process of movement, to the extent that it connotes a transmission of material relations between bodies and the bodies of things in an ambiance that itself can be a receptive environment. In order to articulate this atmospheric, relational path, and to move away from projection as a negatively defined psychoanalytic concept, we will thus perform further acts of cultural archaeology, traveling in other cultural ambiances and traversing many different fields. This cultural journey will range from philosophy to aesthetics, film theory to the history of science, and remain open to questions

rather than answers. What does projection look like when viewed conceptually as a psychically transitive process of material relation? How might we imagine it as a form of material agency and transformation? In considering how projection functions as a milieu for affective encounters that can, in turn, affect, that is, as a transitional atmosphere of relationality, a receptive ambiance, we will emphasize open forms of mixing and becoming and the fluid transitivity of projective atmospheres. The exploration of ambiance as a projective “air” is central to this inquiry, which touches on various notions of flow, inscription, and transmutation that I propose to be the very material movement of projection. But, we might ask, what does this (im)materiality of projection consist of, in elemental and atmospheric terms? Is it a sympathy affecting bodies and the body of things? An energy field? A textural atmospheric current? A force of transduction? This and the following chapter explore all of these possibilities in constructing a path that links projection to different processes of relationality, relatedness, connectivity, resonance, receptive transmission, and transduction, all of which enact material transformation.

PROJECTION AS MESMERIZING TRANSMISSION

Reconsider, in this light, the projective exchange we described as operational in Méliès’s Long Distance Wireless Photography. The kind of projection exposed in this film is basically a transmission of energies. Corporeal images travel “wirelessly” through the ether, from the human to such objects as screens. These substances are literally conducted, traveling from form to form in atmospherics. They move through the atmosphere as if they were clusters of (electrical) energy or waves of light. This projective transmission is presented by Méliès as a product of both science and magic. The phenomenon is, quite simply, mesmerizing. Ultimately, what this early film conveys is the mesmerizing cultural ambiance out of which projection

arose as a concept. An excursion into media archaeology can be useful in clarifying this point. It is significant that the screen in this film that receives the projected image and, in turn, projects it to the audience is black. Méliès’s screen can be seen as a variation on the black mirror developed in the late eighteenth century and its way of projecting ambiance. Let us recall that the dark, reflective convex surfaces of the Claude glass were used by artists and travelers, especially landscape painters, as a prephotographic lens to receive and abstract the tonal character of natural scenes in order to reproduce these aspects on canvas. But during the nineteenth century, the power of the black mirror assumed darker connotations. The instrument became a source not only

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of attraction but of terror. It was believed that it could “project” dark qualities and even hypnotize those viewers who looked onto its surface. This reflective surface was, indeed, thought to be mesmerizing. The magnetic, even demonic, attraction produced by this dark reflective surface was not an isolated phenomenon. As art historian Arnaud Maillet demonstrates in his book on the meaning of the black mirror in Western art, it was connected to the rise of mesmerism.16 This was a “fluidist” current of thought, whose name and function originated from the work of Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer (1734–­1815), a German physician whose 1779 memoir expounded on his discovery of “animal magnetism.”17 Here, as in all his work, he theorized that a natural energetic transference occurs between animate and inanimate objects. For Mesmer, this transmission of energies was a fluid affair, as it was

for others who practiced a vitalist form of thinking. The metaphor of fluidity, much circulated by magnetists, was also conjured by the belief systems of animism, and commonly used by animists. In this shared fluidity of thought, a surface, which is an inanimate object, came to be envisaged as an animated being. The textural quality of a mirror could be perceived as sending off, that is, projecting, qualities of affect that ranged from appealing to demonizing. In the evolution of technical objects that progressed from the Claude glass to the surface of the screen, then, tones and surface effects could be recognized as part of a psychic process of affective transmission in ambiance. And thus, eventually, any screenlike surface that reflected light came to be considered potentially hypnotic. From this cultural terrain and from media archaeological history an important tenet of psychoanalysis developed. As Maillet puts

2.3  Jean-­Martin Charcot demonstrates hypnosis using a magic lantern. Anonymous engraving, 1879. Print Collector/ Alamy Stock Photo.

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it, “The notion of the unconscious emerges partly in conjunction with the black mirror” and its mesmeric qualities.18 Magnetism and hypnotism are deeply related in many ways.19 In 1843, the Scottish surgeon James Braid (1795–­1860) proposed the term hypnosis for a technique derived from Mesmer’s animal magnetism, public performances of which he had attended. The physician was interested in “electro-­biological phenomena” and discussed the connection of his magnetic-­hypnotic work to various theories of light, debating it as “emission from the sun of a subtile material” or as “produced by simple vibration” and ultimately adopting “the vibratory theory” for his pioneering work with hypnosis.20 Thus connected to luminiferous pulses and vibration, hypnosis came to be articulated by the French neurologist Jean-­Martin Charcot (1825–­1893; fig. 2.3), who also acknowledged the work of Mesmer and who notably paved the way for Freud’s discovery of unconscious phenomena. It was at this junction of magnetic vibrations and hypnotic attractions that psychoanalysis began its cultural and therapeutic trajectory. Hypnosis, widely considered a prototypical, fundamental psychoanalytic trope, plays a part as well in the psychic motor of cine-­projection. It is in fact thought by film theorists such as Raymond Bellour to be indicative of the most fundamental psychic power of cinematic projection.21 In this view, the spectator is fixated on the image, immobilized, affected by the visual apparatus of projection to the point of becoming hypnotized. While it is apparent that a hypnotic quality can be a component of the projective mechanism, I am not convinced by the claims for necessary immobility or the insistence on the gaze and the regressive state that a traditional psychoanalytic narrative implies when it comes to filmic projection. I wish to disentangle the hypnotic character of projection from the fixed (male) gaze of the hypnotist or the eye of the paralyzed, regressive spectator. I see this particular projective state rather as produced by the alternate cultural genealogy we

are tracing, more rooted in energy circulation and vibration than in stillness. Could mesmerism provide a different “magnetic” perspective from which to explain the rise and attraction of psychoanalysis? And could it account for hypnotic forms of engagement with imaging in the form of ambient transmission instead of attentive fixation? I think that if the spectatorial attraction to forms of projection were understood to be genealogically connected to passages of energies and to a nonhuman factor such as animal magnetism, we would be less on anthropocentric ground and more in fluid, exploratory environmental terrain. In continuing on this path, I therefore aim for a wide-­ranging notion of projection that is open to magnetic effects of engagement and electrical attraction, including luminiferous propagation—­that is, open to the full range of transitive affects produced in and as an atmosphere. Returning to the archaeological history of media, we can clearly observe a dynamic of such fluid projections at work in proto-­and precinematic apparatuses and early filmic representation. As we have remarked, the black mirror, in its various configurations, displayed a capacity to magnetize and hypnotize, transmitting energies in the environment, as would the projective cinematic screen. This dark, reflective thing, in this sense, is a protocinematic psychic object, sporting an attractive screen fabric. Its very magnetizing surface figures centrally in Méliès’s imagination of a wireless transmission of energies via black screens that, as noted, bear traces of earlier magnetic surfaces, such as the dark Claude glass. In fact, the kind of screen envisaged by Méliès, at the border of magic and science, does not simply convey images or reflect identities, and certainly does not immobilize, but rather attracts and projects the materiality of energy transfers. There is a show of affecting, enthralling, absorbing capacity exuded in this act of screening that can be called truly mesmerizing. And this is because mesmerism, in fact, had been circulating widely in the

expanding the protocinematic magnetic capacity that proliferated with black mirrors. In phantasmagoria, the mesmeric quality affected spectators in immersive forms of projection that even included environmental elements such as smoke in their foggy atmospheres. In Méliès’s dark configuration of projection, one can still detect this phantasmagoric trace at work. In this fantasy of the “wireless” transmission of an atmosphere via black projective screens, we can perceive the force of a fluid circulation: a mesmeric passage that initiated a new material vitalism.

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culture, wavering between empiricist investigation and paranormal phenomena, in areas from science to magic. Traces of this circulation were also present in other techniques of projection that preceded cinema, such as phantasmagoric spectacles. Using a modified magic lantern, as art historian Noam Elcott shows, phantasmagoric presentations gave body to ghostly apparitions that mesmerized audiences.22 This spectacle employed shadowy forms of screening that appeared to transmit and virtually materialize visions, in this way M E D I AT I C M E S M E R I C PA S S A G E S

If the art of projection could develop in this way, as a mesmeric affair, it is because animal magnetism or mesmerism had been influential in several fields from 1780 to the end of the nineteenth century, producing a complex and controversial subculture. Different currents of conduction and transduction circulated in this era of wild magnetism, ranging from the animistic to the more purely ethereal, in a process that reconfigured the environment as a field of transmissions. A spiritualist movement arose, with women playing a very important role as “mediums,” that is, figures of connection who “conducted” spirit matters. These shows of energy flow were theatrical. If mesmerism paved the way to hypnosis this was also because the transmission of energies was displayed and “performed” in space. The theater of magnetic connections popularized by Mesmer gave way to a theatrical technique of suggestion via hypnosis, such as Charcot’s performative displays of psychic phenomena at La Salpêtrière, which were recorded photographically.23 In different ways, then, we can say that projected vibrations and fluid correlations dominated an era and circulated throughout the atmosphere. Around this time, something definitely was “in the air.” From the beginning of the eighteenth century onward, as cultural historian Marina Warner shows in her book Phantasmagoria, “the airy element grew

2.4  Magnetic transfers of energy “mesmerize” two women, as illustrated in C. H. Townsend, Facts in Mesmerism: With Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry into It (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841).

evermore crowded” with “light waves” and “new varieties and properties of air—­vapors and gasses, waves and vibrations.”24 Light waves were captured by photographic processes, and other instruments were devised to detect the invisible powers of the electromagnetic field. A new, “mesmerizing” form of knowledge emerged from these currents and transformed the environment as well as the sense of the body and forms of healing. A transfer of energy between the mesmerist and the patient was believed able to heal the person of physical ailments or reconcile emotional and physical issues. As Warner puts it, “The craze for

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mesmerism had ascribed the cure to a form of electricity,” and here “the border between psychology and physics was blurred.”25 New perspectives opened up in this border-­ crossing, which involved transformation in the geography of sensation, for a transposition of energies recast the capacity of the senses to connect not just in but as ambiance. Mesmerism was, in fact, part of a larger cultural phenomenon that pursued new forms of sensory contact in the environment. As historian Alison Winter argues, it promoted “transfers of thoughts and words from one place to another” and “the displacement of sound and thought through space.”26 The mesmeric force was furthermore a flowing substance, circulating in tangible matter in the atmosphere. Such a force produced an electrical charge, a real form of conduction. It induced a transference of forms, a haptic transmission of energy between bodies and the bodies of things. In her interestingly titled book The Darkened Room, historian Alex Owen stresses that “organic magnetism was an emanation, vapor, or aura that flowed from a body or plant and which a trained operator could harness.”27 The pervasive fluid could be directed, or rather, “projected,” by a medium, who was very often female, to a specific area and led to affect both organic and inorganic matter. In this particular sense, the notion of “medium” can be reconfigured, stressing that it “incorporates” the gesture of conduction performed by a female mediator who creates an

energetic path of transmission, and this interpretation further pushes the concept of mediality in an environmental way. In terms of corporeality, it is important to note that not just the gaze but especially the hands were used by mediums to induce this energy flow in ambiance (fig. 2.4). This hapticity, or rather a form of haptic mediation, was stressed by female mediums, suggesting that there was an empowering gender component in this mediatic phenomenon, where women were subjects and not only the objects of the mesmeric operation of transmission. Furthermore, the process of relatedness that would emerge in this kind of projection was a form of care that might even result in a cure. Magnetic healing would occur through a close connection created in the ambient transfer of energy. As a female mesmerist emphasized in describing the process in 1885, “By concentrating your thoughts upon your hands, you can feel [the magnetic force] permeating them, accompanied with a peculiar sensation of warmth.”28 The palms of the hands had a power that could both magnetize and demagnetize. This haptic touch of the medium enabled what was interestingly known as a “pass”: the material contact created an electric transmission of affect that could receptively induce a transformation. In a way, then, the electric transfer that transpired in the “darkened room” of mediatic passages was a form of ethereal yet material projection: a transformative transduction.

F L U I D, A I R Y M AT T E R S O F P R OJ E C T I O N

The projective field developed as an extensive terrain of cultural interactions, which even included a form of cosmology, positioned in a larger history that sought to explain the origins and evolution of the universe. Animal magnetism, according to the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, was an important component of early modern “psycho-­cosmo-­eterology”—­a current of thought running from Paracelsus in the German Renaissance, to Athanasius Kircher and Isaac New-

ton in succeeding centuries, and culminating in Mesmer’s “theory of presentist interdependencies between physical emanations of planetary and animal kinds.”29 Magnetism worked particularly in between psychology and cosmology, fields that are both, in their own ways, creators of atmosphere. According to its theories, bodies encounter one another in the ambient space by way of the magnetic forces they carry, and could affect one another through the elemental

In its original formulation, psychological projection is a form of displacement. As Jean Laplanche and Jean-­ Bertrand Pontalis put it, in a classic definition, it designates the transfer of qualities “from centre to periphery or from subject to object.”34 The notion of projection, then, was developed in an effort to overcome the boundaries of the ego. This was a step toward affirming an intersubjective space, and exploring its potential for transit. Or, to put it in the reverse, the understanding

2.5  Jean-­Antoine Nollet, Leçons de Physique Expérimentale, vol. 5 (Paris: Hippolyte-­Louis Guerin and Louis-­François Delatour, 1764).

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currents in which they are immersed. In describing this ambient attraction, Mesmer coined an apt term for the fluid forces of projection: “floodabilities.”30 Through the work of floodabilities, exterior and interior spaces become connected to such an extent that, in Sloterdijk’s words, even “the soul could be conceived of as a field of interpersonal resonances.”31 Intersubjectivity is emphasized in this form of projective thinking, which conceives of a fluid current that creates resonances between beings and with things. What is at stake here is basically the development of a form of sympathy: a concept that emerged from the Greek term for a community of feeling, a fellow feeling, a form of relatedness that can become a kinship between things. Over time, as Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich Hufeland affirmed in his 1811 natural history of sympathy, magnetopathic practices became the most important manifestation of “the ability of humans to enter a sympathetic relationship.”32 These practices established a correspondence in the universe consisting of a transmission of waves of affinity. Ultimately, this line of speculative thinking promoted a form of relationality that is bioenergetic. Like Freud later on, Mesmer worked with scientific thinking to produce innovation in the conception of intimate space. But he was not as seduced as Freud was by the body of individual psychology. The ideas he proposed were ego-­transcending, as were the concurrent tenets of the early socialist utopians, with their own ideals of attraction and gravitation. Mesmer experimented with what Sloterdijk calls “interpersonal concepts for the dissolution of boundaries.”33 In this sense, he anticipated an important aspect of psychoanalysis, the moment when Freud attempted to grapple with the limits of the ego. This is the point at which the notion of projection was fully conceived. Let us recall that, in psychoanalytic terms, projection designates a particular psychic operation that, if explored beyond its characterization as a negative defense, can supersede the delimitation of the individual.

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of intersubjectivity as the dissolution of boundaries paved the ground for the birth of projection. In following this line of projective thinking, and in mapping a field of “projective imagination,” I propose that we return to the idea of floodabilities and reinterpret them as elemental conductions, fluidistic concepts of transmission between and across beings. The notion of projection can be usefully explored and expanded in this cultural context of fluidity, particularly if posited as a form of sympathy. Projection is an element of a larger field of transformative relationality, and it participates in a set of correlations that includes the fluidity and floodability of intimate space.35 The interpersonal current of relatedness that emerges with magnetic thinking has a vast range of potential action if it is not restricted solely to the individual power relation between hypnotic healer and patient. There is a larger, active process of interaction at play here that is more receptive, and can both hinder and modify elemental boundaries. In other words, magnetism can be seen as a real form of conductive transmission—­an “infra-­body” projection. Placing the phenomenon of mesmerism in the context of this broader atmospheric thinking of fluidity can further advance a theoretical formulation of projective mediations in terms of “environmentality.” This would involve considering mesmerism a form of material imagination, that is, imagination that requires the mediation of an elemental material, even an environmental matter. Following this line of material thinking, Steven Connor stresses the fact that Mesmer

devised his ideas on “animal magnetism,” which was a material yet immaterial fluid, in the context of then-­ current scientific research on atmosphere.36 Early on, in his 1766 dissertation On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body, he postulated “animal gravity” as a force that agitates matter.37 This force was deemed the cause of atmospheric phenomena and furthermore, as Conner argues, represented an augmentation of the belief in the existence of an all-­pervasive atmosphere. Mesmer pursued the notion that bodies are susceptible to atmospheric variation in the encompassing environment they inhabit. In his Discourse on Magnetism of 1782, he spoke of a nervous fluid, and, when defining the attraction between elements of our living milieu as “sympathy,” he emphasized that electrical and magnetic matters are “as real as the existence of light.”38 This “universal fluid,” he contended, can—­just like light—­ be reflected and propagated by a mirror, and transmitted through such a medium. Hence, in this view, the fluid magnetic power, always in motion between things, literally mediates. It “imprint[s] an effect upon all surrounding matter and upon the medium within which we are immersed.”39 Magnetically interchanged, this fluid matter is the primordial form of communication. It is, ultimately, in Connor’s words, “the medium of universal permeation and communicability.”40 In other words, this is a vital force of ambient transmission that is truly projective. And it is precisely here that the medium of projection, which itself reflects and propagates light, genealogically manifests as a form of relational, environmental transmission.

INFLUENCING MACHINES OF PROJECTION

In this regard, we should emphasize that galvanic and mesmeric ideas proliferated around the birth of psychoanalysis and its conception of projection, concomitant with the invention of cine-­projection. A disciple of Sigmund Freud, Victor Tausk, delineated his own “mesmerizing” psychic phenomenon of mediality.41 In a now-­famous essay written in 1919, he spoke of an

“influencing machine,” borrowing the term from a device invented in 1706 by a student of Newton’s, Francis Hauksbee.42 The original machine was a spinning glass globe that, when touched, transmitted an electrical spark and emitted an atmospheric light known as “the glow of life.” Tausk took inspiration from this atmospheric object to describe psychological phe-

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nomena. In evoking this dispositif, he called attention to imaginative devices envisioned by schizophrenics, who construct them in their minds as unconscious projections of their fragmented corporeal experience, and even their tortured and paranoid selves. The influencing machine has been seen as sharing psychic, imaginative functions with the cinematic apparatus (fig. 2.6).43 Tausk’s essay might even be recognized as a first theoretical articulation of what a cinematic apparatus is. What interests me in this narrative is not so much the device’s well-­known role in studies of paranoia or in the process of pathological “affliction” exposed by media theorist Jeffrey West Kirkwood, but rather how this machine is devised as part of a psychic process that implies the dissolution of boundaries.44 In this respect, I prefer to focus on a less traveled road: the material configuration of the instrument itself. As a psychic device, the influencing machine is an object of material imagination. This dispositif exhibits an intriguing inner construction, well worth exploring further in its materiality, for it enables technological operations of transmission.45 The projective machines that Tausk discusses, modeled on Hauksbee’s light-­emitting spinning globe, retain something of this luminous spark and convey a flickering atmospheric genealogy. They appear to have an electric, transmitting power of sorts. These “machines of a mystical nature,” as Christopher Turner puts it, “supposedly work by means of radio-­waves, telepathy, x-­rays, invisible wires” and are “complex structures, constructed of ‘boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries and the like.’”46 In this sense, the influencing apparatuses are indeed closely related to filmic machines of projection. They, too, encompass flows and currents of relation between interior and exterior space, and ambient transmissions of energies, expressed through their mechanical, material imagination. Subjects experience this conductive power of the machines, and they may even feel inclined to explore the apparatus itself. In writing on the influencing machine, Tausk insisted on the mechanics of the

projective operation, arguing that “patients endeavor to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge,” and that “all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain . . . the marvelous powers of this machine.”47 What is produced here is therefore a complex technical operation. The imaginary machines are objects devised as psychic means of projection that are technological, and they are circulated and experienced in their operational technicity. Furthermore, they can be said even to function as “mediums,” in a broad

2.6  The influencing machine as projective medium, as conceived in an image by psychiatric patient Jakob Mohr, in Beweiße, ca. 1910. Drawing with text, 13 × 8¼ in. Inv. No 627/1. © Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg.

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2.7  Electrical kiss, an experiment by the natural philosopher Georg Matthias Bose, illustrated in an anonymous engraving, ca. 1800. History Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

sense. After all, the influencing machine is both a psychic affair and a matter of physics. As a conductor of energy, the apparatus has psychic powers of transmission, which are not only imaginative but also imagistic. As it transfers psychic energy by technical means, the “influencing machine” creates communication by way of images that even can be imaged memories. As Tausk explains, “The main effects of the influencing machine are” that “it makes the patients see pictures, appearing on a single plane, on walls, or on windowpanes,” and “when this is the case, the machine is generally a magic lantern or cinematograph.”48 In this sense, influencing machines not only are related to technical mediums but are themselves cinematic devices. This mental machine is an actual projector of moving images. And

what it “projects” is the very functioning of a cinematographic, projective technology. In this respect, the conceptual operation described by Tausk displays an affinity with the findings of the philosopher and psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, who around the same time theorized that the medium of film is a projection of the mind.49 Let us recall that in his 1916 “psychological study” of film, Münsterberg argued that projection in cinema takes shape as a real psychic mechanism. He based his findings on experimentation at the Psychological Laboratory of Harvard University (fig. 2.8), and particularly on experiments that continued the research on affect pioneered by his colleague, the philosopher and psychologist William James.50 As a German émigré, Münsterberg was familiar with and influenced by the aesthetic discourse of Einfühlung, or empathy theory, a subject to which we will return at length. His experiments and ideas about cinematic projection emphasize the role of mental projections as well as psychomotor effects, and manifest empathic connotations. For Münsterberg, the power of cinema relies on the operations of a truly projective mechanism. It lies in a specific aesthetic relational ability—­an empathetic “transport” that is expressed in the ability to produce a psychophysiological voyage, from inside to outside, and felt in the ambiance of reception. Speaking of spectatorial “projections” in almost neuroaesthetic terms, he insisted that “depth and movement alike come to us in the moving picture world, not as hard facts but as a mixture. . . . They are present and yet they are not in the things. We invest the impressions with them.”51 As film projects the workings of the mind, the mind itself appears cinematographic. In viewing a film, a passage is created as “the objective world is molded by the interests of the mind” in permeable ways.52 Ultimately, cine-­projection can overcome the strictures of time, space, or causality and adjust events to inner forms of relationality, “namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion.”53 Thus Münsterberg, who had tested neurological flux with scientific instruments, was able

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to see that the cinema is itself an “instrument”—­a tool, a machine of galvanic mental connections that become currents of projection. For Münsterberg, the psychologist, as for Tausk, the psychoanalyst, mental projection is a complex instrument with an “influential” force, for it can operate as a magnetic tool for transcending boundaries and crossing borders, including those between interior and exterior space. Here, projection is both a real dispositif and an imaginative instrument of mediality. For Münsterberg, it functions like a cinematic machine, which can itself enable a fluid transfer of energies between the outer and the inner world. Cinema, a projection of our mental capacities, engages the mind’s own apparatus of projection in a powerful set of influences that transpire in ambiance. In creating this transitive passage, projection ends up even producing an ambiance, for in cine-­projection, as Münsterberg puts it, “the

feeling of the soul emanates into the surrounding.”54 As an actual emanation, Tausk’s influencing machine, too, is a device of imaginative projection that emulates the functioning of a cinematic machine of projection, an apparatus that itself mediates mental processes and imaginary transmissions of energies. And what is most important, this complex cine-­projective object has the capacity not only to create but to affect, and transform, the feeling of the surroundings. According to Tausk, the projective machine has a mediatic power that is truly ambient: it ultimately produces, as well as removes, “thoughts and feelings” by means of “air-­ currents” and the force of waves, including “electricity, magnetism or x-­rays.”55 Hence this projective mode, with its rays, undulations, and ripples, returns us to the particular wave of thinking that we have aimed to emphasize, connecting together the “projective imagination”

2.8  Instruments for experiments on spatial perception, displayed in Hugo Münsterberg, Psychological Laboratory of Harvard University, 1893. Collection Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University.

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with “atmospheric thinking.” Here we are again, back in the realm of magnetic phenomena, back to the force of light and the propagation of electric rays, and amid the energy field of electromagnetic waves. Understood in these modern, mediatic, psychic

ways, the projective mechanism is still operating in, and extending, the realm of “floodabilities,” as an energy conductor that can generate transitive affective ambiance—­that is to say, atmosphere, in all senses of the word.

P R O J E C T I V E P S Y C H O A N A LY T I C O B J E C T- ­S C R E E N S

Rethinking Tausk’s projective machine in terms of its energetic materiality as an imaginative instrument—­a processual, mediatic object—­can lead us further away from a strict notion of psychic projection understood simply, and commonly, as a defense mechanism. The operation can be understood differently than as an expulsion of unwanted, internally produced sensations onto the external if we recognize that projection, as we propose, is a more broadly conceived processual dispositif: a mediatic instrument that affects an ambiance. Further probing the psychoanalytic imagination can be helpful in advancing this more atmospheric interpretation, and can open up other sides and wider conceptions of the “perturbing” operations of projection. Thinking psychoanalytically in relation to the projection of moving images enables us to acknowledge that projection involves an elemental form of displacement, including a dislocation of corporeal sensations. It engages, in the words of feminist film theorist Mary Ann Doane, “a fundamental disorientation,” or “a spatio-­ 2.9  The Soul of Man, in Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Nuremberg: Endter Verlag, 1658).

psychical instability.”56 In my view, however, we need not see this destabilizing process of projection as necessarily deleterious, as a “grounding alienation.”57 There is no denying that projection is psychoanalytically generated “in anxieties about the inability to distinguish inside from outside, subject from object,” as media theorist Matthew Noble-­Olson contends in his reading of “melancholy projection.”58 But what does this position imply if we emphasize only the regulation, normalization, or control of such geopsychic anxieties? This psychological implication of projection can be probed even further in spatial terms if we consider how the psychoanalytic mechanism relates to the history of mechanical projection devices developed out of the scientific, mediatic revolution of the Enlightenment, including, in this scenario, precinematic apparatuses. In a double move that investigates Freud’s theory of projection in relation to early devices for casting an image, visual-­culture historian Jill Casid argues that “the scene of projection” is embedded in the construction of power and discarnate vision.59 In her view, early modern projective devices such as the camera obscura and the magic lantern constitute “a way of knowing, a method with power-­producing effects,” including the management of fear and the production of terror, and are, ultimately, a technique characterized as “paranoid projection.”60 In a rich history that accounts for modes of shadow projection, projective technologies are understood to be “philosophical instruments” but, along with the screen itself, are seen to create “the separation of viewing subject from the object in the form of a thrown screen image.”61 Modern projection, here, is ultimately “an apparatus of power that produces its subject” in

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2.10  Peter Moore, Untitled (Nam June Paik performing Zen for Film, 1964), 1965. New Cinema Festival I, Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, November 2, 1965, New York City. Gelatin silver print, 8 × 10 in. © 2020 Barbara Moore/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

mediatic separation, in “a process that points . . . [to] the shaping of the fortress ego by paranoid projection” and the dynamics of melancholia.62 In drafting “the scene of projection” with a complex argument that historicizes psychoanalysis while psychoanalyzing modern visual history, Casid nevertheless gives one pause, since her conclusions ultimately lead to the formulation of discarnate vision and a pervasive paranoid “screen”—­situations that, in a psychoanalytic sense, are still entangled with notions of illusion and delusion, as well as defense and expulsion. What does this insistence on the paranoid side of the dispositif of projection obscure regarding processes of becoming and an affirmation of the potential agency of screen media and their apparatuses? I am concerned that locking projection into a process of dematerialization in this way can marginalize other, more embodied, receptive, and rela-

tional aspects that comprise its cultural history in terms of psychic as well as mediatic becoming. I am thinking in particular of the more tender, haptic cartographies that the projective imagination contains as an agency of contact and receptive transport, that is, as a moving architecture of material relations. After all, the scene of projection is not a static paradigm or a fixed architecture but a mobile process, in which, as Casid herself admits, “counterpossibilities” and “alternate dynamics” of affective and somatic projection arise, such as “incorporative introjection.”63 To expand these counterpossibilities, and to pursue less shadowy or paranoid aspects of the projective imagination, I feel compelled to probe the permeability of boundaries as well as the strictures of divisions and borders. In psychoanalytic terms, projection does indeed raise questions about distinctions between inside and

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outside, subject and object, but these anxieties, as we have argued, do not necessarily produce unsurmountable walls or separations between inner and outer spaces. On the contrary, they may point the subject toward the possibility of crossing such divides. Furthermore, the projective situations created by media that project moving images enable one to move across terrains of affect as well as travel through geographies and temporalities, in situations of collective, public intimacy. In this way, the phenomenon of projection does not create impassable borders but can rather create porous boundaries. Endowed with a force of subjective as well as cultural agency, projection can be a medium of material porosity, for it defines and shapes complex patterns of material relations. In this mediatic sense of transport, it can open a path of becoming in a process of continual, fluctuating mediation between territories of selfhood and objecthood in the material world. In a more receptive way, its psychic apparatus can contribute to opening up a space for transformative thinking and feeling. To further explore this aspect of relational porosity in projection, delineating the boundary of the self in relation to the object, it is useful to insist on materiality and the material world.64 Psychoanalytically speaking, the notion of “projective identification” put forth by Melanie Klein provides a way of furthering this notion in relation to material conditions and objecthood, in a more fluid dynamic of projection and introjection.65 As the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal emphasizes in a comprehensive account of Kleinian theories, Klein defines “projective identification” as “the result of the projection of parts of the self into an object.”66 In this view, an object can take on the characteristics of the projected part of the self as much as a subject may identify with the object of his or her projection and projected introjection. Although this notion, furthered by the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, does not exclude the expulsion of bad objects or the ego’s undesirable parts, it does offer us a chance to emphasize the function of the material world in a process

of projection.67 This view suggests that objects, diverse nonhuman forms, and not simply subjects, can drive a projective-­introjective dynamics. Furthermore, in extending Klein’s notion of projection and her model of the mother-­infant relationship, Bion claims that emotion, closely tied to thought, is embodied, and that it is not a separate sentiment or an expression of individuality. Affect is rather a relational affair, and cannot be disconnected from the feeling of an embodied relationship. In this sense, “projective identification” becomes a way to underscore not only materiality but also the intermediate realm of intersubjectivity, and to acknowledge the potential for transformation that occurs through projective processes, enacted in life experiences as well as in therapeutic analytic relationships.68 It is helpful to reclaim these aspects of the materiality and relationality of “projective identification” in rethinking the “projective” relation of cinema to psychoanalysis, and in the effort to widen the focus of theories of the projective apparatus.69 Calling for a more haptic view—­one that is inclusive even of “the hands of the projectionist”—­visual culture scholar Lisa Cartwright reenvisions the earlier Lacanian discourse of apparatus theory, engaging affect theory.70 In discussing the relation of psychoanalytic “projective identification” to cinematic identification in projection, she rightly claims that “projective identification requires a better theory than a subject-­object model of knowing and being in the world.”71 Rather than conceptualizing a split, or a one-­way street of mirroring the other, or a dominance of subject over object in identification, or an isomorphism of self and object, projection should indeed be recast as intersubjective and communicative. One should recognize as well that “projection and the concept of projective identification can be important aspects of empathetic identification,” a subject we will discuss further.72 The psychoanalytic interaction of projective and introjective identification is indeed central to explaining the transmission of affect in more fluid and

receptive terms. It especially suggests ways to incorporate the materiality of objecthood in the projective mechanism. But this requires resisting the fixation on the subject of identification that continues to linger in film theory. In order to advance a more materialistic view, we may wish to divert attention from this much-­debated issue, focusing less on the representational realm and more on a mediatic understanding of cine-­projection. Through the work of artists who employ the projection of moving images, which is explored in the second part of this book, I intend to show that projection does not simply produce effects

of identification with the camera or forms of illusion, as argued in earlier, restrictive views of Lacanian or identity theory, but rather produces ambient effects of relationality, such as a critical and receptive absorption in the environment of screen space. To expand this argument, one might also usefully return to Jacques Lacan’s own writings and recall the cultural context out of which his perspective originated, when he borrowed the scene of the gaze from the philosopher Jean-­Paul Sartre. In fact, for Lacan, cognizance of the act of looking is not generated by the look alone, as commonly assumed,

2.11  Penelope Umbrico, Out of Order: Bad Display, 2016. Installation view, former Pfizer factory, Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2016. C-­prints, used Plexiglas, and TV boxes; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

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but rather is produced, as Joan Copjec points out, through awareness of the surroundings: things like the rustling of branches behind the looker or the sound of footsteps, followed by silence.73 What is at work in this scene, and in the forms of projection we have been pursuing, is a psychic awareness of spatial, ambient, phenomenal qualities. In projection, these qualities are heightened and passed infra-­body, creating transformation in receptivity. A creative restaging and reinvention of such ambient projective mechanisms occurs in the milieu of moving-­image projection, which itself produces projective relations. In other words, there are atmospheres of projection to consider in the arts. Psychoanalysis can sustain this aesthetic investigation of a material projection involving object relations. As the psychoanalyst André Green puts it, in his treatment of the development of psychic projection, “Projection begins when the object provides a surface for projection.”74 This reading recognizes the function of the surface of an object in, of, and for projection. It emphasizes that a material is needed to project upon, an object that turns into a surface of mediation. It also acknowledges that interanimated relations are projected onto such a “superficial” material. Psychoanalytically speaking, then, there is such a thing as an actual “projec-

tive screen”: a material surface that becomes activated in a psychic sense in projection.75 The languages of psychoanalysis and film thus merge around this object-­screen and the surface encounters enacted there in the act of projection. Understood in this way, the surface of a projective screen can act as both an active psychic substance in the transmission of affect and a material condition for the transmission of moving images. Furthermore, on the superficial atmosphere of the projective screen an “excorporation” takes place, which is the correlate of incorporation. This process is “centrifugal . . . not localized in any precise place,” as Green explains; it “dwells not within things but between them” and, most importantly, “infiltrates the surrounding space.”76 Thus projection here becomes psychoanalytically constituted as an atmosphere. This kind of excorporation is not an individual expulsion of negativity or a dumping of bad feelings. It is rather a more pervasive form of mediation and, together with incorporation, delineates a way of dwelling between things in the surrounding space. This form of projection is a material transfer of spatialized affects and, most importantly, speaks to material conditions of space. It acknowledges a vibrant, environmental transmission: the transference of the motility, vitality, and fluidity of milieu that takes place in receptive projection.

E I N F Ü L U N G , O R E M P A T H Y, A S A M A T T E R O F P R O J E C T I O N

What I empathize is, in the most general sense, life itself. . . . In one word, life is activity . . . an inner breathing or pulsation; or more generally, it is inner motion. —Theodor Lipps77

In considering the atmospheric space of projection—­a milieu of mediation in which the “projective screen” operates as a cultural technique—­different forms of ambient transmission emerge. As we have seen, material relations develop in projection in between subjects, objects, and space. Affects are intermediated on the screen surface, a porous membrane of conduction, and diffused in and from the surroundings. Surface encounters that occur in the act of projected

screening include the sensory perception of the waves of projected light and the sensing of ambient tones, moods, and dispositions. Such transmissions of atmospheric tonalities through screen spaces can be further understood if we address forms of the transmission of affects that are receptive, such as empathy and sympathy, and consider how one may establish sympathetic empathy with space itself in projection. Empathy has a long and complex history as a form

own. In his own way, Warburg also furthered recognition of the movement of affect in the arts. With his pictorial Mnemosyne Atlas, he offered a cartography of the subject in a montagist picture outline of memory that took sequential, moving-­image form.85 The art historian conceived a pathosformel, an emotive formula that tracked mnemonic corporeal traces as they circulate through art objects across time, thus proposing a version of the transmission of affect that emanates from Einfühlung. Affects here are not only configured corporeally but understood as atmospheres, and mapped as they recur in different historical phases of art, in a passage that acknowledges their reception: the way in which they affect. In revisiting the discourse of empathy in light of the “projective imagination,” it is important to emphasize the “atmospheric thinking” that sustains it and transpires from it. In other words, we should stress that the process of empathic connection occurs not only between people, as is often popularly assumed, but especially between persons and (art) objects as well as with such things as space. As the German philosopher and psychologist Theodor Lipps clearly put it, when defining his broad and more psychologically oriented vision of empathy at the cusp of modernity, Einfühlung can be a mimicry or transfer that is activated between the subject and his or her surroundings.86 One can empathize with expressive, dynamic forms of architecture, with colors and sounds, or with scenery and situations as well as with objects. In other words, Einfühlung expresses a relation to the environment, and even a sense of relatedness or affinity with atmosphere.87 And this kind of “projection” emphasizes the material and immaterial consistencies of atmosphere, understood psychically as mood. In Lipps’s words, “a landscape expresses a mood,” and this character of ambient affect or “‘expression’ says exactly what we intend by the term ‘empathy.’”88 Empathy is thus a form of “transport”: a psychic passage set in motion not simply with physical beings

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of exchange and emotional projection. At particular junctions in history, as philosopher Andrea Pinotti shows in surveying this concept “from Plato to the postmodern,” empathy becomes related to atmosphere and linked to sympathy.78 Specifically, a sense of ambient sympathy emerges, embedded in the influential notion of Einfühlung, often simply translated as empathy and meaning, literally, the sense of “in-­feeling” and the activity of “feeling into.”79 Primarily articulated in German philosophical aesthetics, the concept of Einfühlung was developed in conjunction with perceptual psychology and physiology, as well as art and architectural history, in the second half of the nineteenth century.80 Earlier, in 1778, the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder had mentioned the term, defining it as an “interior sympathy,” a tactile connection one feels when coming into contact with three-­ dimensional space and the plasticity of sculpture.81 In its development as an aesthetics, empathy theory crossed paths with an actual sense of projection that emerged from the late nineteenth-­century exploration of sensory psychophysiology.82 In 1873, influenced by the psychophysiology of Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt, philosopher Robert Vischer proposed that the body objectifies and transplants itself in spatial forms.83 For Vischer, it is this unconscious excorporation—­a corporeal projection into the forms of objects, including abstract ones like clouds or lines—­that moves the aesthetic experience. An attunement—­a porous resonance between the senses, a reciprocal vibration—­can be palpably recognized as it is felt in the arts. This formulation of empathy with objects and aesthetic forms, felt on the surface of the body, is an important projective aspect and had an impact on the aesthetic ideas of the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand and the art historian Aby Warburg, among many others. Hildebrand advanced the idea that art is apprehended through a process of projection that implies a vital resonance.84 In his view, objects and representation have a story that is enlivened in analogic affinity with the subject’s

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2.12 Atmospheric attunement: material testing by the architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro for its 2009 design of Alice Tully Hall, New York. Courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

but also with material space, including such things as the surface of the earth, settings and locales, forms and formations, tints and tones, hues and shapes. According to Lipps, Einfühlung can be an actual function of these spatial configurations and relations, as it expresses the very “feel” of the ambient. Understood in this way, empathy can be seen as a particular form of transmission and mediation that occurs on the surface of things and in the environment. Empathy, in other words, is an atmospheric matter, activated in the projective layers of material surface encounters. And these kinds of encounters include all that transpires in the ambiance created on surface space, whether on skin or screen, receptively. In this sense, empathy can be further understood in terms of a material passage and interpreted as an actual form of projection. This imaginative concept

intersected with psychophysiology’s own sense of projection, and it led to the theory developed by Freud, who learned of Einfühlung from Lipps. This cultural map constructed the projective modality as an open, receptive space. Within it, the intervention of Wilhelm Worringer celebrated the force of surfaces and spatial ornamentation, as did that of fellow art historian Alois Riegl. As Spyros Papapetros has argued, Worringer’s account of ornament acknowledges a form of energy or process that turns art objects into live forms, as if vivifying them from within.89 At the limit, Worringer proposed that empathy, a material encounter with aesthetic space, represents the “superficial” exchange of a vital feeling.90 Addressing this form of transfer, he suggested that empathy can be configured as a particular vitalist projection. He claimed that an “inner need for self-­activation . . . [is] the presupposition of the

imaginatively aligning and virtually correlating our shapes to their contours. Such a process of “spatial creation” is therefore an experiential projection from within the body of the receptive subject onto tactile abstract forms of space, extending into the atmosphere. Ambient empathy engages our capacity to haptically and kinesthetically sense the movement of surfaces, the rhythm of lines, the shapes of things, the volumes of space—­that is, the perturbations of our surroundings—­ as we move and breathe through a site. In this atmospheric sense, we can further elaborate on Worringer’s idea that the impact “of a line, of a form consists in the value of the life that it holds for us.” However, in reinterpreting this idea, I would resist the solipsistic view that projection exists solely as a passage from the subject into the object. In fact, in reviewing the literature on this subject, as film theorist Robin Curtis does, one can find many instances that support the idea that Einfühlung can imply a more articulated theory of reception in which there is a level of reciprocity.100 In affirming such a view, I would even push this notion of a “feeling into” toward the more relational, receptive atmospheric aspect that I have been exploring in discussing the ambiance of projection as a transmission of energies. Invoking the vibrant materiality of space, we can further assert the rights and the life of the object. A dynamic of atmospheric moods is in fact created in an evolving, twofold, reciprocal empathetic exchange between and across subjects, objects, and spaces. At the heart of empathy is an image in motion, the expression of an internal movement, which arises in surface encounters in an ambiance, itself receptive to producing vital exchange. Empathy is not just the projection of a vital energy of the beholder but also a spirit that moves in matter. In attending to Worringer’s words again, we may sense this matter of projected life energy, as suggested in a passage in which he cites Lipps’s own formulation of this projective resonance. Here he states that “the urge to empathy as a pre-­assumption of aesthetic experience finds its gratification in the beauty of the organic,” which

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process of empathy,” for “in the forms of the work of art we enjoy ourselves”; hence, “aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-­enjoyment.”91 He then made an explicit mention of projection in connection to vitalism. In his words, “the value of a line, of a form consists for us in the value of the life that it holds for us.” That is, “It holds its beauty only through our own vital feeling, which, in some mysterious manner, we project into it.”92 I return against the grain to Worringer’s notion of empathy, in contrast to the opinion that empathy and abstraction occupy distinct aesthetic realms, to advance a sense of atmospheric projection and to address the importance of vitalism.93 In light of Lipps’s theory of Einfühlung, we now fully recognize that one can empathize with any spatial or abstract phenomenon of environmental configuration. One can feel empathy with an abstract figure or shape, and even empathize with an outline, a silhouette, a contour, or a line. This kind of vitalism is not always a comfortable feeling but rather a sensing of the perturbation of forms. Lipps, who affirms the vital materiality of things, thinks of a line as a dynamic, even disquieting force. In this sense, he foreshadows a contemporary, vitalist formulation of what the anthropologist Tim Ingold calls “the life of lines.”94 One can even “feel like an abstract line,” in the words of film theorist Laura Marks.95 As Lipps indicated long ago, “Creative activity lies in the line,” and thus, considering that Einfühlung is itself activity, one can certainly sense deep “empathy with linear forms.”96 The formal configuration of space is thus central to this receptive “feeling into,” as art historian Heinrich Wölfflin also claimed in writing about the psychology of architecture.97 Spatial construction is an active process of empathy, for as the art historian August Schmarsow most significantly showed, architecture must be understood as a dynamic, “moving” space, that is, as an atmosphere: a site that conveys mood in its vital lines of composition.98 For Schmarsow, “The spatial construct is . . . a projection from within the subject.99 By this he means that architectural forms are understood as we project ourselves physiologically into their structures,

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is to say, quoting Lipps, that “‘what I empathise into it is quite generally life. And life is energy, inner working, striving and accomplishing. In a word, life is activity.’”101 In conclusion, “The crucial factor is, therefore, rather the sensation itself, i.e., the inner motion, the inner life, the inner self-­activation.”102 Recapturing Worringer’s line of argument in vitalist terms, and taking it a step forward in a different direction, I therefore suggest thinking of empathy as something that moves and resonates, receptively, both inside and outside oneself. Rather than restricting Einfühlung to a simple act of mimesis or identification originating from the human toward an object or an art object, it is more fruitful to conceive of empathy in a way closer to Lipps’s interpretation, as

an “openness.” As we access a space, it enters us. The subject “opens itself ” to the aesthetic presence of an art object, as it does to the contours and perturbations of a space. This is a two-­sided affair, a reciprocal movement of receptivity. Empathy is something that moves in us as and because it moves in matter. This vital matter can be a resonant projection of our inner activation—­that is to say, a material manifestation of our inner motion. Reciprocally, the energy of space, the vibrancy of matter, the frequencies of the “air” of a place can transfer onto our bodies. This empathic character is fully environmental. It is the very form of mixing and interaction that occurs in an atmosphere, and that creates its own forms of ambient projection as receptive transmission.

NEURAL PROJECTIONS

The meeting of physiology and psychology as well as the findings of psychoanalysis and aesthetics contributed much, in the culture of modernity, to a wide-­ranging notion of projection, understood as a transmission of energy that includes the force of affect. Projection, that is, arose as a modern phenomenon across different forms and instruments of knowledge that formulated notions of mediation, transfer, relationality, and receptivity. This included a theory of empathy, which developed in a magnetic field of material interactions and resonance. This particular projective mode turned out to be a form of transformative mediation: an ambient transmutation. In the midst of this culture, the cinematic art of projection itself germinated as a product and agent of modernity. Its apparatus carried on modern ideas about the perception of atmospheres, the shaping of subjectivity and objectivity, and the intersection of these states, in resonant, luminiferous manifestations. In the realm of these cultural transmissions that engage a form of atmospheric thinking, neurophysiological formulations of the act of projection emerged. The vitalist insistence on sensory pathways energized

the field of perception and enhanced the sense of the projective encounter that occurs in ambiance. Walter Benjamin, as we have noted, described how the environment is sensorially activated by technology, becoming pervasively and electrically mediatic in modernity. He also developed a notion of medium that extends to the environment, the milieu, and the atmosphere. In theorizing such sentient perception in the modern era, Benjamin further designated the flâneur as “the virtuoso of empathy” because of his “intoxication” with things.103 His notion of empathy was neurophysiological. It related to the term innervation, which refers to the circulation of sensory and psychic energies, a phenomenon that also pervades “the spirit of technology” expressed in Benjamin’s writings on the planetarium.104 For Benjamin, innervation is a two-­way process of transmission of energies, a notion that was drawn, as film theorist Miriam Bratu Hansen explained, from a vast field of cultural interactions.105 This processual notion of sensorial innervation circulated in early perceptual psychology, including in the seminal work of William James, as well as in the fields of physiological aesthetics and biomechanics. The two-­way process

2.13.1  View of Cyclorama. La Nature, no. 1180, January 11, 1896.

2.13.2  Cyclorama, detail of the projection device. La Nature, no. 1180, January 11, 1896.

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of stimulation was understood to be both external and internal. Freud made use of this notion, too, and employed it to describe the physiological process at the basis of psychic responses: a transmission of energy along nerve pathways.106 For Benjamin, the physiology of innervation was underlain by an understanding of modernity as a condition that produces profound stimulation and a strong impact on the sensorium. In other words, he defined the modern form of experience as profoundly neurological. And he proposed that such experience was offered and conveyed by the new media of modernity. It drove the very mechanism of filmic mediation. The impact of cinema, the art of projection, can indeed be understood only if we acknowledge a collective state of innervation. Innervation is thus another way to account for the kind of projection that is a collective transmission of affect in an atmosphere. This is not, to paraphrase Benjamin, “a one-­way street” but rather a social circulation of psychic energies. Here, in this collective projection, a porous interface between organisms becomes conceived and manifested. This neurophysiological pathway was also taken, albeit in a different way, by Sergei Eisenstein. The Russian filmmaker and theorist was famously interested in affect and spectatorial engagement, which he conceived as a psychophysical affair. In his view, a film audience is enraptured in watching a film in a form of empathy that is intensely physiological. As he put it in 1929, empathy occurs as one is “pulsating in unison” with film.107 In film projection, receptivity occurs when there is active “pulsation,” which one senses in the body of the film (at 16, 18, or 24 frames per second) and, sympathetically, in one’s own body. Such a notion of pulsation shares a path with Benjamin’s own psychophysiological sense of the energy of projection, the sense of “innervation.” In terms of aisthesis, this idea also relates to Hugo Münsterberg’s neuroaesthetic sense that spectatorial projection is a psychomotorial affair, engaging a feeling of empathy. These three outcomes, though distinct, share a vitalist formulation and deep cultural roots. As is the case for Benjamin’s and Münsterberg’s embodied sense

of projection, Eisenstein’s kinesthetic version stems from foundational psychology, including the work of William James, as well as from the physiological side of the aesthetics of Einfühlung. Eisenstein’s own path to empathy specifically echoes biomechanics and the very “pulsations” of the scientific and psychophysiological research of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which conceived the human body’s response to perception as muscular, visceral, and imitative.108 Furthermore, early in his career, Eisenstein theorized and practiced “Expressive Movement,” which was essentially an imitative form of empathy.109 In this view, actors express forms of gestural movement that the audience responds to viscerally, physiologically empathizing with their gesturing of affect. As the filmmaker wrote in a pamphlet, this expressive practice of motion is “solely capable of evoking this emotion in the spectator, who in turn reflexively repeats in weakened form the entire system of the actor’s movements.”110 The audience, that is, kinesthetically imitates motion in empathic projection. “As a result of the produced movements,” Eisenstein claimed, “the spectator’s incipient muscular tensions are released in the desired emotion.”111 Motion and emotion are here connected empathically, as a mimetic correlation of energies and a sympathetic pulsation that can create receptivity. This early neurophysiological pathway to projection has recently found new development in the history of science. It has returned, in recast form, as scientists strive to explain phenomena of intercorporeal transmission of energies with new instruments of visualization. A prominent proponent of neural empathy is the Italian neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, who participated in the individuation of “mirror neurons” in 1992 and who claims that a “mirroring” effect is the basis of empathic interpersonal connections.112 In short, to perceive a movement means also to mirror an action in one’s own physiological system. This kinesthetic idea, originating from the dynamic projection inherent in theories of empathy, extends the reach of these theories while offering a current neurological explanation.

sorially experience motion.115 One can virtually feel the dynamic of a space or an object as well as of a subject in motion and experience the emotion, and even its memory. In this spectatorial, mnemonic simulation, spatial motion and emotion are haptically connected neurologically. Furthermore, our somatosensory functions can be activated even when the contact observed concerns inanimate objects or abstract forms. In this virtually tactile way, one can transcend the body while remaining in it, and this explains how one can access other bodies and enter things and inhabit spaces in the activity of spectating. Giving empathic motion a neural consistency as it revisits the concept in contemporary though somewhat literal terms, this theory makes its own contribution to understanding projection as a dynamic of receptive intercorporeality and ambient resonance.116

E M PAT H I C P R OJ E C T I O N A N D T H E A M B I A N C E O F T R A N S I T I O N A L S PA C E S

The paradigm of projection is back on the contemporary cultural map, in ways that revisit its history and ambiance, and can expand its grounding in notions of vitalism and theories of empathy. The atmospheric suggestions provided by the early theories of empathy also find, albeit in a different way, a terrain of current expansion in art history, especially in the recent writings of Michael Fried, which are open to “the laying bare of empathic projection.”117 The art historian has long been interested in the psychic mechanism that drives what he calls “the invention of absorption”: “a powerful mode of emotional communication [that] can be actuated by absolutely minimal physiognomic and gestural means.”118 Such a minimal form of “empathic projection” communicates an atmosphere of inner absorption, finding expression all the way from Caravaggio to the contemporary lightboxes of Jeff Wall and the large-­scale photographs of Thomas Struth. The point to emphasize here, in view of our notion of projective empathy, is that, for Fried, human beings not only “tend strongly to project” but “by and large they cannot not project . . . a conviction of inwardness

onto, or rather into, painted or sculpted figures who elicit that act of projection.”119 The figures of such projections also may be nonhumans, and particularly animals, as in some moving-­image installations by Douglas Gordon (see fig. 3.6) and Anri Sala. Moving images are considered most suited to expressing the absorptive character inherent in the process of projection, as this projective art embodies the actual space of empathic projection: its very setting and mise-­en-­scène, its actual ambient dispositif. Furthermore, empathic projection is stronger when the mechanism of projection is unveiled and exposed in the work of art, creating fuller absorption in the apparatus. In this regard, what is enhanced is the “role of the empathically projecting viewer in making the ‘magic’ of absorption.”120 It should be noted that Fried borrows the term “empathic projection” from the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who speaks of projection as a way to overcome separation and create “a seam in human experience.”121 As a projective process, then, empathy has the capacity to bridge a divide, creating an experiential seam between the human or embodied and the nonhuman

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In neurological terms, Gallese insists on the atmospheric characteristic of the empathic exchange and adds a neural twist to the articulation of moving-­image projection as a spatial form of transmission.113 Writing with film theorist Michele Guerra, Gallese has in fact tested his findings in relation to filmic space and its reception.114 In their view, an “embodied simulation,” which is the neurological basis of the interaction with other beings, is precisely what drives the activity of spectatorship. In life, when one observes an emotion and is led to simulate it internally in one’s body, one reuses neuronal patterns drawn from one’s past experience. The aesthetic experience of projected moving images is based on a similar process of simulation that is even more virtual. In this view, techniques of movement developed in film language enable a spectator to sen-

2.14  Clemens von Wedemeyer, Sun Cinema, 2010. Installation view, Mardin, Turkey, 2010. © 2010 Clemens von Wedemeyer, VG Bild-­ Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris; and KOW, Berlin.

or inanimate. Cavell’s notion, itself attuned to art’s empathic devices, offers us access to reclaiming the dispositif of empathic projection in art beyond the human realm, while giving Fried the opportunity to show that empathy is more evident in artworks that lay bare their own projective mechanism. In terms of ambient projection this point is important, as artist and writer Ken Wilder shows in writing about landscape films, further stressing the connection between “empathic projection” and a self-­reflexive technology that reveals its own mechanism at play.122 If we take a more ambient position, in fact, we can go beyond the subject’s

imaginative identification with the projective device to focus instead on the inanimate and the natural realm. As mechanisms of projection are traced back psychically in this way, a sense of space, even evoking early childhood experiences, and ways of connecting the human and the nonhuman can rise to the surface. In this regard, a last crucial seam can be constructed with psychoanalysis, addressing the relation of “empathic projection” to what D. W. Winnicott called “transitional objects.”123 These are objects that an infant “projects into.” They designate any material to which she attributes special meaning and by means of which

that is also a milieu of potentiality, as film theorist Annette Kuhn puts it in advocating for applying the underused Winnicottian model to film analysis.129 Winnicott indeed urges us to pay attention to this transitional place as “the intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute.”130 In other words, as artist and theorist Victor Burgin puts it, what is at stake here is “a time of transition and a space of transaction.”131 Winnicott recognizes not only these transitions and transactions but also what he terms “the location of cultural experience,” which is “the potential space between the individual and the environment,” described as “a space of maximally intense experiences.”132 This is precisely the receptive ambiance that comes into play when psychically transitive space extends, in performative ways, into imaginative spaces of communication and creative cultural situations that project relationality. In other words, what we experience with and through transitional phenomena is the creation of a real medium zone of receptive transmission. We encountered an imaginative construction of this “virtual” medium zone when Méliès dreamed of a wireless transmission conducted via screen space. Other such examples will follow as we consider how atmospheres of projection take place in visual arts environments.133 In the course of this aesthetic as well as theoretical pursuit, we will keep in mind Winnicott’s suggestion that we pay attention to spaces of potentiality and the location of experience, for in his work one can sense the transitional setting in which the mediatic projective experience is itself sited. As we will see, resonant experiences of encounter can take place within the plastic, malleable, transitional spaces produced by the inventive use of the ambient medium of projection. Let us continue, then, to explore this area of cultural bridging and mediation, an environment of relational communication, an atmosphere of creative potentialities of relatedness, a place of receptive experiential attunement.

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she can make a successful shift from the earliest oral relationship with her mother to object-­relationships, creativity, and “imaginative living.”124 To explain transitional objects, Winnicott uses the example of a string to which a child might be “attached.” He sees this object as particularly transitional, claiming that “string can be looked upon as an extension of all other techniques of communication. String joins.”125 What is particularly interesting for our purposes is that Winnicott does not focus on the thing per se or even on the life of this linear form. He rather articulates its technical capacity to join, that is, to communicate. Here a linear form can become a space, a site of communicative junctures and relational potentials. Insofar as it is a communicative device that creates a seam, such a material object, which strings things together, reminds us of a screen. Itself an object of material culture, the screen too has a transitive function, and a relational capacity of linkage. As a cultural technique of communication, the screen has the ability to transmit, and to join. Its surface makes space for connections between interior and exterior space, and between persons and things, activating transitions in receptivity. In this sense, an act of screening can be related to transitional phenomena because of the imaginative potential that is held by an object: a potential not only to mediate but to connect in the process of making space. In transitional phenomena, as in an act of screening, it is not just the object, or the screen as object per se, that is transitional; rather, what matters is its objective potentiality: the technical potential to create a transfer, a transitional space, and a receptive, communicative ambiance. In general, Winnicott is sensitive to space and insists “on the place of the object—­outside, inside, at the border.”126 His focus is on “transitional phenomena” and on the kind of bridge space they create.127 The analyst defines this bridge space as a “personal intermediate area,” which is also an area of interpersonal connections.128 And he further forges a “third space”

3.1  Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, ca. 1809. Oil on canvas, 43¼ × 67½ in. Collection Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Painters/Alamy Stock Photo.

3

Atmospheres of Transduction Relatedness and Sympathy

A Atmosphere is a metaphysical space in which everything depends on everything else, . . . a space in which each person’s life is mixed with the life of others. . . . It is the absolute medium, . . . the principle through which the world makes itself inhabitable. . . . One is always, in the matter of the atmosphere itself, in the world, because the world exists as atmosphere.—Emanuele Coccia1

s our excursus on various psychic territories has shown, projection and empathy can be associated largely in transitional terms and as resonant, receptive experiences of intermediation that produce transformation. These are indeed transitive phenomena, based on a transmission of affect that encompasses objects and spaces, and whose effects reside and transpire in the atmosphere, affecting change. With regard to such spaces of transport, an even more “elemental” setting can be articulated here. Extending our investigation of medium as ambiance in projective terms, we will elaborate on the energetic forces that can generate an environment of relationality and a space of communing and relatedness. As we further intersect modes of the “projective imagination” with an “atmospheric thinking,” we will look at several cultural phenomena, beginning with a return to the notion of Stimmung, an important component of a theory of atmosphere and particularly influential in the development of early film theory. This trail of ambient transmission will lead us to investigate issues of cultural vitalism, considering in particular vitalist theories of relational transfer that engage the concept of ambiance. In focusing on theories of sympathy, and other kinds of elemental relatedness, I will touch upon different forms of material connection with the animate universe of our surroundings. In emphasizing the energies of transmission that resonate in ambiance, and the way this receptivity can activate a

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transformation, I will particularly insist on the notion of transduction as it has emerged in the sciences as well as in the humanities and in psychological discourse. Transduction, as we will see, plays a fundamen-

tal role in the cultural terrain out of which our notion of projection—­understood not as identification but, relationally, as transmission and transmutation—­ emerged, in and as ambient space.

AT M O S P H E R I C P R OJ E C T I O N S : ST I M M U N G

Observe whenever the rays are let in and pour the sunlight through the dark chambers of houses; you will see many minute bodies in many ways through the apparent void mingle in the midst of the light of the rays.—Lucretius2

The untranslatable German term Stimmung—­often rendered as atmosphere, humeur, or mood—­originally referred to the musical practice of attunement. This idea of rhythm and resonance is significant to this study, especially for the way it suggests a tone, tonality, disposition, reverberation, or transposition in an ambiance. The concept of Stimmung reverberated extensively as it was developed in German publications between 1770 and the late nineteenth century, resonating in many fields across the sciences, the arts, and the humanities, especially in physiology, psychology, philosophy, and aesthetics. Stimmungen are feelings that exist both internally and externally, diffused rather than directed toward a specific object; they are affects that surround us.3 In his comprehensive history, David Wellbery describes them, using the philosopher Hermann Lotze’s description, “colouration of a state of mind,” as sensations that are not unique but rather form as combinations and are transmitted in an interplay of tonalities that can saturate the entire field of experience.4 Furthermore, the term Stimmung has a communicative dimension, serving as it has, from its earliest history onward in relation to collectivities, to indicate a form of communication that is diffusive, suggestive, pervasive, and, at the limit, so infectious as to be contagious. In the larger realm of empathic tunings, the rhythm of Stimmung can be understood to be a vibrating quality of space and an attunement to place. Particularly relevant in this ambient sense is Lotze’s theory of “inner co-­feeling,” which offered sensory, physiological

investigations of spatial perception in terms of kinesthetic movements that are close to projective experiences.5 In his 1911 essay about Stimmungseinfühlung, or mood-­empathy, the philosopher Moritz Geiger phenomenologically emphasized empathy with space, landscape, and objects, and the commonality between subjective mood and objective qualities of the material world.6 He had studied with Theodor Lipps, who, as discussed, developed Einfühlung as a spatial empathy, and whose notion of empathic projection possessed an atmospheric quality that aligns closely with Stimmung.7 For Geiger, landscape possesses an affective tone that is like a shimmer. Objects display this scintillating affective character, a sparkling energy that moves back and forth with a subject’s own Stimmung. In the complex projective relation articulated here, there emerges a modern, material turn toward affirming the life of objects, the vibrancy of matter, and the character of spatial qualities. This modern experience of space becomes established also in relation to affect, through the work of the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl.8 He wrote about Stimmung as a fundamental artistic practice, calling it “the content of modern art,” and considered the “feeling” of landscape as an essentially modern aesthetic experience.9 Landscape and Stimmung also were prominently connected by Georg Simmel, the philosopher and sociologist who theorized the affect of modernity.10 Although his work is mostly associated with the theorization of urban subjectivity and with connecting “the metropolis and mental life,” Simmel employed the idea of Stimmung

in a 1913 essay to articulate a theory of landscape as a specifically modern form of perception.11 This underestimated term in his philosophy can be usefully integrated into the discussion of modern affects, for it is not intended to be pastoral and opposed to urbanity but is rather indicative of an openness to spatial resonances, in any environment. For Simmel, individuals relate to the mood of a landscape, in nature as in art, in a reciprocal act “of perception and feeling.”12 In this view, Stimmung becomes an actual atmosphere. This modern concept promotes intermediation between the subject and a specific surrounding milieu. The processual notion articulates the sense of reso-

nance, or transposition, that is collectively felt in and through some flowing integration of the separate components of an environment, in an ever-­shifting interconnection of individual traits. In characterizing this phenomenological domain, such an ambient notion included a sensing of weather or, rather, the capacity to take the full temperature of a space. The sense of smell is crucial to Simmel’s interpretation of Stimmung: it is the atmosphere that one breathes in, the milieu in which one is incorporated, the sense of opening to others in empathy, and hence also the medium that connects the subject with the environment.13 To grasp the impact of this atmospheric discourse,

3.2  Robert Morris, Steam, 1967/2009. Installation view, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, Germany, 2009. © 2021 The Estate of Robert Morris/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York.

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let us turn again to Leo Spitzer, who devoted an entire book to the “interpretation of the word Stimmung,” assessing its vast history and its circulation in diverse fields.14 Spitzer’s account is relevant to our discussion for its emphasis on the ambiguity of this concept, hovering between the objective and the subjective, and because it recognizes the Stimmung of such things as ambiance, shining light on the “tuning in” that takes place in and through the material world. And yet his account ultimately implies that such attunement to place might attempt to create harmony, and in this respect, it must be resisted and critiqued. But relatedness is not to be equated with harmony. While finding Stimmung attractive as a theory of atmosphere that contains a projection, and thus relevant to what “goes around” and passes in and through an atmosphere of projection, I do not wish to suggest any such harmonic feeling of unity. Rather, I am interested in the conceptual and material “perturbations” that occur and resonate in atmospheric situations, including the kind of Stimmung that operates in the ambiance of projection. If this notion is relevant to projection it is because it takes affect to be a complex spatial phenomenon and can convey a vital sense of space, understood as a lived, expansive, fluctuating body that is both sited and placeless. Insofar as it is climate-­related, it provides a formula that, while connecting, embodies the disturbances, or perturbations, needed to transform and modify a site. It is important to note, in this regard, that Stimmung is specific not only to place but to time, as it is a located experience. It conveys temporality and transmits moods that are temporal as they develop at particular moments in time in an ambiance. As such, a feeling of Stimmung consistently morphs. While enacting constant transmutation, this force agitates, stirs, disturbs, and perturbs equilibriums. As a particularly malleable spatiotemporal concept, Stimmung has resurfaced recently as an attractive proposition in disparate fields. As noted, it colors aspects of the philosophical discourse surrounding ambiance, milieu, and atmosphere in terms of affect. This

notion is echoed in Kathleen Stewart’s formulation of “atmospheric attunements,” which defines “a tuning up . . . a sentience to a world’s work, bodies, rhythms.”15 Stimmung can function as a way to reaffirm a situational ambiance that is expressed in the pulse of sound, the vibration of light, and the rhythm of space. While, for Stewart, this kind of attunement can create a methodological shift in cultural anthropology, the literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht advocates for Stimmung in literature as an interpretive critical practice.16 Reading for Stimmung means attending to “the forms that envelop us and our bodies as a physical reality,” an approach that “can catalyze inner feelings without matters of representation necessarily being involved.”17 The call for Stimmung is indeed consequential in the effort to emphasize nonrepresentational theories and modes of expression, and to move away from a strict fixation on figuration, representation, or narrative modes and even from hermeneutics, acknowledging the force of texts to surround us in atmosphere, rhythm, nuances, vitality, and tonalities. For Gumbrecht, as film theorist Inga Pollmann puts it, this forceful nonfigurative capacity “fulfills a need,” a desire “felt in times characterized by technological mediation to experience the thickness of material presence.”18 While interested in the potentialities of Stimmung in terms of a modality or, rather, an ambient theory that is nonrepresentational and less anthropocentric, I do not advocate for it as a response or reaction to a supposed loss of materiality in our era of technological mediation. On the contrary, I see this concept as modern: as an integral part of the coming into being of modern media, as playing a role in the articulation of atmospheres of projection, and as constituting the very definition, at the time of modernity, of psychic projection as a space of interaction and a site of mediality. Stimmung is a material form of atmospheric receptivity and resonance that can be expressed only in, and in passing through, a medium. It is itself a tonal, tactile, textural form of environmental mediation. After all, it is conveyed through mediums such as air and

cell-­life of the vital issues in which all great events are ultimately conceived,” which are made of “the aggregate of the movement of single particles.”24 Using such material language, Balázs expresses how a medium can shape the fabric of the visual world, projectively interweaving with its very fiber. Here, film resonates with the cellular rhythm that things themselves not only possess but emanate and irradiate—­that is, project out into the ambiance. In suggesting the material force of Stimmung, Balázs insists on atmosphere, and even evokes its elements as he describes the function of art. “Atmosphere is to be sure the soul of every art,” he claims, “the air and the aroma that pervade every work of art.” It is a “nebulous primal matter,” and “the substance common to the most disparate works, the ultimate reality of every art.”25 In connecting atmosphere and artworks in this substantial yet nebular way, Balázs ultimately defines the character—­the “air” itself—­of a medium, its very fragrance. Atmospheres and mediums are related because they are specific agencies, localized means of expression. As Balázs puts it, the particular air and aroma of an atmosphere are the fundamental aspects that “lend distinctiveness to a medium and a world.”26 As we listen to the scent of these airy words, the atmospherics that defines and pervades the art of projection becomes palpable, articulated as a climatic, weathered matter. In a way, a theoretical meteorology of media emerges here. A meteorological sense of Stimmung takes shape as well in the writings of the filmmaker and film theorist Jean Epstein, who especially favored atmospheric affectivity.27 Epstein had an interest in the alchemic imagination, evoked the alchemist and physician Paracelsus, and pursued a material alchemy in his writing. Sniffing around his theoretical formulations, the alchemy of projection becomes materialized: one can sense the atmosphere of projection as a material chemistry, smell its environment, and experience its weathering (see fig. 3.3). Epstein atmospherically claims that “cathedrals are constructed of stone and

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light, and felt in and through the active, receptive mediation of the body and the body of things. It is affect that is effectively externalized through material mediums that are able to absorb its vibrancy and transmit the traces of vibrations through their own pulsation, interactively. It is in this sense that this communicative concept played an essential part in the aesthetic formation of new mediums such as film. Stimmung furthers the idea, debated earlier in this book, when tracing an environmental archaeology of mediality, that there is an historical and conceptual relation between ambiance and medium.19 This atmospheric sense can be felt especially in the development of early film history and in the inception of a theory of media. Early film theorists persistently employed the notion of Stimmung to express the ambient quality of mediation they found present in cine-­projection. If we read closely early writings on film, we in fact can experience this nonrepresentational, “elemental” sense of medium as ambient matter, and envision the atmosphere of projection as a tuning in and attunement to the surrounding world. Béla Balázs, who was a librettist, particularly advocated for Stimmung when he emphasized that cinema expresses a fundamental rhythm that is almost musical: the “melody” of “microphysiognomy.”20 He understood the musicality of Stimmung and even its relation to Stemme, voice, proxy to vocal cords, as he described the resounding, corporeal materiality of film. In developing a physiognomy of the visible, as film theorist Antonio Somaini maintains, Balázs in fact strove to articulate a wide-­ranging notion of visual culture in tune with the experience of the material world.21 The new medium of film, in the words of the early theorist, shows “the face of things” and reveals “the hidden life of little things,” their vitalism.22 It opens up a “new dimension” of the material world, while making visible the “‘polyphonic’ play of features” of our environment.23 As a vehicle for Stimmung, the filmic screen shows “blurred outlines” and “unknown objects,” such as “the erotic battles of flowers and the poetry of miniature landscapes . . . the

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3.3  Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire, 1947. 35mm, black and white, 22 min. Film still.

sky. The best films are constructed of photographs and sky.”28 In an essay on “the fluid universe of the screen,” he insists that projection is an active mobilization of spatiotemporal modes, which are perceived as variable in a transmutation of energies and proliferation of rhythms.29 Fluid aspects of the world can come to life in projection because “the cinema is psychic . . . a metal brain.”30 Directly invoking Paracelsus, Epstein speaks of projection as an alchemy of transformation, a transubstantiation—­that is, as a process of transduction. This material projection requires the mind to gravitate to the surface of matter, which constantly morphs: “The face of beauty, it is the taste of things.”31

Epstein coins the term photogénie to describe the capturing of expressive qualities, the tone or the character that rises to the surface of an image, often generated by the play of light and shadows or the clouding of the image. This term defines an aesthetic of moods that is, for moving images, the very equivalent of Stimmung. Such photogénie is not a matter of representation, figuration, expressive features, narrative devices or cues, or even filmic style.32 Rather, this kind of diffuse mood engages the movement of the imagination as a form of projection. “The cinema is . . . powder for projection and emotion,” Epstein argues, and such projection invests the relationship between internal and external space.33 “The land-

The dust is treacherous. The carpet emits venomous arabesques.”36 Filmic projection enhances the life of objects, their affective potential, even their moods. For Epstein, a revolver projected large in a close-­up “has a temperament, habits, memories.” It “is as dark as the temptations of the night.”37 In his hands, the inanimate turns animate, and the nonhuman communicates. The atmospheric realm of “quasi-­things” becomes pervasively textured, affected, weathered. Ultimately, with Epstein, we can trace and develop a “sympathetic” form of Stimmung. Here, atmosphere is understood to function in a particularly attuning sense. It is a resonating environment that resonates within. Atmosphere is so pervasive that it can envelop the entire environment in sympathetic relatedness or rather resonance. It is animated, with the environment and situations coming alive in receptively animistic ways. In this climate of vitalism, affect transmitted as forms of weather features prominently, and as mood resonates, it drives a variety of atmospheric “projections.” Exploring the Stimmung of climate, and Stimmung as climate, finally elicits sympathy with the environment, with its agents, and even with their own moody atmosphere. As he observes weather on screen, Epstein would typically exclaim, “What sadness can be found in rain!”38

R E S O N A N C E A S P R OJ E C T I O N : S Y M PAT H Y

This atmospheric projection also finds expression in the writings of the pioneer filmmaker and film theorist Germaine Dulac. Film, as a material and mechanical object, she argues, has a projective capacity “to feel, visually” and possesses a transformative force that can activate “movement, rhythm, life.”39 For this female writer and image-­maker, the attunement of Stimmung via the movement of moving images becomes an active process, creating a sympathetic relation to the material world (see fig. 3.4). The medium of film can engage and interact with “the

expression of things” themselves, and this, in Dulac’s estimation, is about “playing with matter.”40 A sympathetic vibration resonates outward from states of matter and enables one to feel an expressivity in projection, which, in turn, resonates within. This dynamic form of receptive resonance deeply engages forms of space, the shapes of objects, and a vital materiality. Dulac insists on the imaginative relations of projection, for “the cinematic action must not be limited to the human person, but must extend beyond it into the realm of nature and dream.”41 Like Epstein,

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scape may represent a state of mind” that can be “a state of rest,” but “the landscape’s dance is photogenic. Through the window of a train or a ship’s porthole, the world acquires a new, specific cinematic vivacity.”34 The screen is itself such an active, vivacious environment. It is the site of a moving landscape of projections, and it ends up becoming an atmospheric landscape itself. An ambient screen is fleshed out in Epstein’s writings, which develop the vitalist, even animistic, side of Stimmung. Subtle shifts of atmosphere that occur on the screen are noticed, made perceptible in the thin fabric of a light-­sensitive material that ends up becoming sentient itself. His use of language emphasizes the physicality of atmospheric shifts that arise on the surface of things. In film, Epstein claims, “the hills harden like muscles. The universe is on edge. The philosopher’s light. The atmosphere is heavy with love. I am looking.”35 This understanding of projection is so deeply atmospheric that even weather becomes sensibly palpable. In Epstein’s conception, the world takes shape materialized in light, in tangible ways: as light saturates a space, the universe of things becomes animated. Speaking of film as a projective space, Epstein notes that “the whole room is saturated with every kind of drama” and describes how “the cigar smoke is poised menacingly over the ashtray’s throat.

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3.4  Germaine Dulac, L’Invitation au Voyage, 1927. 35mm, black and white, 39 min. Film still. Courtesy of Harvard Film Archive, Harvard University.

she is keen on exploring the animate quality of the so-­ called inanimate world. To describe the atmosphere of projection, Dulac even resorts to material science and its language. “Cinema might be found,” she says, outside of cinema, especially in the world of science, which can render “the formation of crystals, the trajectory of a bullet, the bursting of a bubble (a pure rhythm, and what a moving one! wonderful syntheses), the evolution of microbes, the expressiveness and lives of insects.”42 In this view, the work of projection fully becomes an intrinsic sympathy with our surroundings. This feeling of connection and sense of relatedness extends deeply within geological, atmospheric, and environmental formations. Such projective sympathy is primarily developed within the fiber of beings other than humans and grows in their patterns of formation.

Dulac tells us to look for filmic materiality in zoological forms such as the life of insects, or in biological matters such as the metabolism of cells and the constitution of organisms, or even in the swarming motion of microbes. “Shooting” a film reminds this filmmaker of the actual trajectory of a bullet. In her view, one can understand the motion and rhythm of moving images even as disintegration, as in a bubble bursting. In the end, filmic projection manifests itself as an active and vital phenomenon, exhibiting a luminiferous play of nonhuman forms. The fabric of light that refracts from a screen is akin to the prismatic, mineral light that emanates and refracts from a crystal and irradiates into the surroundings. Thus, the encompassing environment of projection is rendered as both geological matter and atmospheric climate. In this resonant mode, then, Dulac articulates a

of relating that is a more simultaneous relatedness or fellow-­feeling. Sympathy is also more biologically oriented than empathy. It has a vitalist history that is closer to the realm of the natural sciences. The connotations of its characterization as an act of affecting and process of being affected can even approach a form of contagion. It is in this vitalist sense that the notion of passage came to affect, or rather infect, the writings of Germaine Dulac, influencing their biological rhetoric and even mineral register. Sympathy is an infective projective movement, a communicable, transmittable dimension of motion that is at work in the entire material world. It is a transfer of the energies of matter that can be both positive and negative. As such a form of biotic transmission, it finds expressive language in Dulac’s haptic visual theory. Sympathy can be felt through the vital matters she evokes, including those biomolecular matters such as the traffic of cells and the circulation of microbes. Sympathy is not the expression of sentiment of an individual person but a dynamic that is biosocially active. This is a force in flux that disperses in ambiance. Streams of sympathy flow, as do material liquids or currents of energy. A sympathetic vibe can advance in waves and even come close to mimicking an electric current or tide. Sympathy resonates with the motion of matter itself, with its moving particles or atomistic formations. It can encompass a form of intersubjective projection with such ethereal things as the speed of light or the atmospheric formation of clouds. Fellow-­ feeling, in other words, is a form of active circulation, arising from and returning to natural or environmental phenomena. We have already encountered such streams of sympathy in this book: in various forms, they take shape in the early manifestations of a “projective imagination” and in the kind of materialism that ran from the alchemic speculation of Paracelus to Mesmer’s magnetism and later streamed into the mesmerizing projections devised in precinematic times. Magnetic attraction itself, in fact, can be understood as a form

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strong sense of projective materiality, as expressed in cine-­projection. Her formulation speaks of yet another side of the projective realm, one firmly planted in the material world, its processes and rhythms. It not only displays a deeply sympathetic penchant but actually appears to be rooted in the actual language of sympathy theory, its philosophical and scientific registers. The biotic words she uses to render the affect of things and cinematic objects as lively show the influence of a sociobiological as well as a psychological articulation of sympathy, and combine these aspects in receptive ways. Let us, then, unpack these aspects of sympathy theory in order to better understand the connection between the art of projection and sympathy with respect to transmission and transformation, and especially as it relates to the transitivity of affect. Let us recall that the term sympathy comes from the ancient Greek, where it connotes a shared feeling or a sense of commonality. Writing about the passions, the philosopher David Hume articulated this idea in psychological terms, understanding sympathy as a vehicle for the transmission of affect.43 Adam Smith developed the same concept in more phenomenological terms and introduced it to the social sciences.44 Essentially, for both these thinkers, sympathy is a cognitive-­affective passage that requires imagination, itself a projective effort, in order to be felt and experienced. As Lauren Wispé put it in his intellectual history of the idea, “The conception of sympathy in the beginning was as medium for the transmission of emotions.”45 In other words, sympathy was articulated as a form of mediation that is an imaginative projection. Charles Darwin, writing in precinematic times, then biologized this concept of projective mediation, positing sympathy as an instinct that can define and even shape man as a social animal.46 Although there are evident connections, and even confusions, between the notions of empathy (especially understood as Einfühlung) and sympathy, in general it can be said that the latter, in general, implies a way

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3.5 Atmosphere, as envisioned in Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus (Amsterdam: Joannes Jansson and Elizeus Weyerstraet, 1664–­65). Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo.

of sympathy that is particularly “elemental.” After all, animal magnetism is a natural force, existing in and connecting through all forms of living entities, including animals and vegetables. In order to be experienced, and to operate in transfer, mesmerizing phenomena presuppose and induce a fellow-­feeling, and this is sensed as a vitalist, fluid connection transpiring infra-­ bodies. Magnetopathic relations are themselves “sympathetic” in that they are based on a form of exchange, a receptive transmission of affect that is both energetic and energizing, and even therapeutic or healing. Sympathy, then, fully participates in the articulation of the larger cultural paradigm of the imaginative projective and atmospheric thinking that we have

been exploring in this book. This can be summarized as a research for processes of projection conceived as transitive relations that effect transformation in ambiance, including transfer, transmission, transposition, transaction, and transduction. In this search, we also can encounter processes of receptivity that are formed as association, correlation, resonance, infusion, infection, animation, and vivification. The process of sympathetic empathy is in fact a course of action that, in Andrea Pinotti’s words, engages a history of the “animation” and “vivification of inert, dead things” and the activation of the inanimate universe of objects at large.47 In other words, sympathy promotes forms of speculative thinking and processes that are based in

a form of boundary-­crossing receptive “environmentality.” This may include elements of vitalism. This is because the vitalist empathic transmission that is sympathy participates in the streams of attraction that constitute and circulate in the elemental world and pervade its very atmosphere. After all, a sympathetic resonance of atmospheric nature includes the motion of light, color, sounds, temperature, and other spatial dimensions of the material world. Analogical relations of atmospheric proportion permeate the articulation of sympathy, conceived as the attraction of matter itself in bodies of different species. Sympathy—­understood as an active force that links and threads bodies together in material relations,

even in their microscopic, molecular, and cellular formations—­does indeed affect beings receptively. This relatedness takes a particular turn when, out of its characteristic porosity, sympathy develops as a force of bodily encounter and intercorporeal influence. This is to say that, when conceived as an energy that disseminates, spreads, and propagates, sympathy can come to be experienced as a form of contagion. To affect can surely lead to infection. The transference, or infectiousness of sympathy can even turn into a form of biochemical, even epidemiologic contamination. Hume conceived of the passions as just such a “contagious” matter, following medicine’s long-­standing use of the term sympathy to indicate how illness is

3.6  Douglas Gordon, Play Dead; Real Time, 2003. Installation view, Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2004. Multichannel video installation, silent, dimensions variable. © Studio lost but found/ VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn, 2020. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery/Studio lost but found, Berlin.

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transmitted and pharmacologically cured.48 We should also recall that, in his famous Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, in the seventeenth century, conceived of melancholia as an imaginative force that can spread, an inner feeling that can be sympathetically transferred to others in the same way that one can be mimetically infected by pain witnessed in another’s body.49 Imbued with this particular sense—­of a keen disposition to assimilate experiences—­the concept of sympathy comes to constitute a quite powerful, even viral dynamic, especially when translated in social as well as biological terms. It is this more contagious sense of sympathy that has attracted the attention in recent years of political theorists such as Jane Bennett, who has turned to its vitalist process as a consequential way to advance her reflections on “vibrant matter” in the world and its effects.50 Bennett advocates for viewing sympathy as a contagion between bodies, human and nonhuman, because it requires a “dilation, or the opening wider of the pores of the body.”51 Such contagion, or infection, is a complex dynamic because it “is not always symmetrical—­not always an exchange of equal degrees of power or intensity—­but it is always interactive.”52 Affirming sympathy as a key concept in nineteenth-­ century North American political discourse, Bennett focuses on Walt Whitman’s use of the term, which he applied not exclusively to humans, in tune with posthumanist concerns. Sympathy is indeed a vital, natural force that directly involves nonhuman bodies, and is an attraction so heterogeneous and promiscuous that it can overcome the boundaries of species. It can be felt as a part of the body, sensed even below sensory detection as an implicit acceptance, an erotic attraction, or even a gravitational pull of matter. Sympathy is what connects “the human foot and the mineral earth.”53 It is what makes one aware of being “made up of vegetable, stony, mineral, and solar solids, liquids, and gases.”54 That is to say, made up of the surrounding milieu and the elements of atmosphere.

As such a form of natural affective transfer, sympathy indeed can be understood as a broadly spatial, environmental, and even ambient notion. Bodies affect one another in and through the component parts of their biosocial milieu and through the texture of such substances, including the consistency of atmosphere, in the form of both climatic ambiance and affective fabric. This textural affinity, and sense of relatedness, which porously and receptively attracts bodies, figures significantly in the concept of sympathetic vitalism, especially if we consider that, insofar as it is a natural force, a form of material sympathy permeates things like the process of alchemic experimentation and infuses forms of magnetic thinking such as animal magnetism. Revisited in contemporary terms, as a form of relatedness, sympathy also performs contagiously, in Bennett’s view, to the extent that it is a material, textural form of attraction. “Does not all matter,” she asks, “aching, attract all matter?”55 Indeed it does, for sympathy, ultimately, is close to sets of attractions that are geological or cosmological in nature, including gravitational forces. This material mode of agency that fires up circuits of energies of physical inclinations or propensities and diffuses nonhuman forms of vitalities, is finally fully atmospheric, even akin to the kind of emission and radiation that is expressed in the solar modes of heliophilia. In this atmospheric sense, then, rather than understanding sympathy simply as a psychological state, we can now fully recognize it as “an ontological infrastructure, an undersigned system of affinities (which persists alongside antipathies) between and within bodies” of different species and various material and ambient configurations.56 This particular sense of kinship, or rather relatedness, is virtual, and it is this virtuality, which is also a potentiality, that can possibly constitute agency. With a complex history that moves alongside and through modern notions of atmosphere, sympathy offers us a fundamental projective paradigm of porous interaction and intermediation that engages

a global surge of self-­sufficient individualism, enforced isolation, social distancing, boundary-­enforcement mentality and acts of walling-­off, this conversation on forms of commonality, communing, and collective practices engaging the very nature of environment seems ever more urgent. Recognition of a transitive, communal force “that moves around” could give us hope of resisting some of that division and dichotomy, rejecting divisive forms of thinking in favor of sustaining and encouraging more affective, connective, infusive, receptive forms of communication and a sense of community.

T H E L A N D S CA P E O F P R OJ E C T I O N , A S E A M W I T H T H E I N A N I M AT E

Having turned empathic projection away from questions of mere mimesis or identification with another human, or confinement to the sole province of sentient beings, I now turn to explore further the process of projection as forming a seam with the inanimate. If I was driven, first, toward the atmospherics of Stimmung and theories of sympathy it was because of their capacity to capture vibrant relations of affinity, bindability, and resonance with the motion of the material world. Sympathy, as I have argued, is not only a relation of vital attractions but a material form of receptive transmission: a projection of the energy itself of circulation. Such a force that moves also has the potential to transform what it touches along its conductive path. This projective capacity for transmutation, which encompasses infra-­body and inter-­object relations, is expressed not only in the natural world but also, and prominently, in and with various mediums, and through their artistic and cultural productions. In this material sense, as it concerns the visual arts, it is important to recognize the function of the things that activate the projective dynamic: the technological artifacts and environments that we operate within and that shape us. As far as the art and atmosphere of projection—­the focus of this book—­is concerned, I propose to think of the screen as such an object, or

rather, as one such resonant, vital, receptive form of objecthood, a thing that joins. A screen can function like the connective string we encountered in Winnicott’s account of the “transitional object,” which is itself akin to a technique of communication.57 It expresses in its own objecthood a “dooring”: the transitive potential of the intermedial work of projection. As an object that viewers imaginatively project themselves into, it produces the creation of projective phenomena that are communally transitional. The surface of a “projective screen” has the capacity to hold in its fabric a moving set of actual and potential projections, which are activated in transitions between interior and exterior space, and in between persons and things.58 In this sense, a screen is not an inert, inanimate thing but an animated, processual object. This processual aspect will be further articulated as we consider experiences of projection in the contemporary visual arts in the second part of the book, where a series of case studies reveal the transformations of ambiance that can occur through the material configuration of the object-­screen of projection, itself understood as an environment. The reflective surface of the screen will show its agency in acting as a projective threshold space and a transmitter of energies. A porous membrane of psychic projections, the screen

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kinship with our nonhuman partners and relatedness with other organisms, and intersects as well with contemporary philosophies of ecomaterialism. Both grounded and ethereal, sympathy is a receptive force of commonality that can “move,” and move around, infectively, even through histories and across different fields. This type of projective transmission is indeed an avenue of transport, in all senses of the word. If embraced, the moving force of sympathy holds the potential to help us overcome the anxiety of influence and affirm more forcefully the cultural and social value of porosity and relationality. In the face of

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fabric can conduct tones and tonalities and transmit moods, which are experienced in, and resonate through, an ambiance. The creation of a seam with the inanimate can occur through the very scale of the luminiferous object-­screen, in the transitive architecture of an atmosphere of projection. In drawing attention here to how this forthcoming analysis of artworks resonates with the issues raised thus far, a specific point should be emphasized regarding sympathic and empathic transfers. With respect to the projection of moving images on screens, I argue that empathic and sympathetic projections are not restricted to the realm of psychic identification, psychological characterization, stylistic technique, or narrative development. Projection is rather about being immersed in an environment of screening and absorbed in an atmosphere beyond representation. A sympathetic exchange occurs in and through the very space of projection, which forms a seam between the animate viewer and the inanimate screen, in transitive, receptive terrains of “moving” transformation. This is made particularly evident in the moving-­ image installation Ashes (2012–­15), by the artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. Here, a freestanding sculptural screen displays apparently unrelated footage on its two sides. The two films run simultaneously, though they cannot be seen together. One side of the screen presents attractive, atmospheric images originally shot in the grainy texture of Super 8mm film. Ashes, a charismatic young fisherman, is traveling by sea, happily perched on his boat. We follow his navigation, moving through blue skies and the soft waves of the Caribbean Sea. The horizon line shifts, appearing to rise and fall with the boat’s rhythmic motion. The atmosphere is serene. The other side of the screen shows a different scene: an object, which is not immediately identified nor indeed identifiable, is being made by someone who is intently at work in its manufacture. Hands move through materials with skill, and a sense of materiality imbues the scene. Different stages of the object’s existence unfold in sequence, and all phases of its coming into being can

be closely observed. This object is being constructed, slowly, by way of cutting wood, carving stone, assembling parts, plastering and painting surfaces, and, finally, lettering. In the unfolding of the work, one is not only attracted by the materiality of the object but engaged in the process of fabricating it. Eventually, this careful process of making unveils its results, fully and tragically, revealing its function. What we have been absorbed by, and empathically “projected” into, is the construction of a tomb and its stone. This is the burial place for Ashes, the young fisherman, who has been killed.59 In McQueen’s installation, it is the spatial form of the projection that conveys the affect of the work. Here, the empathic projection is not a matter of identification with a character or even of figurative representation but rather a processual affair, a transfer that occurs in between spaces. The transmission of affects engages the very form of the screen, with its double surface. In the course of viewing, a variety of affects pass in between and through the two-­sided screen of projection, where life and death take place. The feeling of connection that is a sympathetic “projection” ultimately creates a literal seam with an inanimate state. The twofold screen conveys life as if it were stretching at both ends. This movement from the animation of life to the stillness of death is not only sited on the folds of the screen but enabled by spectatorial displacement. The complexity of this affecting story in fact can be experienced only if one moves from one screen side to the other in the projection space, or if one stands to the side peering between the seam itself. One must move to be moved, and only then can the transmission of affects become reflective, affective transformation. It is in this way that McQueen’s Ashes moves, and moves us to think, as it travels between the luminiferous atmosphere of the wave of life to the matter of death, enacting a return of the body to ashes, materialized in the dust of entombment itself. Activating this final material seam with the inanimate, the projection effects a material transmutation of the substances we are made of and will return to: from ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

P R OJ E C T I O N AS T R A N S D U C T I O N : M AG N E T I C E N E R G I ES A N D V I B R AT I O N S

Projection has emerged from our narrative as a material form of transformative transmission: a pulsating force that moves through and across bodies and the bodies of things, effecting change through this porous, material movement of energetic forces. Because the act of projection is a dynamic process of imaginative relational transfers, transformational change can occur as the vitality of affect is conducted and energy fields are moved in and through the ambiance. To articulate the notion of projection further in this receptive sense, I wish to conclude my theoretical exploration by insisting on a particular aspect of this projective transmission: the energy of transduction.

To better understand the act of projection as a transduction, we need to probe the connection of this concept to the discourse of technology.60 As noted earlier, “transduction” stems from the Latin verb transducere, which means to lead across, to transfer. Over time, it has retained the sense of an active force that conveys a dynamic in motion: the action of conducting or bringing across. The range of such action can refer in particular to a transformation in an energy substrate. To enact a transduction can mean “to convert energy . . . into a different medium or form of energy.”61 A transducer is a medium for such a transformation. For exam-

3.7  Cildo Meireles, Amerikkka, 1991/2013. Installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2014. Painted wooden eggs and bullets, wood, metal; dimensions variable. Photo © Agostino Osio. Courtesy of the artist; Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo; and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan.

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ple, it can be a “device for converting variations in one physical quantity, as pressure, brightness, etc. quantitatively into variations in another,” or “for converting a non-­electrical to an electrical signal.”62 In simple terms, the human eye and the ear can be considered transducers, since they are engaged in sensory processes that convert energies. Visual phototransduction is a process by which light is converted into electrical signals in various cells, including the photosensitive cells of the retina of the eye. In the auditory system, sound vibrations, which are a kind of mechanical energy, are transduced into electrical energy by cells in the inner ear. Sound vibrations from an object cause vibrations in air molecules, which, in turn, vibrate the ear drum. Thus, visual and sonic energies can change as they traverse different mediums. The kind of transduction that occurs in the eye and the ear extends to mediatic technologies such as the telephone and to apparatuses such as those employed in the art of projection. The vital notion of transduction has been adopted in various disciplines, ranging from biology, where it defines the transfer of genetic material from one cell to another by viruslike particles, to psychology. In psychic or mental terms, transduction can retain a biotic meaning when it denotes what takes place when sensors in the body convert physical signals from the environment into neural signals. In general, then, transduction can be said to signify a material transformation. It is the action or process of transforming a signal, including changes in the way sensory signals can be captured, apprehended, and interpreted in and by a medium. It is important to emphasize that an act of transduction, as it passes through a medium, can alter the very nature of an energy or signal, converting it into variations that transfer from one medium into another. This understanding of transduction as a mediatic operation has special relevance for media and visual

studies. In a study of energy and electromagnetism in the arts, media arts theorist Douglas Kahn has emphasized the role of transduction as a form of mediation, claiming that “if we take energy at its base level in movement, then the next thing to note is its movement within and between classes of energy: transduction.”63 This means considering movement across qualitatively different forms of energy, including how, in Kahn’s explanation, electromagnetic radiation transforms into acoustical mediums, turning electromagnetic waves into mechanical vibrations, and radio into sound. It also means recognizing paradigm shifts that occur when the concept of transduction is applied across disciplines, for “the term is most often defined as the means by which one state of energy moves to another, but in fact the meaning changes as it moves from one disciplinary field to another.”64 Nevertheless, whether employed scientifically or metaphorically, as in the humanities, transduction is primarily a way to assert a theoretical “moving materialism of energy.”65 This interpretation of transduction in transitive, material, mediatic terms is particularly useful to our way of articulating the process of projection, which relies on luminiferous phenomena and their transmission in ambiance to propagate forms of energy. The energy of transduction correlates magnetism and electricity and is a component of the movement of light, in its cosmological, ambient manifestation. Furthermore, the “lived electromagnetism” of transduction is a practice that amalgamates various perceptual experiences of ambiance with the discourses of technology and science, ranging historically from the study of atmospheric phenomena, from light all the way to telecommunications. The historical discovery by the French physicist André-­Marie Ampère of “electrodynamics,” which became the science of electromagnetism, and the discovery of animal electricity by the Italian scien-

ities” of a lived electromagnetism, which is a field of material interconnectedness of elements. And that conduction of energy, understood as an infrastructure that makes connections possible, encompasses the attraction, receptivity, and circulation of affects in lived experience. The notion of projection, as we have shown, emerged as a process, from fluid currents of thought that extend from the alchemy of Paracelsus all the way to theories of light particles, resonant waves, and atmospheric currents. It coalesced in Mesmer’s own version of magnetism as a projective force. A lived electromagnetism can also be felt in the energy generated in early forms of projection such as the ghostly waves of phantasmagoric spectacles, which electrified audiences, or in early film’s fantasy of a wireless transmission. This construct can be seen, too, as permeating the conductive “influencing machines” psychoanalytically conceived by Victor Tausk. And how can one think of the theories and practice of empathic projection and sympathy we have discussed without viewing them as expressing and enacting a form of transductive phenomena? After all, there is a pulsation and innervation enacted in the phenomenon of sympathy, a fluid, energetic, resonant exchange with objects and the environment, that can receptively transform both the subjects and objects of the exchange. Such transmissions of affect, that is, can themselves induce a transformative transduction. This is especially the case when we consider the energy conducted in terms of material circulation in an atmosphere. Atmosphere, itself an environment of psychic energies, is a setting in which a variety of forms of transduction are activated in its mediums of air and light. This is all to say that the art of projection conveys the energy of the atmospheric, relational, transformational thinking that is transduction. Projection is itself an active, relational movement of matter-­energies. In an act of projection, a

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tist and philosopher Luigi Galvani, which lead to bioelectromagnetics, found numerous technological applications.66 It is important to note that this discovered electromagnetic energy, which has always been present in the natural environment, in organic and biological forms, became disclosed as it became industrialized and channeled in such things as telegraph wires and other technologies. Its inherent force as an atmospheric current—­a spatial field of energetic transmission between the fluid and the gaseous, the corporeal and the incorporeal—­was both tamed and extended by technological transformation. This rechanneling of environmental energies occurred particularly at the end of the nineteenth century with the entrance of the media of modernity. At the turn of the twentieth century, electromagnetic models generated even more waves, moving from radium and X-­rays all the way to radio. In these ways, modern media transformed the formation, reception, and resonance of energetic environments. In this sense, the discourse on energy transmission, including the resounding circulation of energetic fields, developed by Kahn mostly in the context of sound, can be easily extended to visual media and the art of projection, born of modernity. The concept of transduction returns us to the historical origins of projection as it arose in the energy fields of magnetic thinking, electromagnetic waves, and atmospheric discourses—­a genealogy we have traced in previous chapters. Projection, as we argued, is indeed a component, and even an agent, of the vast environment of electromagnetic discourse. It arose from the sensory experience of light and atmosphere as mediums of ambiance and from a discourse that combined technological, scientific, and philosophical knowledge with a sense of perceptual change of the environment. It particularly grew out of the energy of correlations established between medium and ambiance, and the “floodabil-

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transmission of (psychic) energies takes place in a site, and these energies transductively circulate in an ambiance. Space is not only animated but vibrates in projection, in shifting and morphing ways. Luminosity is a component of this energetic atmosphere of projection, for light is energy that ferries across; it not only is transmitted but itself transmits, connecting living beings and things together as it pulsates. Light frequencies and lived matters can resonate in receptive sympathy, in material ways, in the environment. In projection, one can sense a reverberation of the felt space, a vibration in which the perceiving subject meets the movement of the perceptual space, and both are changed by it. Such

vibrations, which emanate from waves of light, are not at all simply visual, for they can be perceived as if they were auditory or palpably tactile. The energetic attraction of projection provides one reason why cine-­projection can still fascinate, magnetize, or even mesmerize today. This modality is, in some way, genealogically galvanizing. Projection, as a vibration of electrical energy in which one’s own energy can join, destabilizing the flow, still operates on tensions. Beings can continue to affect one another in this galvanic fashion, not simply in harmony but in more electrifying spaces of atmospheric, collective perturbation—­that is to say, in novel atmospheres of projection.

A TRANSDUCTIVE PROJECTION

In the face of these conceptual and genealogic histories, it should be recognized that, as regards the art of projection, a stream of transductive qualities is still present and operative in contemporary culture. Energies pertaining to the genealogy of the projective concepts that we have traced in our cultural archaeology of environmentality in mediality are very much alive today in the use of moving-­image projection in contemporary art. Various forms of transformative transmission, as we will further see, are enacted today in the luminiferous environments of the art gallery and the museum—­in ambiances where the black box meets the white cube—­in ways that reinvent the projective imagination, especially in light of atmospheric thinking. An awareness of the receptive process of ambient transformation is developed through art. A transmission of energy can be sensed through an aisthesis, that is, in a sensory exploration, including a quiet contemplation of the affective, transformative character of atmosphere. This particular environmental form of transduction can engage the cosmology of light and air and affect the ways in which these elements are felt and sensed, how they diffuse and change in the ambi-

ance of the projective space. In the lived technology of projection, this affecting atmosphere can be transduced as it is transformed in material space. To give a more concrete sense of this atmospheric kind of transduction as part of the energy transmitted and resonated in projection, consider, for example, Bill Viola’s early video installation Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier 1979 (1979; fig. 3.8). In Viola’s words, the “video image is actually a shimmering energy pattern of electrons vibrating in time.”67 In this pioneering work, which evokes the environment of an aquarium, transduction is literally felt and, with a materially fluid quality, conveyed in the form of a liquid, vibrating apparatus of projection. A screen is suspended in the space of the art gallery above a large, shallow pool of water. A video projector with three separate beams—­one each for red, green, and blue light—­casts images of Mount Rainier onto the surface of the water, which reflects them up to the rear projection screen. Through this process of transmission, the static images of the mountainous landscape become mobilized, almost electrified. The passage through light and water transforms stasis into motion, and transmits moving

energy. As the projection continues, the process conveys a transformation that is an actual transduction: a material transmutation occurs, converting the rocky stillness of mountain into the flowing liquidity of water. In this aquatic form of projection, states of matter morph, and one can sense the very energy of solid transforming into liquid. The perturbation enacted in this atmosphere of projection is furthermore manual as well as mechanical: at periodic intervals, the water’s surface is disturbed by the handiwork of gallery attendants, causing the three beams of color to separate further and the image to decompose in even more liquid ways. As the transformative projective process continues in this way, one finally becomes immersed in energetic patterns

of abstraction, pulsating forms, and vibrating color, all reverberating in the ambiance. Then, slowly, the water settles again, and the representation of the mountain resurfaces more clearly. As soon as the surface vibrations subside, however, they start anew, and the pattern of transformation and dissolution renews, with gurgling water and murmuring sounds resonating throughout the atmosphere. The very fluidity of an act of projection can be sensed in these transductive energy transfers of liquid vitality. As the immersive feeling of projection is materialized, in currents of transforming matter-­energy, one is led to sympathetically, receptively tune in the vibrant, fluctuating process of an energetic environment of transduction.

3.8  Bill Viola, Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier 1979, 1979. Video/ sound installation. Color videotape playback with rear projection reflected off water surface of a pool onto a suspended screen, in a large, dark room; water disturbed by hand at intervals; amplified stereo sound. Photo: Phoebe d’Heurle. Courtesy of James Cohan, New York.

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L I G H T WAV ES A N D C I N E M ATO G R A P H I C P R OJ E C T I O N S

I speak . . . of Colours so far as they arise from Light. For they appear sometimes by other Causes, as when by the power of Phantasy we see Colours in a Dream. —Isaac Newton68

As exemplified in Viola’s Moving Stillness: Mount Rainer 1979, transduction enacted in cine-­projection returns us to the vibrant universe of light, energy, and atmosphere that is explored in the sciences. We have shown how the history of cine-­projection is in fact intertwined with science’s search for a theory of the composition and transmission of light and its energy, and the consistency of atmosphere.69 It is also intertwined with science’s own desire to create cinematographic machines. If every scientific way to imagine light over time is connected to the larger form of that time’s cultural imagination, the modern one can be said to be appropriately cinematographic. As historian of science Jimena Canales explains, modern “wave physics, together with the realization that lightwaves took time to be transmitted,” provided “new ways of conceiving the universe as unfolding cinematographically.”70 The matter of the speed of light, and its relation to stillness and variability, was furthermore a subject much debated in the modern life sciences, in ways that touched even on how it is captured in cinematographic projection.71 Imaginary technologies developed out of these modern waves of thinking about the transmission of light. In considering the course that light takes, scientific fantasies of a cinematographic nature arose, pushing the idea of luminous transmission in the direction of time and prompting the consideration of temporality as transport. In 1846 the finite velocity of the speed of light was used by the amateur scientist Felix Eberty to imagine ways in which, by way of the voyage of light, one might even travel in time. In light’s temporal trajectory, he posited, one could see past eras and, at the limit, experience “all of the world’s past history, albeit as if unfolded ‘in reverse.’”72 History, that is, could unfold as if in an elaborate, cinematographic, projective flashback.

3.9  Isaac Newton examining the nature of light: anonymous engraving after a painting by John Adams Houston, printed ca. 1879.

As this quasi-­scientific dream shows, what can be seen, and especially imagined, through the motion of a luminous emission is especially interesting in terms of the “projection” of time. The movement of light begins at a source but can seem imperceptible; emitted light from the sun or stars, for example, may appear to be static, and yet it does move. Moreover, as the emission moves through space it becomes perceived with delay. Hence the transport of luminosity can come to resonate with that which constitutes a temporal projection. It not only can be imagined as a trace of past memory but can even appear to trace an imaginatively mnemonic or historical course. As in psychic projection,

the eyes, visually, but in diffuse corporeality, across the body and its surroundings and in ways that are closer to sensing waves. As modern science continued to probe these questions regarding the path of light and to explore the nonlocality and motion of photons in light of quantum physics, it became ever more clear, as the physicist Arthur Zajonc shows, that “ambiguity is essential to light.”74 For this scientist, this also means that the “wave-­particle duality” is bound to disappear while a more ambiguous “wave-­particle-­ness remains.”75 No longer a well-­defined, local, or enduring entity, light is recognized to be a more subtle, complex, intertwined, variable form of energy, one that is neither pushed nor pulled but rather “informed” by motion. In the end, in “entering light,” Zajonc concludes, one must learn to leave assumptions behind, “cross into another dimension,” and let the imagination lead the search.76 For it is indeed not only “through research” but through “artistic practice and quiet contemplation” that “light’s elusive being constantly re-­creates itself.”77

F L U I D AT M O S P H E R ES O F P R OJ E C T I O N

The fundamental ambiguity of the path of light and the different waves of its atmospheric sensing that scientists came to recognize does not surprise the cultural theorist engaged with the visual arts, attentive to art installations and keen to contemplate their luminiferous ambiances of projection. After all, the term ambiance arose as an ambulatory concept, from the Latin ambire, “what goes around.”78 This ambulatory notion is rich in nuances and subtle forms of ambiguity, related as it is in many ways to the idea of ambient transport. In fact, as Karen Pinkus suggests, commenting on Spitzer’s essay on milieu and ambiance, the Latin prefix amb(i) that is inscribed in ambiance occurs in ambivalence and ambiguity as well.79 It is indeed by means of research through the wandering, ambiguous paths picturing the cultural and aesthetic imagination of environmentality that light can be sensed recre-

ating itself, technologically. In the contemplation of ambient atmospherics in artistic forms of projective imagination, light can be reexperienced and reinvented along its own ambivalent paths and in the ambling projections that cinematic promenades can produce. Adopting this ambulatory path in the course of our analysis of atmospherics and luminiferous ambiance in the first part of this book, we have emphasized forms of transmission and transport, claiming that the atmospheric imagination is keen on “what goes around” and constantly recreates the ambivalent mixture of nondirectional movement in forms of transduction. Synthetically, we have recognized that atmosphere, to borrow Steven Connor’s words, “is the ultimate ‘mixed body,’ made up of distribution, communication and interferences,” and that “in betweenness becomes the normative condition of the atmospheric.”80 This medi-

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this sort of luminous time is not linear but travels a complex and layered course, even an ambiguous path. Such an atmospheric thinking of luminous transport does, indeed, engage and interact with the nuanced territory of the projective imagination. Questions debated in modern science have included whether one could see light itself or only perceive objects that reflect it, and also whether and how its speed is, or can become, perceptible. And these questions led to an acknowledgment of the function of sensorial imagination in perception. After James Clerk Maxwell theorized electromagnetic waves in terms of light these debates continued, engaging the complex relation between the two phenomena and conjecturing whether it is possible to perceive electric and magnetic fields directly or only through visible light.73 Questions concerned not just the ability to see light optically but the capacity to feel it, an aspect that is also important in projection. Debates addressed how gradients or spectrums of light can themselves be felt sensorially, not only with

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atic, intermediary capacity, expressed in the way ambiance functions as a medium that produces a hybrid mixture, characterizes the movement of transduction: a going around that is by definition a transmission of energies. The transfer of elements or forms that takes place in transduction can lead to the blurring of distinctions between them. In the course of its path, as energy is converted into a different medium, a form of infusion, transmutation, or contamination occurs as part of this process of transformation. To complete our articulation of atmosphere as intertwined with medium, movement, mixture, and fluidity, and by extension with projection, we will now make a final round of connections between the projective imagination and atmospheric thinking. In this endeavor, a productive suggestion comes from the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia, whose recent book The Life of Plants, though primarily concerned with vegetal life, displays elective affinities with our concept of “going around,” for it too regards atmosphere as a fundamental space of mixture, of the circulation of life, matter, and energy. In this cosmological view, which is a metaphysics of mélange, we do not simply live on earth but inhabit the living matter of its atmosphere. Here, plant life is intertwined with air, breathing, and vision as it receives light and other processes of a tangible atmospheric nature that are implanted in the nonhuman universes. While occasionally wishing that this cosmic mixture would produce unity and, at times, even unified truth—­ an aspiration that I do not share—­Coccia offers valuable suggestions for thinking about the immersive aspect of an atmosphere, and even its climate. In Coccia’s conception, atmosphere, which generates and vibrates in life, is essentially a vast, immersive climate of transformative fluidity. Here, climate is culturally constructed, and conceived in a broad sense, which both encompasses and surpasses some of the scientific notions we have touched upon. Climate, in fact “is not the collection of the gases that envelop the terrestrial globe. It is the essence of cosmic fluidity”; in other words, “the infinite mixture of all things, present, past,

and future.”81 It does not simply produce this mixing but is the actual name, definition, and metaphysical structure of a mixture. In the mix of atmospheric encounters, exchanges take place that produce forms of knowledge as the medium of ambiance becomes subject and the subject, in turn, becomes ambient. This “weathered” form of mixing, proper to atmospheric currents and paths of knowledge, is fundamentally a relational modality. The topological exchange that is operative in the cosmos is diffused in, by, and through all living forms that inhabit the atmosphere. This kind of immersive fluidity, then, constitutes a material mode of living. Fluidity is not simply an aggregate state of matter but defines the very constitution of lived space and social milieu, for to live in a society is to take part in constructing an atmosphere. In Coccia’s words, fluidity is “the structure of universal circulation,” and this defines “the place where everything comes into contact with everything else, and comes to mix with it without losing its form and its own substance.”82 In this sense, atmosphere ultimately can be understood as a site of composite, fluid mixing, and this definition, taken transitively, can approach what we have called an ambiance of projection. In developing his notion of a cosmic atmosphere of mélange, Coccia, too, gets close at one point to perceiving the atmospheric pull of connection as a form of projection. In describing the phenomenon of subjects and objects breathing in unison, he speaks of “reciprocal projection: a movement,” defined as the most primal relation between the living being and the milieu.83 This primary projection occurs in particular between the interior and the exterior, as “the living being commissions the world with what it must make of its own body and whereby the world, on the contrary, entrusts the living being with the realization of a movement that should have been external to it.”84 This implies that one must exit one’s self to access other forms of life, to connect with and to be traversed and transformed by them. Such potential movement is indeed what we have called a projection: a process of

sion as a form of immersion. It is a modality of projection that encourages a sense of unity and unification with one’s surroundings. Reciprocal projection becomes immersive when living entities become identified with the world in which they are immersed, for according to Coccia, in immersion “there is no material distinction between us and the rest of the world.”87 Apart from its insistence on identification, this concept of immersion is important for us to consider because immersion is not only a matter of ambiance but also a specific aspect of projection, as a form of receptive dwelling in the surrounding. Seen as a spatial extension of projective movement, immersion can in fact be interpreted as a particular quality of ambiance: a form of inhabitation or dwelling. For Coccia, immersion is related to one’s sense of inhabiting domestic space, for it indicates a sensuous familiarity with place. It can even become a site of domesticity or domestication, in that an immersive state may signal an inability to separate oneself from one’s Umwelt. Immersion is the way in which one projects oneself into a world to which one feels close and proximate, as if it were an extension of one’s own body. In this sense, immersion is an affective, enveloping form of projection: a way of making space intimate by way of one’s projection into it. Beginning with the porous membrane of one’s skin, this envelope extends to the permeable, malleable nature of the surrounding atmosphere, which becomes a space so fluid that it can turn liquid. Such immersive projection into this all-­around space can feel oceanic, like living in seawater. In Coccia’s words, “If being in the world is immersion,” it is “because an immersed being has a relationship with the world” that is not one of standing in front of space as an object but rather living immersed in it, as a “jellyfish with the sea.”88 If conceived transitively as a spatial configuration or environmental process—­that is, as the dynamic condition of being enveloped in a space, bathed in its ambiance, fluidly or even aquatically—­immersion can itself positively liquefy in enfolding conceptual terms. Envelopment is, after all, not only the actual condition

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openness and receptivity in which a corporeal potential is externalized in an ambient movement that feels actively resonant with it. In this kind of openly porous, receptive cosmology that we have pursued, there are echoes of Stimmung and many other forms of empathic and sympathetic projection, which we have explored while insisting that these reverberating movements can be produced, and mediated, by technological forms of projection. Although he does not elaborate on mediality when he mentions projection in passing, Coccia himself suggests that “what we call technique is a movement of this type,” a projective transfer; and this is because, thanks to technical operations, “the soul [esprit] lives outside the living being’s body and makes itself soul [âme] of the world” and “conversely, a natural movement finds its origin and ultimate form in an idea of the living being.”85 Both ambiance and technological space, and their potential intersections in atmospheres of projection, indeed enable sympathetic, receptive forms of breathing through and in between matters of inner and outer life. I am particularly interested in this experience of a mutual, “reciprocal projection” because it can prevail over barriers of division across species, in both human and nonhuman universes, and make possible open forms of understanding and communication. This responsive transfer is a valuable aspect of what I have called a projective transmission in my articulation of the dynamic role of cultural technologies of projection. If the modality of a permeable, reciprocal, receptive form of projection is actively pursued as a “moving” cultural technique, it can encourage the transformative motion of potential transduction. However, this reciprocity produces a different effect in Coccia’s philosophical model, which ultimately rests on similitude and harmony in the exchange. This is because he proposes that the projective process of communication is “only the echo of [the] reciprocal inherence of all things in all other things . . . a perpetual contagion.”86 This kind of atmospheric reverberation—­of a being projected into something that is also in us—­is not so much a transductive transmis-

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of being immersed within the atmospheric milieu but the way in which we palpably experience that milieu as an intermixture of elements. This is the very process through which atmospheres emerge, shape, and develop in receptive and responsive intermediation between the animate and the inanimate, the human and the nonhuman. As we acknowledge that envelopment is elementally atmospheric in this processual sense, we can perceive waves of immersion and experience the very flux of atmospheres as they unfold and enfold. To sense elemental envelopment as such a fluid form of becoming is “critical for thinking about atmospheres,” as the cultural geographer Derek P. McCormack puts it, for it enables us to hold a tension in place, shaking the continuity “between entities and the elemental conditions in which these entities are immersed and in which they participate.”89 An immersive state that is haptically fluid can become a transformative condition if it sheds the pen-

chant for similitude, accord, and steady flow, or fusional oceanic embrace, in favor of letting in the motion of currents and riding the waves of ambient perturbations. In other words, if we were to see immersion less as a static, passive state of encircling identification with space, we could see it more, as Coccia at times suggests, as “an action of mutual compenetration between subject and environment, body and space, life and medium.”90 Pushing this reciprocal action in the more fluid direction of an energic swimming in the waves, or sailing in atmospheric perturbation, we could see immersion playing a larger part in the process of projective transformation that is transduction. In this way, even immersion could become an active process of perturbation and transformative transduction—­a site in which “one cannot exist in a fluid space without modifying, by this very fact, the reality and form of the environment that surrounds us.”91

IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS OF PROJECTION

Reformulated in this more fluid sense, which encompasses active and transformative perturbations, inhabitable spaces of immersion become relevant to the projective relations we are considering with respect to the circulation, translation, and transformation of artistic forms in the ambiance. This mode of atmospheric permeability, fluid and enveloping receptive connection, and hybrid mixing is, in fact, not simply a quality of the natural or material world or a property of the art and technology of projection; rather, it is mediated in their midst. Technical operations of reciprocal projection produce their own ever-­ changing, fluid, even liquid atmospheres in a luminiferous milieu of ambient mixing, which, in particular circumstances, can induce a sense of immersion. Critical awareness of this process can be produced artistically by working in tension with this spatial and ambient attraction, as Amie Siegel does in her work, sensitive to the relation of dwelling to environment.

Consider how her 2016 moving-­image installation The Noon Complex (fig. 3.10) reimagines the famous Casa Malaparte as it is immersed in, or rather projected into, the marine landscape of the island of Capri. Siegel literally “re-­projects” images of this modernist home as it was shot in Jean-­Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, with the exception of digitally removing the body of Brigitte Bardot immersed in it, lying naked on the rooftop terrace that juts into the sea. A live performance projected onto a nearby screen reproduces Bardot’s gestures and postures, reenacting her presence in the space. In this way, the installation enables viewers to feel the fascination with immersion in an ambiance, all the while perturbing the total infusion of body and space as well as questioning the gender perspective. In a way, then, Siegel shows that it is possible to be both for and against ambiance, at the same time. It is therefore advisable not to position ourselves wholly “against ambience,” as art theorist Seth Kim-­Cohen

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suggests, or even against immersion tout court, but rather to be wary of immersive states in art that become simple enclosures, inducing pacifying harmony or accord, a smoothing over of differences.92 To my mind, when basking in a luminous glow or luxuriating in soothing sounds produces opiate effects, encircling self-­affirmation, or encourages idle passivity rather than producing openness, engagement, and perturbation, the active flow of a cognitive and affective act of projection comes to a halt. Atmospheric projections, that is, are not all immersive, or immersive in a passive way; and, most importantly, one must not confuse contemplation with immersion, for they are not the same modality of reception and do not produce the same receptive process. There are, of course, different forms of immersion, and some are certainly all-­encompassing. Immersion

often relies on a sensory envelopment that can be encircling and infusive, producing what Erika Balsom describes as “an oceanic feeling” that sometimes can be even as limitless and unbounded as a quasi-­sublime state.93 Artworks can convey a pronounced immersive feeling that is primarily sensory in this way when they create indissoluble bonds with ambiance, such as aesthetic situations in which luminous or fluid transmission is heightened and perceived to be an inhabitable cosmos in itself. This kind of immersive cosmology transpires in the work of James Turrell, in artistic environments informed by training in perceptual psychology.94 His way of creating rooms of light and darkness and screening by way of light particles resonates strongly with scientific-­minded experimentation with cosmic

3.10  Amie Siegel, The Noon Complex, 2016. Installation view, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany, 2016. Three-­ channel HD video installation, color/sound. Photo: Frank Kleinbach/ Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London.

3.11  Olafur Eliasson, Rainbow Assembly, 2016. Installation view, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, 2016. Spotlights, water, nozzles, wood, hose, pump. © 2016 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Hyunsoo Kim. Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

light. Using light as a medium, Turrell creates volume and activates space phenomenologically. Viewers are not positioned in front of light but immersed in its ambiance, encircled in the atmosphere of projection. They are asked not to look at but rather to look into an exterior space of light that also can open up a boundless inner space of projection. In unison with the vibrations of the ambiance, one can sense the fabric of this light, even the layers that constitute it, as it touches one’s skin. A textural fabrication, Turrell’s atmospheric light is a fabric so absorbent that it fully absorbs the viewer into it, providing shelter, concealment, and a universe of encompassing, at times totalizing, embrace. In this immersive way, the participant comes to fully realize that light is an environment and, as such, has the ability not only to be a space in itself but to let us be encompassed in space, in smooth projective

passages. Here, an outer experience can turn inward as permeably as the inner sensations and affects of the viewer are at the same time exteriorized in the ambiance of projection, in total accord. In a different, less harmonic way, Olafur Eliasson also has created immersive environments of projection, but ones that feature ambient mixture rather that unity. Eliasson has long been interested in the perception and embodied experience of light waves, which he has explored through sculpture, painting, photography, film, and installation as well as through architecture. Installations such as Room for one colour (1997) and Your colour memory (2004) enhance the perceptual aspect of an ambient environment, as does 360° room for all colours (2002), an encircling wall of pulsating color light that evokes nineteenth-­century panoramas. Immersed in the space of Rainbow Assem-

material interventions in space can take immersive forms as they create an interpenetration of subject and ambiance. They do so, however, in an active and fluid dynamic, open to modifications of the surroundings and perturbations. Elemental forms such as light, water, mist, temperature, and pressure are re-­presented in atmospheric installation, which can transductively transform a space. This particularly fluid sense of atmospheric immersion is exemplified in The Weather Project, Eliasson’s celebrated 2003 installation for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.100 This large-­scale work was a recreated atmosphere, a “climate” of mixed material spaces that viewers could inhabit. Visitors became cinematic spectators as they basked in the electric atmosphere of light emitted by a screen, sculpted in the shape of a sun, and irradiated into the ambiance. Immersed in this atmosphere of projection as shades of sunlight turned into projective light, the space took on a form of public intimacy and was transformed. Audience members leisurely gathered around, loitered in the hall, and even lay down on the floor, as if to absorb this solar energy of projection, fluidly diffused and changing in the atmosphere. As viewers thus bathed in shimmering sunlight, a sea of projection took shape. The iridescent immersion literally morphed into a liquid affair. In this climate of projection, a material transduction occurred. A museum, turned cinema, transformed into a beach.

SUN CINEMAS

Solar energy as a metaphor for projection has also attracted Berlin-­based artist Clemens von Wedemeyer. In 2010 he created the ambient installation Sun Cinema (fig. 3.12; see also fig. 2.14) in the city of Mardin, in southeastern Turkey, on the border of Syria overlooking the Mesopotamian plain.101 Sited on a rocky ridge, the installation comprised a large freestanding screen with metallic mirror panels on its back side, an amphitheater facing it, and a triangular base for the

projector, recalling the shape of the beams of light that it emanates. The installation evokes the climate of Chantal Akerman’s A Voice in the Desert (2002), the third part of her installation From the Other Side, in which a huge screen, hovering on the divisive border between the United States and Mexico, offered connective forms of transit in a similar double-­sided projection.102 In creating his own open-­air installation, von Wedemeyer also explored the notion of a hetero-

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bly (2016; fig. 3.11), which reprises the ambient effect of Beauty (1993), the visitor can analytically experience the atmospheric formation of rainbows, as caused by weather conditions. As light is refracted across a vast mist of water droplets and separates into its component wavelengths, revealing its spectrum, it not only creates but modifies ambiance, as does in turn this atmospheric installation. If Eliasson has an interest in atmospheres it is because they “change all the time” and “cannot be in standstill, frozen,” but are rather “active agents.”95 He is particularly keen on creating atmospheres in public spaces as a “coming together of materials,” in a form of mixing that creates “a hovering, a resonance.”96 In his artistic interventions, he pushes awareness of existing atmospheres, making viewers sensitive to their material composition in an attempt to show that “materiality can actually make atmospheres explicit—­it can draw your attention and amplify your sensitivity.”97 For Eliasson, a material has “psycho-­social content.”98 It is, in other words, projective. A particular material “can make the atmosphere apparent by giving it a trajectory, making it almost tangible,” or it can function in a more transductive, “liberating manner, opening up new ways of engaging with the atmosphere.”99 In his practice, nimble materials are used and combined in ways that creatively enhance the hybrid mixture already present in the physical world of atmosphere. Such

3.12  Clemens von Wedemeyer, Sun Cinema, 2010. Installation view, Mardin, Turkey, 2010. © 2010 Clemens von Wedemeyer, VG Bild-­ Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris; and KOW, Berlin.

geneous social climate, choosing the site in order to offer the diverse population, including speakers of Arabic, Kurdish, and Aramaic as well as Turkish, access to an open-­air cinema (an actual “sun cinema”), now run by a local association that hosts a film festival. Siting the piece in this solar atmosphere succesfully created the conditions to promote a hybrid social mixing. Sun Cinema is an openly inclusive installation that especially explores the mix present in ambiance and the connection between cinema and the sun. To emphasize the receptive energy that connects the two, the screen is set at a particular angle in the landscape. In

the morning, the first rays of the rising sun animate the fabric of the screen in such a way that one can enact a shadow play with one’s reflection on the projective surface. The angle also enables another “climatic” effect to take place: light from the setting sun is directly reflected onto the slightly convex, polished steel plates on the reverse side of the screen, which atmospherically shimmer at sunset. Screen space, a projective surface of transition, here morphs as it projects the changes of the atmosphere. Von Wedemeyer arrived at the idea of an open, solar cine-­projection as a sympathetic receptive space

one that acknowledges the history, agency, and agents of atmosphere. The solar views of Sun Cinema do make you feel that, in the trajectory of light, as in cinematic projection, history can be “screened” in the form of moving images. In enhancing the relation of cine-­projection to atmospheric agency, and of medium to ambiance, this open-­air cinema reclaims the legacy of precinema, with its own exhibitionary spaces of light projection, as much as it incorporates the history of the study of light. This projection exposed to the elements also compels one to reflect on the history of architecture’s own relationship to atmospheric spaces. Its solar architecture was in fact built in consultation with the architect Gürden Gür and architecture students, who contributed to the artist’s exploration of cinema’s relation to architectural ambiance as well as to solar energy and Land Art. The result is the creation of an ambient impact, for the architecture of the installation embraces climate, weather, and perturbation. Temperature, heat, dryness, moisture, mist, and other kinds of weathering agents are an integral part of Sun Cinema, which incorporates not only atmospheric changes but also the way in which the course of a day morphs into night. Slices of natural light are “screened” live here, not simply reflected onto the fabric of the metal screen but morphing in an evolving atmospheric display. Furthermore, as waves of visible light intersect with the plane of the screen they are refracted, and therefore slowed, deviated, and bent by the encounter. In this atmospheric installation of projection, one can experience the propagation of light, sensing how the very sources of reflected, refracted, diffracted, projective light move. The experience of Sun Cinema, finally, reminds us how cine-­projection can not only render or reflect but actually produce the synesthetic complexity of atmospheres; and it can make this process tangibly perceivable, in an encounter between us, as humans, and the life of matter. To be engaged in the site of projection requires an openness, a receptiveness to the fluid mix of ambiance. Atmospherically speaking, it can serve as an

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of embracing energy for an ethnically mixed audience after a decade-­long investigation of the impact of the architecture of cinema on viewers. In previous works, some of his viewers had been imprisoned in the cinema space, as in his video Occupation (2001–­2); some moved about freely in a multiplex with no walls; and others confronted a situation in which the outside of the cinema becomes the inside, as in the film From the Opposite Side (2007). Creatively confronting film’s obsolescence in “Notes for the Cinema Complex,” the artist wrote, “Let us sweep up the remains and look for a new cinema,” made of its projective elements. “We will cut the screen in half,” he proclaimed, “roll it up or sew it together.”103 To definitively dissolve the walls of cinema, von Wedemeyer arrived at constructing Sun Cinema as a solar sculpture. Research took him there as he considered how cine-­projection developed “historically from shadow play and the camera obscura,” and “came to establish itself as an autonomous art form based on the absorption and projection of light.”104 He was particularly interested in the space of cinema as itself atmospheric: “closer to the heretical rituals of light than a cloister” and far from the enclosure of Plato’s cave.105 In order to articulate this atmospheric vision of cine-­projection for Sun Cinema, von Wedemeyer also consulted diverse historical materials, ranging from the space of a fifteenth-­century Islamic observatory to Nancy Holt’s desert installation Sun Tunnels (1973–­76). He was moreover inspired by filmmaker Alexander Kluge’s discovery of the nineteenth-­century amateur astronomer Felix Eberty, mentioned earlier, who believed that the speed of sunlight crossing the universe allowed it to carry the entire course of history and, therefore, that history could be preserved in the cosmos as a path of light.106 He also reflected on the art historian Hans Belting’s view that investigations of the sun by Arabic scientists in the Middle Ages were what led to Western perspective in the Renaissance.107 With the aim of overcoming perspectival centralization, then, von Wedemeyer made Sun Cinema and retrospectively opened the doors to a different history of projection,

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opening to being “in tune with” the rhythms of resounding ambient sources. To be a spectator here is to be attuned to the atmosphere of luminiferous irradiations, sensitive to the vibrancy of light waves, the vibrations of sound, the quiver of noise, and the perturbations of climate. In today’s forms of projection, this magnetic resonance of atmosphere, which is a part of its cultural genealogy, can continue to affect us, and perhaps even mesmerize us, if it creatively reworks “the projective

imagination” in concert with environmental awareness. After all, as an ambiance energetically changes, it charges—­and so does an electric act of projection, with an energy that magnetically transfers across a mix of mediums, persons, and things. If we remain open to such imaginative encounters, the art of projection can indeed still convey an alchemy of transformation, a process of material transmutation that induces projective transduction.

Environmentality: The Art of Projection

4.1  Fabio Mauri, "Warum ein Gedanke einen Raum verpestet?/Perché un pensiero intossica una stanza?" (Why Does a Thought Poison a Room?), from the series Schermi (Screens), 1972. Metal, wood, and canvas with Letraset; thirty-six parts, 28 × 16⅞ in. each. Installation view, Fabio Mauri: I was not new, Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2015. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. © Estate of Fabio Mauri. Courtesy of the Estate of Fabio Mauri and Hauser & Wirth.

4

Projective Climates in Art The Screen as Environmental Medium

A We project our culture, our decipherment of things in the world, as if onto a screen. . . . Projection explains to me the birth of meaning, so in this way I see that the projection modifies the meaning of the object. —Fabio Mauri1

s a cultural technique, the process of projection, as we have seen, has traveled across different mediums and ambiances, for it is itself a vehicle of transmission and transformation, both historically and conceptually. While it has long been the main electric and psychic motor of the art of film, projection has, since the 1990s, increasingly exited the “public intimacy” of the movie theater and come to dwell in the architecture of the art gallery and the museum, enacting further transmutation in these sites’ own public spaces of intimacy.2 In this complex and reciprocal transit between the black box and the white cube, a particularly spatial, ambient form of cinematic projection has emerged. As we walk through exhibition sites, we often encounter moving-­image installations that do not focus on the logic of the text but instead expose the materiality of the film medium and the elements of projection, both on their screens and in space. In their embrace of a zero degree of cinematic expression, many of these works, in defying traditional modes of narration, rather choose to “perform” the act of projection, with its own atmospheric capacity to create multiform spaces of light and enact ambient transformation. As screens becomes “sited” in this atmosphere of projection, they reinstate the environmental function that, as shown, defines its history. Joining the “projective imagination” with “atmospheric thinking,” these projective works evoke the luminous and hazy ways in which the art of projection

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exhibited itself at its very origin, when it made use of atmospheric cameras and magnified the atmosphere that the projective apparatus was able to create with its shadows of light. Such reference to these and other aspects of the cultural ambiance of projection is not simply an act of nostalgia, nor merely an empty desire to dust off an old medium for the sake of digital delight; it rather indicates that the environmental character of projection that characterized early forms of screening is being not only reestablished but reinvented today. For some artists, this is a gesture that performs an analysis of the act of screening and the art of projection, thinking closely about, and with, the imaginative history of these processes in specific ambient terms. It is this performative, analytic gesture that I wish to highlight, for it can constitute a forcefully imaginative process of reinvention of the environment itself of projection. It can signal an effort to activate the relational, collective potential of the projective imagination as a real milieu—­even unrealized potentialities that have eluded history’s notice—­in order to imagine a possible place for it, in our times and in our future. It is for this reason, and in light of history, that this second part of the book is devoted to the environment of the contemporary art of projection.

We should emphasize that the cinematic element and the process of screening we will be treating, in this historical sense, is not only a property of film or film history per se. Screen history, which is fundamentally linked to space, cannot be confined to cinema’s history and must be located in multiple places. It is established in conjunction with and through other art forms and mediums, such as painting, photography, and sculpture; it is constructed together with architecture; and it is dispersed across various media as well as multiple environments and material terrains. A screen can appear in the shape of canvas or as volume or space, acting as if these were screens. In other words, surfaces can become screens and perform as screens. Thinking of the practice of “becoming screen” and how it operates to rearrange sites can refashion the history of projection as a multimedial space of transmission and transduction. Let us, then, take a closer look at this material intermediation that transforms the ambiance of precinema into that of postcinema and creates an imaginative mix of old and new media, focusing on the projective screen and surveying its permeable, resonant, ambient “objecthood.” As we watch this object morphing in space and across time, an “atmospheric screening” will come to light.

THE EMERGENCE AND DISSOLUTION OF THE OBJECT SCREEN

Geometrical notions . . . are limits of things. But illuminated space implies the attenuation of these limits.—Emmanuel Levinas3

In the beginning, there was light, a world of particles and electromagnetic vibrations, reverberating in the atmosphere. And from this luminiferous wave of energy the projective screen surface was born, out of a desire to transform space through luminosity and shadow play. I propose that we think of this historical atmospheric transformation of light space as the material zero degree of the process of “becoming screen,” and that we further investigate how this ambient fascination with the art of projection has migrated into contemporary art and architec-

ture.4 To accomplish this, I continue to design here an alternative genealogy for the screen, conceived not simply optically as a window or a mirror, but rather haptically, as a transitional, relational space, and materially, as an environmental medium.5 We have established that the act of screening is a “cultural technique” that more properly shares spatial qualities and ambient functions with a site of passage—­a “dooring”—­than with the pure, strict geometry of a window or a frame.6 In developing this notion that the projective screen is an architecture of

passage, openness, and transformation that, in turn, creates a transitive, relational environment and sites of transduction, it is fruitful to further engage media archaeology.7 By digging deeper into the history of medium understood as a milieu, we can flesh out the architectural elements of the action of screening, pursuing paths that, resisting the long-­standing optical conception of the screen, affirm its “environmentality.” And by incorporating media archaeology not as a quest for origins but as it travels into and dwells in current forms of screening, we can reshape the trajectory of a material history and display important aspects of the environment in which the cultural history of projection operates, at times producing an “atmospheric screening.”

In this regard, a digression into the interesting, evolving etymology of the word screen can contribute to our enlightenment on this alternative, “elemental,” and environmental history of screening space. As we engage media archaeology in search of atmospherics, we note that the notion of the screen, and its luminous atmosphere, greatly preceded the invention of cinema and even the invention of precinematic devices. The word screen, indeed, had long been used in relation to space before it was applied to the art of projection. It took hold during the early Renaissance, after first appearing in the late thirteenth century in Europe. Its etymology can be traced back to an earlier, Medieval Germanic root that was also present in Latin languages, as is evident in the current French expression écran

4.2  Tobias Putrih, Anthology/Courthouse, 2005. Installation view, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, 2005. Monofilament, hooks, rear-­projection screen, clamps; dimensions variable. Photo: Chris Burke. Courtesy of the artist.

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or the Italian schermo. The term originally pointed to a variety of mediums, surfaces, and types of screening, a significant portion of which emerged from configurations of material space and, in particular, from the world of architecture. As the media historian Erkki Huhtamo has shown, it designated in particular “a floor-­standing piece of furniture, consisting of a sheet of lighter, often translucent material (paper, some kind of fabric, etc.) stretched on a wooden frame (or a series of connected, folding frames).”8 By the nineteenth century this fabrication of the screen—­its textural materiality—­unfolded into a new kind of fabric. Its material state was altered, and a new state of matter emerged on the screen. Transferred from architectural space to the realm of precinematic media, the term came to define a new type of translucent membrane: a light-­reflecting fabric for the transmission of luminous images. A material, luminiferous plane of translucency interestingly expanded to encompass a surface of projection. It is significant to note that The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, first published in 1889, defines the screen first architecturally, as “a covered framework, partition, or curtain . . . ; as, a fire-­screen; a folding-­screen; a window-­screen,” but then includes in this form of spatial metamorpho-

sis an observational veiling of space, “a screen upon which images can be cast by a magic lantern.”9 The architectural fabrication of the screen thus became folded into a projective cultural fabric, retaining its function of making space, transforming sites, and filtering ambiance. This architectural history of the screen’s material evolution compels us to think further about environment and the formation of ambiance. The evolution of the term tells us that what we now call screen and understand to be a projective surface originated in the world of objects and in the quotidian materiality of space. The screen was a “thing,” a mobile object of furniture that inhabited domestic interiors. It functioned especially as a cultural technique to negotiate inside and outside, and materially—­even atmospherically—­ to transform space, acting in concert with light. When deployed to divide space in the home, a screen mediated between private and public zones of habitation, creating an ambiance of privacy and intimacy. Such is the spatial function that the screen most powerfully embodied when, at the end of the nineteenth century, it became a feature of the film theater, where spectators could experience the projection of exteriors into interiors in a social atmosphere of public intimacy.

THE SCREEN PROJECTED IN ART FORM

Born as a fabric that served as a translucent filter, the screen lives on in modern and contemporary visual art as such a piece of material culture, with a spatial, ambient function. To enhance our understanding of how the screen can be configured as an environment today, it is also important to look into art history, and to explore how the architecture of the screen has functioned in modern art. In considering a process of “becoming screen” in art, we can observe the objecthood of the screen taking shape in material ways as an environment. After World War II, a number of Italian artists, among others, found in the screen a new kind of art object, one that offered

them in particular the materiality of canvas—­its own surface—­to experiment with as a new artistic environment. Interesting works were conceived that are not screens themselves but act as if they were: becoming forms of screening that have intense spatial, architectural, and atmospheric characteristics. In the hands of the artist Fabio Mauri, for example, the screen retains the character and architectural qualities we described as having emerged from its spatial and ambient genealogy. In the 1950s and 1960s Mauri made his first series of monochromatic Screens, delicate artworks made of translucent materials such as paper and fabric that resemble skins, which are

cinematic dispositif and the surface of the projection screen. Significantly, Mauri did pioneering work with the concept of “solid light cinema,” referenced clearly in the title of his Cinema a luce solida, part of a series he produced in 1968.12 These sculptures in the form of projectors emanated an ambient light from a conical Plexiglas structure lit by neon, and this light in turn filled the ambiance volumetrically, becoming a solid presence between the projective object and a canvas-­ screen facing it. Inspired by the Futurist Lampadine con i raggi solidificati (Bulbs with Solidified Rays) and the “solidified sun rays” described by Fortunato Depero in 1927 in the manifesto-­mural for his Futurismo, titled Architecture of Light, Mauri gave physical form to the beam that connects the projector with the movie screen. The artist even imagined a solid light beam twenty-­five meters in length to be projected in the EUR area of Rome. Such works not only materialize the atmosphere of cinematic light but join its solid form with a particular atmospheric matter: sunlight. Light from the sun indeed emanates and radiates in an ambiance, as is often seen in paintings, which also make one feel the solid presence of radiating light. But Mauri takes a step further in making viewers sense the material presence of sunlight in cinematic form, thus genealogically connecting the electric rays of cine-­ projection to sunrays. Here cinematic ambiance, its technologically produced light, becomes a product of atmospheric agency. Deeply connected to his ambient Screens, “the solid light cinema” work is also related to the specific uses Mauri made of projection: reversing perspectival projection, offering “retrospective” views, projecting onto bodies and objects since the 1970s, and even transforming the museum into a projector. In serial works such as Projections and others that expand the meaning of the term as a cultural technique, he especially evoked the relation of projections of the mind to history and memory, through spatial projections that engage the viewer in ambiance. A particular

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stretched on frames.10 Reminiscent of the screens that decorate windows or act as passageways, such diaphanous works remind us strongly of how the filmic screen originated in architecture as an atmospherically related medium, used for the transpiration of light in an ambiance. Endowed with the textural quality of a curtain, partition, parchment, or filter, Mauri’s objects, conjured as textile panels, reveal the actual fabric of the filmic screen. Often minimally inscribed with the phrase “the end,” these canvas screens even make direct reference to cinema, disclosing its zero degree of expression. They expose the historical configuration of the act of projection and the material condition of its existence in a plastic dimension. For Mauri, the screen is a vehicle for an operation of projection, which he considers the primary way in which one experiences the material world.11 This is because, for this artist, our understanding of things, our culture, is projected into the world as if onto a screen. If the real appears to us experientially in the form of a projection, the screen is the material object that makes the projective process tangible. Mauri not only wrote about this idea but continued his artistic investigation of screening as a cultural operation of traversal and transmission even beyond and after his celebrated Screens series. He made the screen into a threshold, even an actual accoutrement for doorways, with L’ospite armeno (The Armenian Guest, 2001), one of his series of Zerbini (Doormats), which were true screen-­thresholds, walkable and traversable by the viewer. In the 36-­screen work Perché un pensiero intossica una stanza? (1972; fig. 4.1), whose title asks how “a thought poisons a room,” the screen coincides with the physical and mental architecture that houses it. Mauri exhibited the materiality of projection, its architectonics, creating synthesis between the material of screen and that of projection. He even highlighted pictorial matter in works such as Pittura (1986–­96), which consists of a 35mm film projector threaded with a strip of white canvas instead of celluloid film; in such a way, the artist reflected on the very fabric of the

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work of liquid projection is Senza Ideologia: Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky (1975), an installation that consists of the 16mm projection of Eisentein’s film onto a bucket of milk, which turns the projective screen into a milky substance: a liquid screen.13 The fluid objecthood of projection here is able to retain the faded memories of the early avant-­garde and project forward a sense of its historic times. Mauri’s projections, from the late 1980s onward, together with his environmental installations, fuse architecture and cinema in further fluid reversals of interior/exterior projection. This is clearly evoked in Interno/Esterno (1990) or in Piccolo cinema (2007), a “tiny film theater” with a set of chairs that hangs from the ceiling. Exemplary of such works of materially conceptual projection is the installation Cassettiera (Drawers, 2007), consisting of a piece of rusty iron furniture with little drawers, of the kind used by old post offices, onto which the artist projected Ballad of a Soldier, a 1959 Soviet film directed by Grigori Chukhrai. This object of furniture, an archival filing cabinet, was further transformed into a screen for the projection of history, in the process becoming itself a true archival object itself, a palpably “retrospective” trace of memory, the material testimony of the trauma of war. Here, as in his writing, Mauri stressed the capacity of screen objects to be spaces of projection, projective “fields,” in the largest sense. As he wrote, “These are screens. They are seemingly fields of projection; they are also testimonies of history, regimes of the imagination.”14 Projective surfaces fascinated postwar Italian artists, who were sensitive to their cultural impact. A plastic imagination of the act of screening was pursued by a contemporary of Mauri, the painter and collagist Mario Schifano, who recreated screen texture through layers of paint, in white canvases overlaid with a red frame such as Cleopatra’s Dream (1960–­61), which bears formal resemblance to Mauri’s Screens. Long interested in “visual painting,” Giosetta Fioroni realized “paintings of light” between 1970 and 1971 by projecting light onto white enameled canvases along with silhouettes of skylines,

houses, or boats, which became manifested on the planes as projective apparitions.15 Explicitly related to cine-­projection and to filmic exhibition was the work of Mimmo Rotella, who conceived canvases in the form of screens, and often made elaborate décollages by ripping film posters, mixing together different elements of cinematic language, including montage and display.16 His abstract décollage titled Schermo panoramico 2 (1959), in particular, inscribes the words panoramic screen in a textural composition that conveys the luminosity and fabric of light in projection. In Lo schermo (The Screen, 1965), Rotella reproduces the black ambiance of a film theater with an illuminated screen showing The Sea, a 1965 film shot on the island of Capri. Similar to the environment of seascapes and open perceptual fields, the screenlike series titled blanks, made between 1980 and 1982, makes the ambient screen effect even more texturally evident as Rotella covers the poster with a monochromatic piece of paper, whose crumpled texture resembles fabric or a wrinkled veil.17 Experimental works exploring projection have comprised the decades-­long practice of Paolo Gioli, an artist working since the mid-­1960s across painting, photography, lithography, serigraphy, and film.18 Gioli has experimentally investigated the projective surface in “pinhole films” that do not use a camera, resisting the conventional apparatus of filmmaking, in an effort to recall and reinvent historical, stenopeic forms of cameraless photography. He has also experimented with projectionless projection. In addition to the pinhole films, Gioli has manifested the work of projection in painterly and mixed media works such as Cono di luce (Cone of Light, 1972; fig. 4.3). This large-­scale oil on canvas with photographs sits in space at an angle, its form rendering the conical shape that light creates volumetrically when it is projected out of a film projector. The work engages projective geometry by mobilizing the very angle of projection in its spatial configuration, while reconstructing the luminiferous environment of projection. A 1974

painted and photographic work titled Schermo schermo also clearly refers to the act of screening, and is in close dialogue with the artist’s 1978 film of the same title, both of which treat the projective surface as a “screen of a screen.” Finally, the very ambiance of projection becomes materialized in Gioli’s Superficie vasta della sorgente (1970), a polychrome triptych, eighteen feet wide, whose title refers to the “broad surface” of a fluid source of light. The left panel of the work is a rectangular screenlike surface, while the other two trapezoidal panels, collated together at its right side, create a projective, conical flux of rays. The painting creates an interesting ambient effect as the cone of rays on the right appears to be projecting upon the work’s own rectangular surface-­screen. Evoking both the source of

light and a source of fluidity, this work, in its internal dynamic configuration, elementally renders the actual atmosphere of projection. In the early 1960s, Francesco Lo Savio also opened up a luminous space of “contact between aesthetic surface and external space,” a flow “endowed with a chromatic vibration of surface” directed “out into the environmental space.”19 He has been recognized as a minimalist before Minimalism, first associated with the international artist group ZERO, along with its German founders Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, and Günther Uecker, who were represented in an exhibition Lo Savio curated in June 1961.20 In 1960 Lo Savio had opened his own first solo show in Rome with a series of works interestingly titled

4.3  Paolo Gioli, Cono di luce (Cone of Light), 1972. Oil on canvas with black-­ and-­white photographic prints; triptych: left panel 51⅛ × 66⅞ in.; set at 90° to trapezoidal right panels, 51⅛–­70⅛ × 181⅛ in. Collection of Vittorio Milan, Rovigo, Italy. Courtesy of Paolo Vampa.

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Spazio-­Luce (Space-­Light), made in 1959 and 1960. These paintings are atmospheric in the way they configure light as a space and, in turn, treat space as a light form. Conceived as luminiferous ambiances, Lo Savio’s canvases are projective screens in their own right. Evanescent yet material, the works not only are atmospherically conceived but change perceptually with shifts in the surrounding ambiance. Here, the canvas does more than act as a screen; the atmosphere of projection itself materializes on a screen-­ canvas that texturally condenses the absorption of light, the shift between luminosity and opacity. The energy of projection is felt here, conducted through the atmospheric surface of the painterly plane. Such projection is not only physical but virtual. As Lo Savio himself wrote in his book Spazio-­Luce, “The structuring of surface that determines the continual vibration is a mental matter.”21 In other words, as we have argued, projection is an “environmentality”: a space of material transmission and vibration that is also an imaginative process, a projection of the mind. Architectural atmospherics also drive Lo Savio’s series of Filtri (1959–­62). Here, various forms of “superficial” superimposition of materials create a “filtering” of light space—­an actual form of screening that, again, is deeply atmospheric. In Lo Savio’s work, then, the actual configuration of an ambient screen of projection is materialized, and an “atmospheric screening” takes center stage. Through his brief but intense artistic life, the artist continued to experiment with filtering light space, also creating metal sculptures that reflect space in their movement of flexion and torsion. He reached for wide zones of contact in order to lend sensibility to space, understood as a dynamic temporality made of light, and to create a novel artistic process of environmental dimension.22 Trained in architecture and design, Lo Savio even imagined a Maison au soleil (1962), a model for a light-­sensitive space that was a sort of camera display, envisaged as a piece of social industrial design, ultimately function-

ing as a “matrix of living matter.”23 Also interested in science, Lo Savio was especially engaged in thinking about matter energy and hypothesized arriving at “fluid, energetic spaces,” constituted by “energy flows” that would perturb structures.24 What is expressed through the entire range of Lo Savio’s work is thus a particular artistic form of screening: a perturbation of space by way of light. “Arched, jutting, bulging, everted,” or “creased, undulated, and wrinkled,” like “so many skin disorders,” as art historian Riccardo Venturi puts it, the planes of Italian painting had, in fact, “invaded the three-­dimensional space of our daily reality.”25 Evoking the folds and torqued spaces of the Baroque, these surfaces of light space joined a strand of Minimalism with an historic flexion of space. But rather than a disease, these skins of light expressed the haptic dynamic of an atmospheric movement, an actual perturbation. Those flexible, material screenlike surfaces also constituted a perturbation that was “in the air.” The experiments conducted in Italy were localized but are also related to a larger aesthetic movement concerned with “screening” light. The Italian experiments used light particularly as a medium, and in this way also anticipate and intersect with the direction taken in the United States by the Southern Californian Light and Space movement. They especially resonate with the work of artists such as Doug Wheeler and Robert Irwin, whose “atmospheric” ambiances we consider elsewhere in this book, but also relate to work by Mary Corse, Helen Pashgian, and James Turrell.26 It is particularly relevant to bring up the practices of Pashgian and Corse here, because these artists, though less recognized than the male affiliates of the movement, have consistently, for over five decades, created surfaces that invite acts of screening. Trained as an art historian, with a focus on light in the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, Pashgian has been using industrial materials to create intimate sculptural objects that simultaneously filter and contain illumination. She treats industrial epoxies, plastics, and resins innova-

this ambient way, for both Corse and Pashgian, an act of screening is activated in moving form, as it develops in an environment. While these female artists experimented, in their projective sculptures and screen-­paintings, with the physics and ambient motion of light in space, other artists associated with the Light and Space movement, who also took on a spatial installation of light, generated in time larger, and even more public projective environments. This particularly “cinematic” move was notably pursued by Irwin, Wheeler, and Turrell, among others. But their interest in the relation of surfaces to light space as acts of screening was not unique; it was expressed as well, as we have noted, by the ZERO movement, and realized in work by a number of its international members.28 A group of Italian artists associated with ZERO, such as Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, who made a series of white, screenlike works he called Achromes between 1957 and 1963, notably worked in this direction. Not only do the white surfaces (achieved by dipping the canvas into liquid white china clay) and often pleated textures of the Achromes recall screen fabric and its pliant elasticity; they also speak of a particular genealogy of the screen. Specifically, they speak to the possibility of locating the objectival appearance of the screen to the apparition of a particularly textured, veiled object of long ago: the Shroud of Turin.29 As seen through the light, that white piece of fabric, a shroud stained by a body image, is in fact the material manifestation of how images are absorbed and retained, mnemonically sedimented and traced, on the simple white surface of a canvas-­screen. Manzoni’s shrouded Achromes are also in dialogue with more contemporary representations of screenlike surface materiality, including the works of Alberto Burri, such as Grande bianco plastica (Large White Plastic, 1964), and the practice of Fontana.30 Well known for his cuts into the fabric of his canvases, Fontana also worked throughout his life with reflective materials and textures, creating a variety of

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tively, effecting semitranslucent surfaces to emanate and diffuse light in the environment. Activated by light, these sculptures resonate in ambiance, both inner and outer. In this sense, her plastic surfaces are not simply reflective but projective. As one approaches or moves away from them, the ambiance of light changes, as does the shape of the projective object, which can seemingly depart from its solid state to arrive at dissolving into the atmosphere. In her own way, Corse too uses light as a medium in works that function as screens. In her long practice, she has experimented with the way light travels in waves and bends, as well as the way it reflects and refracts. She has made light boxes that use conduction through electromagnetic fields, employed electric light in her practice, and, in the mid-­1960s, developed a series of White Light Paintings that closely explore light as a perceptual apparatus.27 For these paintings, which span the majority of her career, Corse, who trained in physics, mixes paint with reflective glass microspheres, a component she found in industrial road paint. In almost Newtonian fashion, the paintings invite the viewer to experience the reflection and refraction of light deflected through the glass beads, constantly changing in response to ambient light. Conceived in such an atmospheric way, these light canvases can be seen as embodying the actual fabric of a screen, even literally. A filmic screen is in fact itself coated with materials, including silver and aluminum, that respond to light. There are also glass-­beaded screens, and these in particular are materially connected to Corse’s practice, in which paintings with glass microspheres make literal use of industrial screen material. Furthermore, her refracting canvases morph texturally into the surface of a screen not only because of their luminiferous constitution but also in their mobile viewership. The paintings require the viewer to engage with the moving particles of light as they walk across the canvases to observe perceptual changes. This experience of dynamic circumambulation enables one to see how these screen-­paintings can actually “project” light. In

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screenlike surfaces and projective atmospheric sites. Penning a plea for white textures in Manifesto Blanco in 1946, and authoring two versions of the Manifesto of Spatialism in 1947 and 1948, Fontana called for an active spatialism in conjunction with the dynamism of scientific developments. After resettling in Milan from his native Argentina, he started a series of works composed of “holes” in 1949. Titled Spatial Concepts, the first perforated paintings were actually conceived as screens for the transmission of electric light. Between 1949 and 1968 he developed further atmospheres with a series of works titled Ambienti spaziali. Known in English as Spatial Environments, these were not just spatial but “ambient” environments for the way they variously configured and diffused the ambiance of light. Architecturally conceived structures, the Ambienti could be physically accessed by viewers, who were invited to sense the atmospheric shifts that occurred in the space due to the play of natural, fluorescent, floating, and other kinds of illumination.31 In their ambient composition, these lesser-­known, often destroyed, but very important works by Fontana can be seen as anticipating the direction taken not only by Light and Space artists but also by figures working with electrical ambiances such as Dan Flavin, Keith Sonnier, or François Morellet.32 In Fontana’s works, as art critic and historian Carla Lonzi puts it, ambiance is experiential, for “space is presented with the immediacy, the sensuality, and the specificity of the milieu of existence”; that is to say, as a “space of encounter of dynamic energies,” deeply “connected to the experience of transformative events.”33 I would venture to propose that Fontana’s experiential and transformative ambiances are, in a large sense, emblematic spaces of projection. For one thing, his rooms were specifically constructed in atmospheric light; they were architected mostly by projected light, which was used recurrently in several variations of the Ambienti spaziali, in the black, red, or white spaces, corridors, and labyrinths that the artist illuminated. In these sites, the viewer was immersed in and moved

through luminous atmospheres as if they were in a theater of light energy, often accessed via darkness and perceived tactilely.34 Some of the first ambiances, produced in more than one version between 1948 and 1949, were a type of black room, and this provided the matrix out of which the artist developed his environmental play of darkness and light.35 The effect of the ambiances is at times even literally close to that of a “black box”; that is to say, to the space of cine-­ projection: a cinema to be traversed by spectators. As the architect and artist Nanda Vigo, who collaborated with Fontana, said of Ambiente spaziale: “Utopie” (fig. 4.4), conceived for the XIII Milan Triennal in 1964, “Entering into this dark ‘tube,’ you could perceive the luminous void that accompanied the spectator throughout their trajectory.”36 Fontana and Vigo pushed the spatial form of light and darkness and confounded the difference between two-­and three-­ dimensionality, making an actual ambient cinema. Here viewers are actively, even affectively engaged in the ambiance of projection, in forms of sociability and relationality that make for environments of public intimacy. In this sense, these ambiances anticipate the concerns of contemporary artist-­architect Tomás Saraceno, who creates networks of connections in atmospheric ecosystems, and especially the “weather cinema” of Olafur Eliasson.37 As Fontana himself wrote in a letter to the architect Gio Ponti about the first of his pioneering ambiances of projected light, Ambiente spaziale a luce nera, his 1949 “spatial environment of black light”: “the ‘spatial ambiance’ . . . is luminous form in space—­emotional freedom of the spectator.”38 Keen to collaborate with architects, including Carlo Scarpa, with whom he made Ambiente spaziale, a white oval environment, for the 1966 Venice Biennale, Fontana found ways to experiment with ambient spaces of projection even in actual movie theaters. His interest in designing ambient space met the cinema early on. In 1948, in fact, he provided a ceramic frieze for the proscenium of the Cinema Arlecchino in Milan, designed by the architects Roberto Menghi and Mario Righini.

4.4  Lucio Fontana and Nanda Vigo, Ambiente spaziale: “Utopie,” conceived for the XIII Milan Triennial in 1964. Installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2017. Corridor painted in black with curved walls, black linoleum flooring, two rows of holes backlit with green neon tubes. © Fondazione Lucio Fontana/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Photo © Agostino Osio. Courtesy of Archivio Nanda Vigo and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan.

And after designing a light ceiling for a fashion store in 1953–­54, he went on to design Spatial Ceiling for the movie theater of the Breda Pavilion at the Milan Trade Fair.39 But, to my mind, it is also important to highlight the underestimated impact of Nanda Vigo, with whom Fontana collaborated, for she continues to push the idea of a dynamic, temporal, ambient space of projection to be inhabited.40 Crossing freely between art and architecture, Vigo authored a 1963–­64 “Man-

ifesto Cronotopico” of time-­space and experimented with designing minimal, sensory spaces of morphing light to live in. She also made several art installations, such as the 1965 Ambiente cronotopico, conceived as a livable chronotopic ambiance. The life partner of Piero Manzoni, Vigo discusses how he produced the white, screenlike Achromes while she was “working on inhabited spaces, designing spaces with walls of white glass, lit from within by intense sources of light.”41 Vigo made a series of collaborative works with Fontana, includ-

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4.5  Marinella Pirelli, Film Ambiente, 1969/2004. Installation view, Villa Panza, Varese, Italy, 2004. Photo: Sergio Tenderini. Courtesy of Archivio Marinella Pirelli.

ing the 1968 exhibition Fontana + Vigo, for which two structures were built, one for each artist, interacting as they became connected by spectatorial motion.42 Typical of Vigo’s design, these Ambienti labirinto were made of panes of glass mounted on tubular structures; they created temporal “perturbations” of light space that are truly projective, progressively transforming perception in plastic narratives to be spectatorially traversed. In her work, Vigo recognized and amplified the

psychic dimension of projection as she experimented with nonrepresentational ambient forms. As she put it in 1964, speaking of the “intermediary” function of luminosity and atmospherics, “Light without an image can reach the memory directly and generate a psychic and physical well-­being.”43 The input of the Greek-­born Italian artist Laura Grisi, who lived between Rome and New York, is also not to be underestimated.44 Her artistic practice, hovering

of projection that emerged in Italy developed a more overt reference to the atmosphere of filmic projection, becoming linked to the ambient zero degree of cine-­projection even more closely. The luminiferous installation space of Pirelli’s important but understudied work Film Ambiente (1969/2004; fig. 4.5) lays claim to the presence of an actual “filmic ambiance.” Devoid of any film, this ambient installation stages the act of projection itself and does so atmospherically. A large geometric structure stands in the space of the gallery and becomes animated—­“screened”—­by the rhythm of light, which atmospherically changes color and tone. The viewer is invited to access this ambient space of projection, becoming herself a part of its atmosphere. In Film Ambiente, the medium of film is itself understood not only to be a milieu but to form and transform an ambiance. And ambiance is here the space of projection itself, made material in the environment. In this way, the architecture of projection clearly becomes an atmospheric construction, a transformative ambiance. In these kinds of projective environments, dynamism is a form of energy. Not only expressed but transmitted by waves of light, it is experienced in spectatorial perambulations. As light “goes around,” along with spectators, a mutation of space is performed that is a transduction. The energy transmitted in luminiferous, projective ambiances, that is, creates not only a mutation of spatial conditions but also a psychic transformation, reaching into the depth of memory and enhancing affective, relational atmospheres.

C O N T E M P O R A R Y, V I B R A N T O B J E C T S O F P R O J E C T I O N

The act of screening as an architectural, atmospheric configuration continues to be constructed today in creative spatial ways, as the public spaces of the contemporary art gallery are permeated by the energy and materiality of projective light ambiances. Think of how projection as a luminous object is emblematically materialized in Tacita Dean’s Film (2011),

exhibited in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London.45 Here, we are in the presence of a large vertical projection onto three stacked screens that takes on the appearance of a long strip of celluloid, complete with sprocket holes. The construction resembles a radiant architectural façade appearing to emit vibrant luminescent images. Such a projection

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between conceptual art and diagrammatic thought, was deeply concerned with the spatialization of light and with projective forms. Grisi produced her own version of projective neon sculptures, sporting significant atmospheric titles such as Sunset Light (1967) and Spiral Light (1968). In the 1960s, she also made a series of luminiferous, screenlike neon paintings, which turned the canvas into an urban screen. Sections of the paintings were covered with panels of textured plastic that gave a sense of depth and that could slide over, producing a real effect of screening and effectively mobilizing the figures on the canvas. In this way, through an actual act of screening, a cinema of the city came to light as the figures of passersby turned into filmic silhouettes and moving shadows. As if recalling the very origin of the act of projection, as conceived by Dibutades, Grisi realized her own projective cast on a screen-­canvas-­wall, turning it into cinema. Film culture was an important reference for Grisi, and she further pursued cinematic effects, enhancing them in even more ambient ways in a series of environmental works from 1968 that included Un’area di nebbia (A Space of Fog). Here, columnar sculptures resembling skyscrapers and lit by luminiferous neon tubing were immersed in an environment made hazy by artificial fog. At this time, as the artist turned to working with other natural phenomena, such as the motion of wind and the flow of water, she experimented with the way in which the effects of light, including the density of fog, can “screen” a space and alter the atmosphere. Then in 1969, in the hands of another female artist, Marinella Pirelli, the kind of imaginative ambiance

4.6 Apichatpong Weerasethakul with Tsuyoshi Hisakado, Synchronicity, 2018. Installation view, 58th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, 2019. Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC), La Biennale di Venezia.

of moving forms condenses a vital material history at the moment of film’s obsolescence. It references a particular course of visual art history, spanning from the glow of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent-­tube sculptures to the elemental atmospheres of Robert Smithson’s site and non-­site works, while also gesturing toward the historical practices of experimental film history, all the while offering viewers a spatial exploration of the material conditions of cinematic projection. The complex layers of projection are also exposed by the Thai artist-­filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul in his installation Synchronicity (2018; fig. 4.6), produced in collaboration with the Japanese installation and sound artist Tsuyoshi Hisakado.46 A projection on a slanted wall turned screen is placed

within a responsive environment, activated by a complex interplay of light and sound. The slanted screen has a round hole through which one can sense the atmospheric transformations activated in the cavernous space on the other side by way of luminous and sonorous changes, creating a mood that oscillates between the dreamy and the melancholic. The slanted screen acts genealogically to create a permeable partition, and even to produce an atmospheric modification of the space. On this screen, several layers of projection take place. A video shows a woman restlessly lying in bed in a forest, part of a stratified, projective mise-­en-­scène. With digital effects, including lighting, the screen at times appears to scroll up and down to unfold its own layers, revealing a projection composed of painted the-

materially in history, incorporating in particular the history of abstract film.49 Here, each screen is built as a sculptural presence, a volumetric object that occupies space and becomes an actual piece of architecture. Spatially configured, the screens create ambiance, and take on even more haptic qualities from the array of projective surfaces, both reflective and translucent, of which each is composed (mirror, cloth, or aluminum). As light is refracted on McElheny’s dynamic screen surfaces, the viewer is given a tangible sense of how a material can transform a space, whether in art, architecture, or film. Fractured and recomposed with the projected abstract forms of classic experimental films, these mobilized screen fabrics create a sensory space that also reflects and incorporates the bodies of spectators, who cast their own shadows and reflections in phantasmagoric fashion onto the luminous ambient surfaces. Conceived as such a plastic, textured object of ambient projection, the screen fully enters the realm of what the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls the “surface of design.”50 In this projective disegno of screening space atmospherically, there is also the legacy of Hans Haacke’s construction of a moving, screenlike surface in Wide White Flow (1967), in which a large sheet of white silk fabric was activated by air blown by electric fans, as if energetically breathing. Part of a series of artworks that explored natural, environmental processes of transformation, such as wind, electricity, and condensation, the kinetic flow that Haacke constructed here makes for an ambient space of screening, and strongly relates to other works that explore transformations exerted on matter. This relation of screen fabric to natural, ambient phenomena is also probed by the experimental filmmaker and artist Michael Snow in his 2002 video Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids). Here, a curtain that screens light from a window incessantly blows in the wind, participating in the phenomenon of an atmospheric “solar breath,” and connecting interior and exterior space in an environment of projection.

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atrical backdrops that, along with a transparent screen, constantly modify the scene as well as the screen space and the overall atmosphere. We watch a number of atmospheric scenes of natural settings, such as garden life or a flowing river, and as the layers of projection change, we can witness elemental conditions changing as well, as if we were sensing an entire pre-­Socratic, elemental ambiance—­earth, air, water, and fire—­with theatrical effects. In Synchronicity, viewers can experience the specific genealogic history of the act of screening, in its very becoming an environment. An entire chapter of media archaeology unfolds in this layered projection with its screens that are partitions, transparencies, and even theatrical backdrops, which create an atmosphere and modify the ambiance. Folded together in this genealogic environmental history is also the psychic layer of the “atmospheric screening.” Because the scenes on the screen-­partition and in the cavernous space behind transpire as we watch a woman sleeping, a nocturnal atmosphere permeates the layered projection, appearing to unfold as if it were a dream state. Let us recall that, for Freud, a dream is, “among other things, a projection: an externalization of an internal process.”47 Here, when the projector shutter flips on and off at intervals, the scene shifts as a dream sequence would do, transmuting from one moody set of imagery to the next. In this enfolding atmospherics that condenses the history of screening, we have the materialization of what André Green calls a “projective screen.”48 After all, projection psychically begins when an object, here a wall-­partition, provides a receptive surface, as it does for Dibutades at the origin of this action. In Synchronicity, then, a material surface becomes activated even in a psychic sense through projection, revealing in the folds of its cultural fabric the entire atmosphere of a media archaeology. Josiah McElheny’s Three Screens for Looking at Abstraction (2012) also employs plastic and spatial forms as it engages with the question of what a screen of projection consists of, physically, and how it emerged

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The Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih also has offered architectural and ambient interpretations of screen fabric and projection, in a continuation of these experimental histories (see fig. 4.13). Interested in visionary concepts of architecture and design, Putrih creates architectural and environmental modifications of various public spaces, including movie theaters, constructing temporary environments out of such quotidian materials as paper, cardboard, plywood, monofilament, and light. In a 2005 project, Anthology/ Maya Deren and Anthology/Courthouse, Putrih recreated projection screens that were sized to match those of the legendary Anthology Film Archives, located in New York in the former site of the Second Avenue Courthouse (see fig. 4.2). But he not only meticulously replicated the size of the projection screens of its two cinema spaces (the smaller Maya Deren and larger Courthouse theaters); he reshaped them, installing them sculpturally in an all-­white gallery, twisting their white fabric and hanging them from hooks and wires. In twisting modernist paradigms—­so fond of the white wall surface—­in this way, a translucent white ambiance was fashioned, in which, as the artist puts it, “the screen materializes and defines its own space” of existence.51 During the gallery exhibition, no films were projected on the screen fabrics, for they were meant to display their own conceptual ambient texture. In this sense, his gesture of creating a surface environment of projection reminds us of Vilém Flusser’s claim that “technical images are envisioned surfaces.”52 For Putrih, as for the other artists envisioning the objecthood of the screen in a gallery space, its surface contains layers of history of architectonics and environmentality. Positioned in tensile sculptural form in the gallery, Putrih’s own envisioned screen surface, a translucent textural object, filters and veils the ambiance of the space it defines. Such a reenvisioned technical surface not only remakes the projective space of a cinema but also reinforces the architectural genealogy of the screen, a material object born as a space of translucency that modifies an environment.

This kind of transformative “envisioned surface” thus creates an ambiance as well as a material, historically resonant atmosphere of projection. Another work that clearly recalls the historic function of the screen as an architectural, atmospheric object, filtering light in space, is Ann Hamilton’s bounden (1997–­98; see fig. 1.5). In this delicate installation, first presented at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, France, large screens made of an organza fabric were stretched on wood embroidery frames. These screens were positioned in front of windows, themselves covered in text-­embroidered silk organza, and were slanted downward toward the floor, resting on chairs. As the changing daylight filtered through the screened space, it created projections on the opposing wall, where tears of water appeared through tiny pores in its surface as the emotional atmosphere constantly morphed. In this way, without employing any technological act of projection, Hamilton created a moody, atmospheric projection space. With respect to an “envisioned surface” of ambient screening, consider as well the installations of the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles.53 Textural formations of light are the protagonists of Para Pedro (1984–­93), a projection environment bordered by two angled fabric partitions at whose narrow meeting point five stacked video monitors display morphing textures projected through their ink-­painted surfaces. Meireles’s Amerikkka (1991/2013; see fig. 3.7) creates an environmental transformation from the ambient interaction of dual “screen” surfaces made from materials as different as eggs and bullets. Standing between the two sculptural planes, the viewer feels the ambiance shift in tone. The psychic atmosphere of projection here meets social and political history: it ranges from soft to hard, fragile to damaging, embracing to rejecting, as one confronts the delicacy of the lower screen, made of painted wood eggs, and the projectile violence of the other, suspended above, crafted with bullets. Meireles, interested in surface design and concerned with the history of social space, also

4.7  Cildo Meireles, Através, 1983–­89. Installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2014. Fishing nets, voile, reinforced glass, livestock nets, architecture paper, Venetian blinds, garden fences, wooden gates, prison bars, wooden lattices, iron fences, mosquito nets, metal barrier, aquarium, tennis nets, metal poles, barbed wire, poultry netting, museum barriers, rope, cellophane, glass; 52½ × 52½ × 23 ft. Photo © Agostino Oslo. Courtesy of the artist; Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo; and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan.

explores media archaeology and the early history of the “work” of projection. For Abajur (1997/2010), he created a large protofilmic screen in the form of a “lampshade.” Resembling an enormous Chinese lantern, this is a circular light box whose movement and light are produced by the human labor that powers the work. The large installation Através (1983–­89; fig. 4.7) also stages the screen as an object of material design and configures it as a place of

both partition and transit, albeit without the work of projection. This large installation utilizes several forms of “screens,” ranging from glass to fences, and employs wire, nets, lattices, cellophane, and architectural paper as veils or sheets that hang like curtains or scrims. With these different screen fabrics, which are illuminated in the space, Meireles creates an architecture of passage and an ambiance of “traversal,” as the title emphasizes, reminding us again of

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the genealogic, architectural function of the screen as an object of material space and creator of social environments. For the Chilean-­born artist Alfredo Jaar, trained in architecture as well as film, forms of projection also can be imaginatively fabricated with an eye to social histories through the use of architectural objects. His installation Lament of the Images (2002) constructs an atmospheric projection that resonates across multiple histories. The installation features two large light tables, normally used in photo labs for examining negatives, positioned one above the other. The upper table, mounted upside-­down and suspended from the ceiling, moves slowly down and then up again in an infinite cycle, in this way changing the illumination and ambiance of the space. When this light table is raised to its full height, the projective light illuminates the space fully, and then, as it is lowered, the gallery becomes slowly darkened until only a thin line of light remains in the gap between the two surfaces. Various atmospheres are created by this double object-­screen, making us aware of the subtle movements of an ambiance of projection. As objects of design such as tables function as back-­lit, screenlike objects of projection, they simultaneously reference obsolescent photographic processes in their morphing of light space. An atmospheric mode of projection is also created by Jaar in his installation What Need Is There to Weep over Parts of Life? The Whole of It Calls for Tears (2018). Here, the artist inscribes these words from the Stoic philosopher Seneca’s De Consolatione ad Marciam in red neon letters, shaped like tears, onto a partition-­ screen. The only light in the installation space is emitted by these neon inscriptions, which diffusely irradiate the ambiance. Using only this form of ambient projection, in the absence of any image representation, Jaar produces a melancholic atmosphere, redolent of political implications. The ambiance transmits the loss of “red” culture, of the revolutionary spirit, and especially mourns the disappearance of the Italian Left. In

this installation, as in Lament of the Images, the omission of figuration in favor of ambiance is particularly significant. It is not meant to underplay the importance of figurative patterns or representation but rather aims to highlight their construction and ideological configuration. The lack of images makes us aware of the form of representation, of the very operation of representing, of the kinds of projection that exist in a society, including what is lost, declared obsolescent, or considered missing from the social sphere.54 Such a deliberately nonrepresentational, strongly projective, ambient mode thus makes a political as well as an aesthetic statement by way of creating a pure atmosphere of projection. In the era of image overload, when the figurative may no longer speak, shock, or move with the same force, Jaar finds it ever more important to speak of it in its absence. He illuminates what is not seen—­that is, the invisible screen and the apparatus of projection itself, its atmosphere—­to create awareness of how visual culture and communication work in contemporary society. An intervention such as that made by Arnold Holzknecht and Michele Bernardi on a building in Bolzano, Italy, also uses the atmosphere of projective light in minimal, effective ways to create critical awareness. The monumental building was erected in the Fascist era by the architect Marcello Piacentini, with a monumental frieze on its side that bears Mussolini’s motto, “Believe, Obey, Fight.” To defuse this historical vestige of an authoritarian past, the artists projected onto the frieze the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in LED lights and in multiple languages: “No one has the right to obey.” This luminous inscription does not simply destroy the monumental architecture, canceling out the troubling memory inscribed in it, but creates a projective layer of awareness of its place and function in history, while also subtly proposing an alternative that critically questions it. The artist Krzysztof Wodiczko also uses the dispositif of projection and extensively exposes its architecture in public projects that create political awareness

the window-­screen and hold up hands, pictures, and objects as if wishing to push them through a layer of tissue. The surface tension that occurs through this elastic, flexible, and pliant atmosphere of projection reveals social tension. On this site of screen partition, the migrants can negotiate status and story, for this membrane-­like surface acts simultaneously as a protective layer and a wall. There is substance, which is also a form of resistance, in this material of projection. As if to rebel against their status as shadows, the migrants push up against the partition as they would against a real border. But let us not forget that the virtual architecture constructed by Wodiczko is also a window, with no enclosed frame; that is, it is the kind of architecture in which positions between inside and outside can be mediated, and openness can be located. In its capacity as an aperture, the resilient screen surface does not merely divide but also enables a projective passage—­the channeling of empathy—­ which finally becomes a potential crossing of borders. Possibilities of openings and a hope of exchange can thus be sited on this composite, tensile, permeable site of projection that acts as a membrane of empathy and relationality.

P O S T D I G I TA L I T Y M E E TS G E N E A LO GY

The act of projection is a powerful force of transmission and passage that can continue not only to design but also change our environment, both physically and imaginatively, in the contemporary art gallery. Creative uses of digital means and postmediatic practices can enhance the ability to shed light on the projective mechanism and reaffirm its potential aesthetic and social agency.56 When contemporary artists who explore the art of projection in this way insist on its architectural, environmental, and ambient genealogy, or even reinvent some of precinema’s projective modes of “atmospheric screening,” it can signal something other than a gaze backward at obsolescence. If not

simply celebrating dead mediums but rather performing analytic “operations” of projection, the modalities of transmission and connection, and possibly transformation of environments, that are part of projective history can be reactivated. As demonstrated especially by Meireles, Jaar, and Wodiczko, when artworks incorporate layers of history in a creative reinvention of spatial paradigms, the transformative potentials inherent in the act of projection can be invigorated, projecting future possibilities of material relation. As for the material aspect of the atmosphere of projection and the object quality of the screen, these architectonic elements continue to compel

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and social experiences of memory, history, and subjectivity.55 The installations Guests (2009) and If You See Something . . . (2005), for example, digitally configure windows that are projections—­“screens” on which one can catch glimpses of the lives of immigrants, the unwanted “guests” of the country we are in. A form of mediation, the projective screen acts for Wodiczko as a partition: that is, it functions as a visible screen. Approaching the white, dense, textured materiality of a screen that is closer to a veil or curtain than to a pane of glass, the very conceptual tissue of projection is materialized. Wodiczko’s imaginary windowed architectures that are walls but function as screens make for an elaborate form of mediation as their surfaces provide access to, and create empathy with, the personal narratives of society’s invisible citizens. This is because the texture of these screens is like a permeable, thin sheet that appears to move like a membrane being stretched. Feeling this possibility of projective passage, some visitors to the installation approach the site of the projections as if wishing the space could in fact extend or stretch like such a membrane. In turn, the migrants act as if the partition could bend or warp to create a passage, as if it could be visually traversed, like a veil. They push their bodies up to the surface of

4.8  Matt Saunders, Two Worlds, 2016. Installation view, Blum & Poe, Tokyo, 2016. Two HD animated films on two screens (color and black and white, silent, 12 min. 24 sec., looped, and 8 min. 16 sec., looped). © Matt Saunders. Photo: Keizo Kioku. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/ New York/Tokyo.

digital methods that do not simply revamp old media. The expansive, resonant capacity of screen architecture is exposed, for example, by the artist Matt Saunders in Two Worlds (2016; fig. 4.8), where loops of HD animated films are projected onto screens that sculpturally occupy space.57 The screen is here constructed as a framed surface standing in front of a window, as if to underscore its architectural, atmospheric function, its history and genealogy, and its capacity to create ambient “shadow plays.” As the projection spills over the screen’s frame, and out of its boundary, it forms sections of animated projections on the walls and the floor. This spilling action clearly defies the geometry of projection while affirming its architecture, enhancing the

sculptural objecthood of the screen, atmospherically diffracted in ambient space. For Penelope Umbrico, too, the resonant objecthood of the screen is an important factor, and this takes both physical and virtual form. For Out of Order: Bad Display (2016; see fig. 2.11), she assembled deconstructed LCD screens along with repurposed Plexiglas and metal frames of various dimensions and propped them against the wall of the gallery to make a sculptural installation of their translucent, ambient forms.58 For her Sun/Screen/Scan (2018), screens from disassembled computer monitors, laptops, tablets, and smartphones were each placed on a scanner with its lid open to sunlight and scanned by Umbrico, or rather “screened.” The light that

co, a way to challenge the constricting equation of screening to scanning in terms of scrutiny or surveying, and to open up different potentialities for digital processes of filtering. In another form of ambient screening, closer to a veiling, the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen also probes the architectonics of projection as he develops environmental multimedia installations, often exploring layers of history. For Pythagoras (2013) he constructed an atmospheric installation of screening processes. Taking a cue from the way the eponymous ancient Greek philosopher imparted his teaching, from behind a veil, Ho created “envisioned surfaces” of projection.60 Pythagoras takes a video of moving curtains and projects it onto a screen that is itself composed of layers of mechanized curtains. Behind the screen, the apparatus of projection is hidden. It becomes slowly revealed as a sound and light installation over the course of the performative movement of the curtain-­screens that dance and part in space, veiling the atmosphere of projection and recalling its genealogy in the filtering and obfuscation of light. Also reimagining the atmospheric genealogy of projection, the artist Sarah Sze began a series of evocative ambient installations in 2015 that employ light, movement, and fractured images. Appropriately called Timekeeper, these works sway and loop around time.61 In a 2018 incarnation, titled Flash Point (Timekeeper), Sze created a postdigital space of screening that feels utterly precinematic. The oval chamber of a Roman art gallery was transformed into a space of ambient projection that strongly referenced the atmospheric projection of magic lanterns of centuries past, their representational apparitions and immersive projective environment.62 As a device of projection, the magic lantern produced an image cast by way of light, and this could be done using multiple images moved back and forth or even rotated.63 The effect was that the image appeared conjured or manifested, sensed as an apparition of something vitally coming to life in the ambiance of projection. Sze’s contemporary reinven-

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filters through the screens makes an impression on them, which, in turn, reveals the translucency of the screen object. In this process, the imprints of fingers from the screens’ users and dust particles deposited on their surface emerge, becoming visible on the luminous plane of the resulting image. The scanning, that is, makes a real screening process of the screens. In this way, the history of the screen’s usage and its past forms becomes luminously palpable. This sense of historicity is enhanced by the application to the scanned image of a preset cyanotype filter, chosen in Adobe Photoshop, which effectively renders the screen as a “blueprint.” The final effect of the printed work is of a framed form of filtered bluish light, experientially marked by indexes of hand touch and time travel. Printed in many dimensions, and propped on a wall of infinite screening, these bluish screens populate the room, carrying with them all their historical resonance and experiential reference. They particularly recall the kind of early cyanotypes or blueprints made by the Victorian-­era artist and botanist Anna Atkins, who created images of the environment from light.59 Ultimately, then, Umbrico’s work highlights the genealogical process that generates screen architecture as an ambient, experiential filtering of luminosity. And it reveals that such a filtering historically produced the photographic process out of which projection arose, for it was light “projected” onto a surface that created the blueprint of an object. In this way, the appropriately titled Sun/Screen/Scan, while treating digital screens, makes evident the fact that a filtering always underlies an act of screening. Hence, rather than simply considering the digital screen a mere transit display of information, Umbrico questions its material, environmental constitution, and its function as filter. If the architectural genealogy of the screen is rooted in that process of filtered sunlight produced by a window-­screen, today different forms of filtering are reproduced in forms of digital scanning. Experimenting with them is, for Umbri-

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tion of the atmosphere of magic-­lantern projection evokes this sensory scenario of a luminiferous thing materializing, in multiple ambient projection. As with Susan Hiller’s earlier experiment of precinematic reinvention in her 1987 installation Magic Lantern, Sze’s Flash Point (Timekeeper) produces an experiential response to the atmosphere of moving light forms.64 At the center of the space, Sze places an elaborate dispositif of her own invention, a rotating projective apparatus that casts luminous images. It is made up of several projectors, stacked, their beams radiating in different directions and calibrated to allow the light to pulse and wave around the space. This projective machine spins through a full 360 degrees and, in the rotation, casts different ambient modulations of colored light upon the oval surfaces of the space. Light beams also reach a myriad of little framed, screenlike surfaces, vibrant objects that populate the room and further enhance the creation of a mercurial milieu of projection. Moving pictures of people, animals, and scenes as well as abstractions unfold at irregular intervals and different speeds. The imagery appears to be produced by the projective objects themselves, as if they were their own memories, flickering and orbiting around the room. This atmosphere of projection communicates both an architectural and a scientific dimension in this imaginative, vital display that rematerializes a precinematic ambient apparition.65 Hovering in a historic space that travels between manifestations of the magic lantern and phantasmagoric ghosts, Flash Point (Timekeeper) uses the potential of digital means to question the materiality of projection and its atmospheric history in our virtual age. It ultimately articulates a composite historical space of projective communication that feels retrospectively futuristic in its biotechnical, cosmological, even posthuman display. The atmosphere of projection can indeed be sensorially stimulating, vital, vibrant, and even electrical in various forms of magnetic resonance. For French artist Philippe Parreno, a digital LED screen has both a

sculptural dimension and a morphing surface that is at once electric and capable of electrifying the surrounding atmosphere—­as envisaged with flashing, animated drawings of fireflies in his installation With a Rhythmic Instinction to Be Able to Travel beyond Existing Forces of Life (2014). This electric quality of projection is also used by Parreno to animate, screen, and transform building façades by projecting imaginary marquees on them. Produced between 2006 and 2015, his Marquee series of public projects, made of translucent materials such as Plexiglas, polycarbonate, acrylic glass, and various kinds of lights, also includes an installation that plays with the form of a classic film theater marquee, (dis)placed in 2014 on the Okayama Castle in Japan. Taken from the building and exhibited in gallery or museum spaces, the illuminated Marquees look even more like set designs, or screens, in their architectural quality of luminiferous, sound-­producing objects—­ light sculptures casting shadows in ambiance (see fig. 4.12).66 The capacity of the digital screen to open different “windows” of projection produces a vibrant reconsideration of the architecture of screening. This is the case for the recent work of Christian Marclay, who famously produced a history lesson with The Clock (2010), compiling clips from the history of world cinema that mark the passing of time in a twenty-­four-­ hour cycle, synchronized with the local time of the exhibition space. Continuing his experimentation, Marclay has “reframed” the history of screening with 48 War Movies (2019), an electric performative piece that shows entire films digitally layered, one on top of the other, in concentric frames, only with their outer edges showing. The political effect is a reframing of projection in light of a refashioned military history. In shifting perspectives, formally, the multiple edges of the screen not only create frames within frames but also enhance an effect of perspectival depth, as if one could actually access the dimensional space of projection in order to question it. This act of reframing recalls that of French artist

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Camille Henrot, who also probed the capacity of the digital to explode the frame and create new screens of projection with her Grosse Fatigue (2013; fig. 4.9), a fast-­paced moving-­image archive.67 Pushing the capacity of a desktop computer to display multiple windows, Henrot mined the Smithsonian Institution to reimagine the way in which digital projection can create an archive rather than a database. Images, objects, and sound are here assembled in an electric, erratic, entropic montage of windows, multiplying and overlaying in ways that question the history of framing as well as that of cataloguing. In this vibrant “windowed” way, Henrot makes us think about what and how things become “screened.” The electrical instruments of projection together with the object of the screen can also serve as a

sensorial, mobile vehicle of transport, as in Trisha Baga’s video installation Flatlands 3D (2010), where the screen is variously configured in the shape of an airplane or car window. Such a screen filters many planes of information. In this projection, viewers are asked to navigate a 3D space through a layered screen surface, where a woman’s interior, psychic space coalesces with a landscape of simulation. Rain further veils this multilayered atmospheric window-­ screen, and a sign finally asks the viewer to “please clean the filter.” Here we can sense how the screen, as it becomes relocated as an ever-­present element in our digital culture, functions increasingly as a filter. As an object of daily life, the screen has become a renewed cultural technique: a major site for the mediation of planes, including the private and the

4.9  Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, 2013. Installation view, Reading “The World in Which We Live,” Signal—­Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden, 2013. Video, color, sound, 13 min. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

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public, the individual and the collective. This is the tangible surface where our mediated experience of relationality takes place. As such a relational site, it constitutes the architecture of a sensory, social, and aesthetic transformation. This sense of transformation of our current mediatic environment is present in River, a performance of “expanded” film projection enacted by Nora Schultz at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017.68 Over large windows featuring a vista of the Hudson River, we see an elemental film of a river streaming from glaciers melting in the Swiss Alps, next to a projection produced from a GoPro action camera that Schultz operates live. Multiple flows of projection occur in this filmic performance, and as Schultz moves the digital projector, placed on wheels, around the room, the act of screening becomes a fluid, processual action of screening. As the elemental projections of flowing rivers circle around the walls and the entire three-­dimensional space, we can sense a “environment” of projection taking place not only in site but in motion. This ambient, experiential capacity of projection, augmented by new media, to connect and transform our perception of different spaces, including interior and exterior, as well as to move between art forms,

was recognized at the very inception of the film medium in a futuristic piece of writing that resonates with our times. In 1915 the poet and critic Vachel Lindsay articulated the zero degree of passage that is the filmic screen when he described its transitional, material surface as “sculpture-­in-­motion,” “painting-­in-­motion,” “architecture-­in-­motion,” and even “furniture-­in-­motion.”69 Lindsay touched on the materiality that the screen has now fully come to embody as both an object of design and a space of projection. How can we fail to think of these brilliant definitions when we consider the form of today’s screens, as displayed in the ambiance of our homes and in the environment of art galleries? We are indeed surrounded by screens that are pieces of “sculpture-­in-­motion”—­haptic objects of transport with a material configuration and a plastic quality that shapes our lives. The portable digital screen is an “architecture-­in-­motion” that moves around with us, and it functions as an actual element of our dwellings, a piece of “furniture-­in-­motion” in our homes. And finally, moving-­image installations offer us the sensory pleasures of painterly brushstrokes of atmospheric luminosity and an ambient, filtered texturality, materialized as surfaces of projective design within gallery and museum spaces.

T H E A R C H I T E C T U R E O F P R OJ E C T I O N : T H E AT M O S P H E R I C T H E AT R I C S OF SCREENING

The phenomena of projection that we experience in the contemporary art gallery and in media culture thus resonate with media archaeology, and they cannot be grasped fully without exploring the architectural history of projection and how the screen came to be articulated as a tensile environment, ambient architecture and luminous design surface in space and in art. To further investigate the modern aspect of the screen’s resonant objecthood, how it is placed in the space of projection and activated atmospherically, let us then reconsider moments in the pivotal de-

cade of the 1920s, when the architecture of screening developed as a surface for design in ambient ways. The 1920s saw the rise of movie palaces: large, lavishly designed and richly ornamented public spaces of projection.70 Here, as in the contemporary art gallery, the screen is part of a larger space—­an element of an “installation”—­and participates in the creation of the atmosphere of the site. This spatialization of the art of projection took an even more defined environmental turn at this time, with the design of the “atmospheric theater.” Modern-­era movie palaces generally un-

derscored the spectator’s absorption in the surface environment of projection, creating surface space with simple ornamental lines, curves, and geometries.71 But John Eberson, the master architect of atmospheric theaters, went further in creating ambiance. He designed film spaces that embodied the nineteenth-­century notion of Stimmung—­that is, affective atmospheres that instill a sentiment, state of mind, mood, or tonality.72 In these theaters, built as if they were sets, spectators would experience inside and outside as fluid borders, for the surrounding interior décor was often an architectural reproduction of an exterior, and the atmospheric textures of light and darkness were a featured part of the film show. In describing the Capitol Theater he built in Chicago in 1925, Eberson emphasized the importance of artfully using “paint, brush, and electric light, tree ornament, furnishing, lights and shadows” in atmospheric theater design.73 The Loew’s Paradise Theatre he built in the Bronx in 1929 (fig. 4.11) evoked Italian garden architecture and featured celestial ceiling lights that reenacted the full spectrum of the atmospheric passage from day to night. This radiant

atmosphere resonated with the luminous surface of the screen, conceived as one tiny element of the grand surface design of the immense, ornate theater environment.74 These atmospheric theaters were stimulating immersive spaces that could surround and engage spectators sensorially, in ways that prefigured the digital immersion and sense of environmental geography experienced with current technologies such as 3-­D, IMAX, and virtual reality. A different kind of perceptual atmosphere was embodied in the Film Guild Cinema, designed in a Neoplastic modernist style by Frederick Kiesler.75 For this cinema, built in New York in 1929, the vanguard architect conceived of a spectator ideally “projected” from the darkness of the theater into the light of a central screen, which resembled the diaphragm of a camera. With its lack of architectural decoration, ornament here was minimally created with atmospherics, by the medium of light and the texture of sound waves, which together shaped the ambiance. Kiesler expressed this view clearly in his exquisitely projective architectural drawing Light and Image Projection Pre-

4.10  Electric Palace cinema, Harwich, England, 1911. Harold Ridley Hooper, architect.

4.11  Interior of an atmospheric movie palace: Loew’s Paradise Theatre, Bronx, New York, 1929. John Eberson, architect.

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sentation for the Film Guild Cinema (1929; see fig. 1.9), which shows that, in the architect’s vision, the energy of light projected onto the screen would be reflected back into the ambiance and reverberate in the theater’s atmosphere.76 In the darkness of the theater, light waves appear in projection as if emanating from the reflective white screen, and form an undulating, conical shape that reveals the color spectrum of the light, while bathing the ambiance with resounding energy. Mechanical panels enabled this luminiferous screen to expand or contract, and the walls angled toward this flexible, kinetic screen, which Kiesler named a “screen-­ o-­scope.” His elastic screen design also called for an unrealized “project-­o-­scope” that would have extended the projection from the center screen onto the two side walls and ceiling to create multiple, continuous projections and a total, enveloping film environment.77 The way Kiesler conceptualized projecting light onto these wall-­screens gave architectural form to the notion of cine-­projection as atmospheric surface space. In envisioning such a surface cinema, the architect stated that “the film is a play on surface, the theatre a play in space. . . . The ideal cinema is the house of silence. . . . The spectator must be able to lose himself in an imaginary, endless space.”78 This perceptually absorbing model of envelopment in the projective space has been reincarnated in more recent times in the radical architecture of the cinematheque. In some respects, it informed Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka’s design for the Invisible Cinema in New York City.79 Operating from 1970 to 1974, this theater was a modernist architectural expression of the Anthology Film Archives’ mission to create a museum of film art, a temple especially devoted to avant-­garde cinema.80 The Invisible Cinema seated fewer than one hundred people but was visited by more than fourteen thousand spectators in its first year. In this “interior wholly sheathed in light-­absorbing fabric,” art and film theorist Annette Michelson found “the architecture of the Velvet Light Trap.”81 To ensure complete perceptual fusion in the environment of the cinema—­a total

black box—­the velvet spectators’ seats were outfitted with shell-­like partitions that rose on each side and extended above. A screen in its own right, this divider encapsulated the spectator both atmospherically and aurally, with blinders that prevented peripheral vision or distraction from the side. The surroundings were “screened,” and one was shielded as well as protected and sheltered. The spectator was thus clearly directed to face a “radiating” screen surface, as Kubelka put it, for “the screen and the film were the only visual points of reference” for the audience.82 Silence and proper behavior were enforced in this “machine for viewing,” though the designer emphasized a possible haptic connection among spectators.83 “Only your eyes were shaded from your neighbor, approximately from the shoulders on,” Kubelka explained, “but you could touch your neighbors, and since this was not a complete partition, you always felt that there was someone on your side.”84 In this way, he insisted, “a sympathetic community was created,” for “architecture has to provide a structure in which one is in a community that is not disturbing to others.”85 In some ways, the architecture of the Invisible Cinema anticipated an aspect of our contemporary experience of the projection device, especially as it concerns the atmosphere created by the projective display. Looking at a photograph of Andy Warhol seated in the Invisible Cinema in 1970, or at other images of the audience in the space, one cannot help but reflect on the social isolation this cinematic situation effected. The individual spectator is totally absorbed in the lit screen in a way that seems to portend our current relation to our own portable screens. We, too, tend to sit alone while with others in public spaces, intently immersed in looking at our screens. And this digital isolation is as complex as the zero degree of cinema that was experienced in the Invisible Cinema, for privacy and publicness, intimacy and estrangement, are involved at the same time. The experience of the screen has become individualized, as if a partition were built around us, as real as the ones in Kubelka’s

part of that community advocated by Kubelka. We create contact and communicate, getting “in touch” through our screens but always, of course, making sure not to disturb the others around us.

I N S T A L L I N G C I N E M A O N M U LT I P L E S C R E E N S

The experimental, forward-­looking filmic spaces of projection created in the 1920s conveyed an inventive, sensory transformation of visual space that was experiential. This transformation included the screen itself, as an object becoming a tensile material of projection. The Café and Cinéma de L’Aubette, conceived for the city of Strasburg, is a notable example. It was designed in 1928 by the Dutch De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg, in collaboration with Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-­Arp. Their inventive design contributed to the conceptual extension of the screen’s geometry. This multiuse space featured a screen surrounded by many other square and rectangular panels, in an orthogonal composition that created a montage of geometric frames, connecting architectural with cinematic forms of projection. Here the screen became one “superficial” element of a decorative, spatial assemblage of multiple perspectival spaces that extended from walls to ceiling, making an ambiance of fractured yet connective projection. At the onset of modernity in the nineteenth century, forms of “panoramic vision” had already stretched our frame of vision to incorporate extended spaces of perspectival projection and mobilization.86 A tensile filmic screen emerged from this modern movement of panoramic viewing, which encompassed panorama paintings, dioramas, georamas, cosmoramas, and other spatial “-­oramas,” as well as ornamental surfaces such as panoramic wallpapers.87 In the 1920s these precinematic forms of extended, magnified, multiplied, and portable screens, many of which have become part of contemporary art and culture, were further developed. The avant-­garde experiments of this period resonate strongly with our contemporary experience of the act

and ambiance of screening, especially with respect to their rejection of geometric fixity and singularity. The Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, like Kiesler, advocated the use of multiple, surrounding projection. His “Total Theater” project of 1927, an unrealized collaboration with the theater director Erwin Piscator, called for huge screens “stretched between the twelve columns of the auditorium” so that the audience could “find itself in the midst of a raging sea.”88 Also at the Bauhaus, the transdisciplinary artist László Moholy-­ Nagy conceived an even more tensile screen in tension with environments of diffused light.89 In his 1925 book Painting Photography Film, he theorized luminosity not only as spatial modulation but as a connector of mediums, and linked “Painting with Pigment” to “Light Displays Projected.”90 He regarded the screen fabric, with its radiant, textured surface, as a material in itself, an actual space to be architected creatively. In a chapter significantly titled “Simultaneous or Poly-­ Cinema,” Moholy-­Nagy suggested dynamic reconfigurations of the screen, including devices that would divide “the projection plane” into distinct “cambers, like a landscape,” and project “more than one film . . . on this projection screen” so that “two or more events” could “combine and present parallel and coinciding episodes.”91 In this imaginative experimentation of projective environments, the screen, constructed as a “landscape,” offers differing vistas and viewpoints. Its increased capacity “for simultaneous acoustical and optical activity” is, notably, shared with the metropolis, which itself may be understood as a reverberating screen.92 This tonal landscape-­screen was subjected to inventive planar mobilization not only with various shapes

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visionary design. To “screen” has come to imply a “screening out,” both of other people and the surrounding environment. And yet, absorbed in the light of our individual, portable screens, we too become

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and split forms but also through multiple projections. Moholy-­Nagy imagined screening “a sequence of pictures simultaneously” and “projecting extra prints of the running film-­strip on to the screen through projectors standing next to one another.”93 The polyphonic, multiscreen space he described was a modern landscape of communication, imagined well before multi-

ple “windows” could be opened on a computer screen. Freed from static placements and from singular, fixed geometries, this tensile screen surface dreamed of an “expanded cinema” and of the portable digitality of the future in the way it enhanced simultaneity, parallelism, and the combination of heterogeneous situations onto a fluid, sensory, expansive screening space.

R A D I A N T T E X T U R E S, S O L I D L I G H T S PA C E

In the kind of experimentation Moholy-­Nagy initiated, “the material pigment and the material light” are activated on a morphing landscape-­screen in ways that create the experience of a zero degree of cine-­projection.94 There is an atmospheric quality to this material, a sensorial experience of light space modulation that not only projects the future of

moving-­image installations but refashions the ambient emergence of the projective medium. Luminous, magnetic, textural materialities that surfaced at the inception of cinema can be seen reappearing today, in the era of the medium’s dissolution, in forms of intermediation with other ambient spaces of projection.

4.12  Philippe Parreno’s marquees as installed in the exhibition Hypothesis, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2015–­16. Photo © Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of the artist; Pilar Corrias Gallery, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; Esther Schipper, Berlin; and Fondazione Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan.

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Think of how early cinema produced a radiant film such as Coney Island at Night, made by Edwin S. Porter in 1905, as part of an “electric” trend in early film that explored images made purely of the energy of light space. The atmosphere of this film transmits the waves of electrodynamism and the electromagnetic spark surrounding the modern environment. An expression of the magnetism of electricity as well as the ornamental mode that the German theorist Siegfried Kracauer called “surface splendor,” Coney Island at Night exem-

plifies how the dream of cinema materialized in the age of modernity as an art of luminiferous, mesmerizing projection.95 As we glide across a glittering urban surface and are electrified by the twinkling and shimmering lights, we also come to experience the sensory alchemy of the new media of modernity: the magic of magic lanterns and the shining projections of phantasmagoric shows. We bear witness to the phantasmagoria that—­traveling from the lanterns of Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century to the slides of

4.13  Tobias Putrih, Hoosac (Reprojection Series), 2010. Monofilament, hooks, spotlight. Installation view, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

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Étienne-­Gaspard Robertson in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—­fleshed out the invention of cinema as an art and atmosphere of projection.96 In the form of atmospheric screening displayed by Coney Island at Night, the physical element of projection becomes evident. We are sensitized to the screen’s phenomenological presence and material existence as a medium of electric, projective passage. We sense a pictorial screen surface that is as porous as it is magnetizing. Figured as a cloth, Porter’s screen is a tissue that appears to have been perforated by luminous dots, diffusing light in the ambiance. Though superficially flat, this screen has volume, for the flickering, pulsating waves of light that activate it give it depth, dimension, and plasticity. The dancing light particles, imprinted as if on a scrolling surface, animate the very fabric of the screen, turning textile into moving plane. As it comes alive in textured, magnetic form, the vibrating screen-­ canvas here becomes a scrim on which the architecture of light can be reflectively sensed in atmospheric surface tension. As this electric screen becomes a vibrating scrim, it makes us reflect on the phenomenon of the “light,” tensile screen textures that recur in the space of the contemporary art gallery, where the screen has come to dwell in ambient space and continues to transform, enhancing its plastic condition and magnetic, surface materiality. As these vibrant surfaces become more pervasive, folding and even morphing into ambiance itself, the art of projection in contemporary art creates a cinematic resonance that links the turn of the last century with the beginning of the new millennium, reeling back to the magnetizing condition of projection and the mesmerizing superficial play of luminosity that characterized the history of early modernity, now reinvented in the museum.97 This contemporary winking at modernity’s phantasmagoric projections and particular forms of “atmospheric screening” is widespread in gallery installations.98 Early on, in 1962, Argentine-­born artist Julio Le Parc pioneered his configuration of a mes-

merizing, phantasmagoric moving screen of light with the installation Continual Light Cylinder. A reflective cylindrical mirror made of Plexiglas was animated by the shifting light projected upon it, which appeared to make it move, changing the atmosphere of the space and immersing viewers in its aura. A particular form of captivating luminiferous projection has been explored in sustained, reflective ways since the early 1970s by the artist Anthony McCall, who famously described his 1973 film installation Line Describing a Cone as “a solid light film . . . [that] deals with one of the irreducible, necessary conditions of film: projected light.”99 This work projects—­that is, envisions, casts, and transmits—­a cone of light from a projector into a room, filtering it through dust and smoke, and impelling the spectator to sense that zero degree of the art of projection of which we have spoken. McCall’s work embodies “the projective cast” in the sense articulated by architectural historian Robin Evans, whose dictum that “in architectural projection space is nothing other than pictures of light” we investigated earlier.100 This line that draws a volume, designing a cone, travels architecturally between two-­dimensional and three-­dimensional space. While giving luminous corporeality to an architectural projection, the work gives dimensional, solid character to light, sensed in this “drawing” that designs its material quality on a wall and turns it into the elemental character of filmic projection. Light here is experienced as an atmospheric entity, in particles that modulate space, as it is further filtered through smoke and dust-­filled air, which gives it a greater, more tangible density, recalling the misty atmosphere of phantasmagoric projections. Turned into a volume possessed of body, this luminous solid surface is even sensed as a sculptural presence and becomes a situational site to engage with. Here, as in McCall’s Long Film for Four Projectors (1974), the spectator is enticed to touch the cone of light, handle its surface, and drift around the projective environment-­sculpture. McCall’s understanding of projection has become

ever more environmental in his recent, prolific return to “solid light” films, digitally produced since the early 2000s, where, again, we become absorbed in the luminous ambiance of pure projections as we share in a public intimacy (see fig. 1.10). In Split Second (Mirror) from 2018, for example, a projection that creates a solid cone of light, emanating from one wall, is mirrored on the opposite wall.101 The mirror does not just reflect the projection of light but expands it, for the mirroring action confounds linear perspective, producing an even more complex volumetric, three-­dimensional space. It is as if one could physically enter into and move around this illusionary, mirrored space of projection, to such an extent that one actually feels “projected into” it. Boundaries are lost, and viewers no longer

know if they belong in real space or in the virtual mirrored space of projection. As spectators move about this imaginary projected space, dwelling between the two walls, they become enveloped in a nebular atmosphere of projective particles. The luminiferous ambiance is rendered even more misty and hazy by the phantasmagoric use of smoke machines, digitally calibrated to permeate the solid light projections with tangible, precise effects of a vaporous nature. In using digital technology to enhance material effects of nebularity, this recent work renders the more atmospheric dimension of cine-­projection, and in this respect refashions aspects of the artist’s early environmental performances, as recorded in his film Landscape for Fire (1972; fig. 4.14). McCall

4.14  Anthony McCall, Landscape for Fire, 1972. Performance view, August 27, 1972, North Weald, England. Photo: Carolee Schneemann. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

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moved from this early performance with fire to working with smoke and then to casting an environment of foggy light in hazy projections. In this cumulative environmental way, he has articulated the paradigmatic elemental process and even the alchemic aspect of an atmosphere of projection. There is a transmutation of elements, even a transubstantiation of forms, present in the transductive passage he has conducted from fire to smoke to light particles. This is a concrete affirmation of the atmosphere of projection, as we have defined

it in terms of transduction. After all, the “ambient experience” of projection, according to McCall’s own definition, is the very projective materiality of his installations.102 The “air” of light is made tangible here, and we experience the depth of the elements inherent to and transformed in projection. While sensitized to the materiality of ether we become enveloped in a permeable, mutable atmospheric environment, in whose performance and modulation, perturbation and permutation, we are haptically invited to participate.

AT M O S P H E R ES : I M M AT E R I A L P R OJ E C T I V E D E N S I T Y

An understanding of the atmospheric dimension of projection also underlies, however differently, some of the experimental experiences gathered under the umbrella term expanded cinema.103 Notable in this expansive category are the sensorial intermedia environments created by the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek in his Movie-­Drome (1963–­66).104 This hemispherical dome was a vibrating, immersive environment, coated on its interior with multifaceted, pulsating surfaces of multiple still and moving-­image projections. Atmosphere also became the key element of Steam Screens (fig. 4.15), an installation-­performance that VanDerBeek created with the environmental artist Joan Brigham in 1979 in the Sculpture Garden of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Brigham had pioneered the use of steam in her work, and she undertook a series of collaborations with VanDerBeek in which they used steam as a screen onto which film images were projected. In the museum space, as Brigham put it, “moving steam waves” would “catch and refract the film images, forming and reforming them as the waves roll[ed] through the stream of projected light.”105 Projected into steam, film could reach the ultimate stage of a zero degree of projective existence, coming into being in a state of dissolution. A material that is immaterial, steam even has the

textural quality of a “film,” in that it can filter and reflect luminosity and can make space and light tangible. With Steam Screens, the audience became enveloped in an experience of screening that was truly environmental, recalling Robert Morris’s early work of Land Art, Steam (1967; see fig. 3.2), or Hans Haacke’s action piece Water in Wind (1968).106 VanDerBeek and Brigham designed a performative installation space, atmospherically clouded with particles of light, water, and air, in which the filmic surface became veiled and the ambiance of projection shrouded. However, as Brigham noted, here the “clouds enhance vision, not obscure it” because the artists aimed in the work to act on “surfaces, distances, textures and volumes—­the factors by which we orient ourselves in time and space,” making the imagery “hover like apparitions in mid-­air.”107 And thus, in these vapors of phantasmagoric projection, in a haze of “atmospheric screening,” the film image itself becomes a cloud. Steam Screens created a screen that was an environmental, electrical surface, for steam was used as a force of energy. As Brigham put it, “Steam enters the working day and dreaming night like a dancer onstage, energizing the space with continuous movement.”108 The installation was not only performative but also interactive, placing the viewer in a

4.15  Stan VanDerBeek and Joan Brigham, Steam Screens, 1979. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1979. Installation and performance with steam and projected film. Photo: Francene Keery. Courtesy of Stan VanDerBeek Estate.

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position in which “the realities of each moment’s perception are in flux; contradictory, insistent and elegant. As the steam changes the audience, the audience changes the steam.”109 This misty environment of projection became the site of a moving,

participatory, material performance of ambient public intimacy. Steam here was, ultimately, “a manifestation of the collective dream” of cine-­ projection, materialized in the dissolution of its forms.110

ENERGIES: ENVIRONMENTS OF PROJECTION

In engaging the materiality and atmospherics of projection, Steam Screens reminds us once again how much the immaterial consistency proper to both light and air permeates the projective space, where the visible becomes “a quality pregnant with a texture.”111 The atmosphere of projection—­whether in the theater or the gallery—­is dense with moody waves of light, luminous particles that dance in space, imbued with an air of cloudy, permeable palpability. Projection was always a charged environment, and in the hands of contemporary artists it is becoming even more an atmosphere of vital energy. Screen space is a site haunted by the perturbations of ambiance. To fully sense these vibrant, atmospheric matters, think again of the material history of the screen and of the surface of design in history. An ethereal consistency has always been the material base of the act of screening. As it emerged from the design of the fire screen, the window screen, or partition, and then turned into the nebular exhibition of the magic lantern and phantasmagoria, projection was born out of vibrant, magnetic atmospheres, and this transformed into the Stimmung of “atmospheric theaters.” The act of projecting was designed to make images flare out and move, surfacing from the fabric of light and the density of air. Early manifestations produced a weathered kind of space, for the phantasmagoria of projection was imbued with such vaporous matters as smoke and fog.112 Projection was closely associated with elusive substances—­the hazy, misty quality of shades, silhouettes, and shadows—­which were thought actually to materialize on screen. It followed that Moholy-­Nagy would dream of “light visions” even in “open spaces,

and on unusual screens, such as fog, gas and clouds.”113 Similarly, Brigham would think of steam as a cinematic screen, for, “like other energy systems,” it interacts “by transparent expansion in the surrounding environment” and “transmutes appearance to apparition.”114 An electric, ethereal atmosphere can indeed provide a canvas for projection, as the artist Aldo Tambellini showed in his electronic intermedia experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. Tambellini created a phantasmagoric constellation of projections with his “electromedia” art. His film Black Spiral (Split Screen) (1969/2013) materialized the “airways” by capturing the emissions of television screens that had been manipulated, transforming the horizontal rasters into swirling storms of pixels, resulting in a “weathering” of the image surface. In this way, he gave texture to being “on the air” and turned this ether into black forms that evoke dark matter. With light and darkness, Tambellini created the sensorial experience of a moving cosmology, in which old and new media atmospherically converge. Ether, steam, and sky continue to provide vibrant environments of projection. As if creating a new form of “sky art,” Alex Israel’s painting series Sky Backdrop (2016), canvases produced in collaboration with the Warner Bros. scenery department, depict a “screen” of light and create their own atmospheric zero degree of projection. The elemental, atmospheric, material conditions of projection further come to light in Jennifer West’s Flashlight Film Strip Projections (2014), as light shines onto flat “screens” made of strips of 35mm and 70mm celluloid film, hung like sculptures that function as translucent projective planes. In this

4.16  View of Sun & Sea (Marina), opera-­ performance by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, 58th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, 2019. Photo © Andrej Vasilenko. Courtesy of the artists.

4.17  Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Installation view, All the World’s Futures, German Pavilion, 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, 2015. Single-­channel HD video environment, luminescent LED grid, beach chairs; 23 min. © VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn, 2020. Photo © Manuel Reinartz. Courtesy of the artist; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; and Esther Schipper, Berlin.

installation, as the screens of filmstrips are filtered through light and reprojected onto the walls, the very elemental atmosphere of cine-­projection is ethereally conjured, and its physical materiality shines in a dim, ambient scene of projection. Working with this kind of projective atmosphere, in works such as Àrea de llum 56m2 (2010), the Catalan artist Inma Femenía creates glitches, intervals, and sheets of projective light by transferring digitalized light onto polyurethane, thus

materially exposing the enduring force of technologically produced atmospheric ambiance. Finally, in Artie Vierkant’s 2009 video Exposure Adjustment on a Sunset, we watch the slow unfolding of an ocean sunset, altered so that the sky remains bright while the image becomes digitally textured, bringing to life in digital form the experience of an environment-­cinema. The atmospheric vitality of rays of the sun and ambient transformation continue to fascinate and create

into the ethereal digital space we have come, for better or worse, to call “the cloud.” As current forms of the projective imagination are reflected upon in these contemporary works of atmospheric screening, the atmospheric history of projection comes to be creatively, rather than nostalgically, reinvented and transformed as an environment. Far from being responsible for a dematerialization of forms, this fascination with the ambiance of projection in the art gallery produces transformative, sensorial forms of transduction and communal architectures of materiality as it refashions the environment of public intimacy that originated in the cinema and its precursors. As we will observe in the in-­depth case studies that follow, projective surfaces of material resistance and permeability, integral to the very activity of screening, find their own digital substance in a new, vital environment of projection. Atmospheres here are not simply represented on screens; they materialize as screens, in vibrant surface densities that, in the words of Fabio Mauri, modify “the meaning of the object” and, ethereally, continue to “project our culture, our decipherment of things in the world.”

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connection with the ambiance of projection. This projective affect was conjured in the performance Sun & Sea (Marina), by Lithuanian artists Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, staged at the 2019 Venice Biennale in an old storage space of the Arsenal (fig. 4.16).115 Watching bathers at the beach in this daylong operatic performance, one slowly melts into an atmosphere that is at once energetic and lazy, empathically projecting one’s own sensations of the effects of the sun and the activities of sunbathing. One gets the sense that the activity of spectating is not far from that of absorbing the environment on a day at the beach. This point is made even more clear in Hito Steyerl’s video installation Factory of the Sun (2015; fig. 4.17), staged with beach chairs so that spectators could lounge in an ambient space of bluish light. In this piece, Steyerl conjures a world of energetic perturbations, which renders the transmission of images as energies in our digital world. Images continue to create electric density and frequency when “moving through fiberglass cables,” as Steyerl puts it in her futuristic sun factory.116 These visual signals do, indeed, electrify and affect atmospheres with their frequencies as they travel

5.1  Diana Thater, gorillagorillagorilla, 2009. Installation view, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, 2009. Ten video projectors, two video walls, twelve DVD players, Lee color filters, and existing architecture; dimensions variable with installation. © Diana Thater. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

5

Alchemic Milieus Diana Thater’s Phantasmagoric Habitats

P Strictly speaking, projection is never made; it happens, it is simply there. In the darkness of anything external to me I find, without recognizing it as such, an interior or psychic life that is my own. . . . Such projections repeat themselves whenever man tries to explore an empty darkness and involuntarily fills it with living form. —Carl Gustav Jung1

rojection is materially there, present in live states, in the alchemic world of Diana Thater. An unavoidable manifestation of living form, it happens situationally. For more than two decades, Thater has experimented with video installations that transform architectural spaces by way of “mesmerizing” projection. Her imagistic works are constructed in dynamic relation to the sites that house them, where space is molded by projection in sculptural, dimensional, elemental, and material ways.2 Exhibition sites are never simply empty containers for the installations but rather conceived as the actual milieu of projection. The walls of the gallery are actively engaged and become encircled in projective phantasmagorias. The entire geography of the exhibition site participates in an act of projection that is fully atmospheric. In Thater’s moving-­image installations, there are no simple screens; rather, one experiences a process of screening: projections effectively transform the planar geometries of walls into multiple screens, the surfaces of which are activated and changed through the act of screening. Light and color, and their atmospheric nuances, become the core elements. In some cases, it is not simply the walls but also the windows, floors, and even the ceilings that reflect and emanate light; architectural surfaces themselves thus seem to project—­that is, to “throw forth”—­colored light. In these luminiferous projections, technology is never too far from natural elements and the built space is in

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5.2  The phantasmagoric atmosphere created by magic lantern projection, in an anonymous print, ca. 1860s.

dialogue with natural surroundings. In this way, the milieu of exhibition is transformed into an ambiance of projection. Here, an “atmospheric screening” becomes an actual environment. Consider Oo Fifi: Five Days in Claude Monet’s Garden, Part 1 and Part 2 (1992), a two-­part atmospheric installation that presents images of landscapes taken during Thater’s walks in the gardens at Giverny during different seasons: the viewer experiences indoors a process of layered imaging of outdoor space that also works to decompose and reconstitute color patterns. The light-­images that emanate from the projectors cover not only the interior walls but also the windows in the gallery, which themselves are covered in theatrical gels. The resulting effects recall the ambiance of Robert Irwin’s Light and Space environments, and remind us especially of his Excursus: Homage to the Square3 (1998–­99/2015; see figs. 11.1 and 11.2), a work of gossamer chambers that uses gels on ambient and fluorescent lights, creating strata of luminous filtering that

not only transform windows into atmospheric scrims but affect the entire atmosphere.3 In similar fashion, as ambient light transpires into Thater’s installation, the interior light of the garden projections pulsates energetically outward in a reciprocal, moving form of projection that permeates the architectural surfaces and reaches to the street. In Thater’s environments of projections, the scale of living forms is often manipulated; overpowering distortions change planar geometries and create spatial disorientation in an ambiance. Faced with the layering of images, a viewer cannot simply stare passively at the projective surfaces. Within the darkened spaces that are atmospherically animated by moving forms and colored light, all perceptual senses are activated in sympathy with the shapes that keep transforming. One feels driven to engage with the work physically, to perceive these image-­formations by way of one’s own bodily motion, thereby generating further shifts in the ambiance through one’s own presence.

5.3  Diana Thater, Delphine, 1999. Installation view, Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, October 29, 2016–­January 8, 2017. Four LCD video projectors, eighteen video monitors, six laserdisc players and laserdiscs, one Lasrplay-­4 synchronizer, two VVR-­1000 video processors, Lee color filters, and existing architecture; dimensions variable with installation. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago. © Diana Thater. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

The work of projection cannot be actualized without the participation of viewers in its phantasmagoria. Thater’s dazzling, luminous projections are phantasmagoric in the sense that they require us to occupy immersive light space, to inhabit it as our dwelling and activate it as a space of becoming and transformation. In most of her installations, from Abyss of Light (1993) to China (1995), from Chernobyl (2011) to Science, Fiction (2014) or Delphine (1999), as reconfigured for the Boston ICA Watershed in 2018, gallery visitors experience the projective space in its material existence by projecting their own moving bodies into it. In all

these works, as viewers traverse the installation space they are hit by light emanating from the projectors and inevitably cast shadows. In this act of screening, the figures of the visitors themselves are “screened,” for they too become projections. As apparitions, they populate the phantasmagoria of the projective space, their silhouettes interacting with the images in an elaborate shadow theater. In this sense, Thater’s contemporary projections are inscribed in and part of the long history of the phantasmagoric spectacle, which developed as an enveloping and shadowy form of projection, understood in the

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largest sense of this term. As scholars such as Marina Warner and Noam Elcott have shown in different ways, phantasmagoria is in fact a cultural technique of projection, which, by its very nature, is shadowy, ghostly, and all-­encompassing.4 As a projective apparatus, as well as a conceptual dispositif, phantasmagoria was crucial to the nineteenth-­century development of moving-­image display, which culminated in the cinema; and it was a particularly immersive show.5 It used a modified magic lantern, an apparatus that, like Thater’s own modified projectors, gave body to skewed apparitions of moving light and darkness. At the dawn of modernity, as we have noted, projection was closely associated with the hazy, misty quality of shades, silhouettes, and shadows, which were believed to materialize physically on screen in mesmerizing ways. For their atmospheric screening, phantasmagoric shows turned walls into screens and even projected imagery through immaterial elements such as smoke, enveloping the viewer in their environmental midst. Smoke was also diffused around the space from the apparatus of projection itself. When a lit candle or gas lantern was placed in the magic lantern projector to produce the light needed to project images into the space, it also produced fumes that veiled the atmosphere. It was never possible to be positioned outside this weathered ambiance, for it was intended to surround the spectator. The environments Thater constructs closely reenact historical phantasmagoric spectacles in this respect, as her projections also encompass every surface, surrounding viewers and calling for their complete absorption into the space. Thater uses this precinematic scenography not as a gimmick but rather to extend the historical potential of this encompassing form of projection, reinventing in particular its inclination for atmospheric incorporation in the projective space. Gallerygoers, materially incorporated into both the act of screening and its mesmerizing space, become wholly immersed in the moving, phantasmagoric landscape of projections, which suffuses surfaces as if it were a membrane, becoming an actual environment.

In this form of “superficial” projection, the borders between subject and object are constantly blurred. The viewing subject becomes an object of representation as his or her shadow is incorporated—­or “cast”—­into the work, while, in turn, the world of presented images becomes subjectively inhabited, and transformed, by the viewer’s moving presence. The exterior world enters the interior space in this permeable way in a number of ambient, elemental, even specifically environmental works. Like Oo Fifi, the installation Broken Circle (1997) featured tinted gels on gallery windows, allowing the atmosphere of natural light into the indoor spaces. And Thater has a penchant for representing the natural world, specifically, the habitats of animals and their motion through space, as can been experienced in gorillagorillagorilla (2009; fig. 5.1). Delphine (1999; fig. 5.3) also explores the vitality of animal life. Here, dolphins move through the volumetric space of the installation, thanks to video projectors that have been placed at different heights and oblique angles to cast images onto the ceiling as well as onto the walls and the floor. The dolphins’ movements impel viewers to mimic the aquatic mammals’ way of traversing surface space with their own bodies. Gallerygoers sympathetically respond to the magnetism of fluid animal motion and inhabit what might be called an “outside-­inside,” an interior saturated by outdoor images of a fluid environment. In a phantasmagoric blurring of geometries and borders, a space of flux comes into being, in which boundaries between human and nonhuman forms are crossed. Liquid projections of live organisms made of light and shadow thus animate the rigid mass of the walls of Thater’s video installations, as if creating apertures in their planar surfaces. Finally, then, as we ourselves become projected into this blurred world of material projections that are both natural and artificial, we experience light space as porous and transformative, ultimately sensing the threshold that defines projection—­a passage, a two-­ way externalization of an internal process.

A VIEW FROM THE PROJECTOR

The spatial configurations of Thater’s video installations compel active viewers, in many ways, to be absorbed in the permeable environment of projection, in its very atmosphere. Ultimately, as the artist has said, she wants us “to see the way projectors see,” that is, to experience how a projective technology produces its own perceptual apparatus. And so, rather than hiding the mechanism of screening, Thater insists on making it both visible and present.6 As gallerygoers wander in her video world, they encounter the full apparatus of projection, exhibited physically in plain view, as an object-­space to

contend with and, at the limit, even identify and empathize with. In the majority of Thater’s installations, including Delphine, Abyss of Light, China, and Chernobyl (2011; fig. 5.4), the video projectors are featured as if they are characters or, more precisely, actors whose presence activates the space, eliciting sympathy with the activity they perform. By incorporating the technology of projection in such tangible, material ways, Thater asserts the presence of the projectors not merely as a formal or critical gesture, as some artists have done. Rather, the machines are shown off admiringly in their

5.4  Diana Thater, Chernobyl, 2011. Installation view, David Zwirner, New York, 2012. Six video projectors, six media players, and Lee color filters; dimensions variable with installation. © Diana Thater. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

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vibrant role as real players, true performers, and even active agents in the audiovisual construction of the dazzling dream space. Viewers become aware that the elements of the projection that perform in the space have been manipulated and displayed in novel form by the artist. In this sense, Thater turns phantasmagoria inside out, exposing its tricks and laying bare its mechanisms, which have traditionally remained hidden. She makes the work of the projectors clearly perceptible by decomposing the light they throw off, creating light spaces that appear distilled, warped, and even distorted. In the end, these off-­kilter compositions actively refashion the historical phantasmagoric scene, which itself tended to be a warped space haunted by distortions.

Thater often recalibrates the red, green, and blue light beams that emanate from video projectors, resulting in altered, quasi-­abstract spaces of hypnotic colored light forms whose RGB palette is complemented by yellow, magenta, and cyan. At times, as in Abyss of Light, the projected light becomes the full protagonist. That video installation comprises a series of abstract, monochromatic color forms, including six consecutive vertical stripes of pure color tones that are projected sequentially on walls that appear to “screen” colors. These color bars make viewers aware of the chromatic range that video projectors possess by dissecting it and showing it back to them in analytic form. Immersed in this Abyss of Light, and absorbed in the solid light space of projection, we truly come to “see the way projectors see.”

THE CHEMISTRY OF PROJECTION: AN ALCHEMY OF FORMS

Thater’s mode of video installation is so “projective” that it compels us to reflect on the larger sense of that term and to engage critically with the range of meanings of projection treated theoretically in the first part of this book. To further understand her phantasmagoric sites and grasp how we may “see the way projectors see,” let us again consider aspects of the history of the “projective imagination”—­for the artist’s use of projection is grounded in the cultural genealogy of this modern form of knowledge and even reflects its etymology. Let us recall first that projection holds in its genealogy a particular kind of materiality: the mark of movement and the transmutation of matter. The word projection appeared in fifteenth-­century texts on alchemy, where it signaled a potential material transformation of substances, as in “the casting of the powder of philosopher’s stone on a molten metal to effect its transmutation.”7 This alchemic facet of projection is important for Thater, who transforms material space through light forms, which are themselves, in turn, materially changed in the process. This transmutation engages the nonhuman realm of objects as well as geometries and planes. It is

significant that around 1550, following the alchemic formulation, a spatial meaning became attached to the idea of projection. Projection came to define “the action of drawing a map or plan of a surface on three-­ dimensional objects,” especially “the representation on a plane surface” and “any of the geometrical or cartographic methods by which this may be done.”8 And it is from these transformative modalities—­the activity of converting matter in alchemy, or refiguring space in the act of drawing, in architecture and cartography—­ that the idea of projection became established as a way of generating a modern form of projective visual knowledge. In time, with technological change, projection would come to be understood as the shifting presentation and representation of object-­images on a surface, which eventually took the form of a screen. It is no wonder, then, that artists such as Thater, interested in reshaping space through light and moving images, would work at the junction of projection and geometric form, for projection is itself an architectural construct that engages space and its representational transformations. Thater creatively activates the geometry of projection in order to draw novel shapes

that offer multiple vanishing points. The gallery visitor experiences an electric blurring of space, or as Lynne Cooke puts it, “the bleeding of one surface into another,” as she “encounters interventions, in ‘barren rooms,’ of luminous projections. . . . For, like electric light, video has no surface except its support.”10 In molding architectures and altering visual geometries in pictorial projection, this installation mode ultimately exhibits the extent of the transformations that video projection itself can effect in surface and ambient space when it is deployed inventively in experimental ways.

A LC H E M Y A N D M AT T E R S O F P R OJ E C T I O N

The transformative notion of projection at work in Thater’s video installations is also rooted in the etymological grounding of the term projection that the alchemic meaning was built upon—­derived from the Latin proiectionem and retaining the significance of the verb proiecere, “to throw forth.” This etymology is generative for Thater, as art historian Liz Kotz points out, in the sense that she projects with distortions and illusions, “stretching out” spatial boundaries in pictorial ways.11 Her use of video projection is connected to ideas of movement and expulsion, a “throwing forth” that characterizes light itself. After all, projection is, fundamentally, an instrument not only for drafting but for drawing, and drawing out, luminous trajectories. Its essential materiality is a casting of light, and this is produced by means of film and video projectors that are themselves said to have a “throw.” Following this line of thought, we can come to sense Thater’s fascination with material luminosity: here is an artist who, wanting us to “see the way projectors see,” not only plays with the projective surface but casts it—­exhibiting the very light that vibrantly emanates from the projectors’ own throw. Thater’s projective act of propelling transformation, of expelling outward onto surfaces to create an exchange of subject and object, can be further understood through the lens of psychoanalysis, especially

if we reconsider the neurophysiological and material basis that Sigmund Freud drew upon.12 When projection grew in the physiology of an expanded sensory perception, and in the mesmerizing atmosphere of transmission of energies, it became articulated psychically as the process of expelling from the self and then transferring qualities, feelings, desires, fantasies, or even objects, “displacing” them onto another person, thing, or situation.13 As Laplanche and Pontalis summarize, this is “an operation” whereby a psychic element is “relocated in an external position,” in a passage that can take place not only between subjects but also “from subject to object.”14 In the Kleinian notion of “projective identification,” this process of exchange can also result in an object taking up the qualities and characteristics of the self or the part of the self that is projecting them.15 Such a process of dislocation and exchange is precisely the modality that Thater adapts in her projections, when making projectors “see” and, in turn, making us see as projective objects do. Thater’s work reminds us as well that projection, with its reverse dynamic of introjection, continues to embrace the type of fluid exchange between the animate and the inanimate world that was inscribed in its earlier alchemic and magnetic expressions. The kind of transference that is conducted here is an alchemy of transformations that engages the properties of the inorganic,

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and figures on planes, cinematically, reminding us as well that the “projective cast” in architectural terms is “nothing other than the picture of light.”9 As is especially evident in knots + surfaces (2001; see fig. 5.7), her video projections are characterized by articulate, luminous surface play, full of pictorial references that transition architecturally between bidimensional and tridimensional forms. Altering the scale of the figurative images and creating an expanse of volumes, this work engages an array of shapes, forms, and scales in a rich chromatic range, with skewed compositions

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5.5  Jan Matejko, Alchemist Sendivogius, 1867. Oil on panel, 28¾ × 51⅛ in. Collection Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland.

including technical objects, which become activated in projection. To really sense the process of transmutation that Thater operates with her projections of nonhuman qualities, we thus need to expand our understanding of the alchemic side of the projective process.16 If a quote from Jung served as epigraph for our discussion of this artist’s work, it is because this psychoanalyst recognized an alchemic quality in projection, and explored the link between psychic projection and alchemy in terms of its potential to animate matter. In treating the projective imagination as a vital cultural paradigm, Jung insisted that projection is a form of discovery and transmutation of the material world. He claimed as well that the root of alchemy is to be found in the actual, transformative mechanism of projection, and wrote of the alchemist as an actual “operator” of projection. In his words, “While working on his chemical experiments the operator had certain psychic experiences which appeared to him as the particular behavior of the chemical process.”17 This experience of the material world is sensed as an imaginative form of projection. Interestingly, the alchemist “experienced his projection as a proper-

ty of matter; but what he was in reality experiencing was his own unconscious.”18 In other words, projection is here a mechanism of boundary creation and a process of mediation between matter and subjectivity. It is also an “elemental” matter. In this projective process, Jung concludes, the alchemist “recapitulated the whole history of man’s knowledge of nature.”19 Jung’s account of alchemy resonates deeply with Thater’s own sense of the material “operations” of projection and with the “elemental” quality of the projective dispositif she employs. The alchemist is here an artist, who is able to detect the vibrancy of things and the life of objects, such as projectors, and to experience not only the presence but the mixing of ideas in physical matter, and who mixes, in turn, something of her own energy into the material world. Seeing her work through this material and alchemic lens, we can recognize that projection joins alchemy in its capacity to “operate” processes of material correspondence, forms of elective affinity, hybrid transmissions, and transfers of sympathy. In this sense, projection, in sympathy with alchemic movements, can be affirmed

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as the instrument of a fluid resonance, a permeable form of knowledge that produces reverberations and transductions of energies. Such a view of projective transductions can be corroborated by Jung’s alchemic understanding of projection as a form of transubstantiation across and between interior worlds and exterior environments. In his view, the ancient alchemists essentially dealt in matters of material projection that were also psychic, and that dynamically intersected with sympathy. Alchemists had long been practitioners of the transmutation of elements, and had operated in this way well before psychoanalysis was born. They could understand, and name, projection not only as a relation between subject and object but as the mark of their sympathetic exchange, in which various matters themselves sympathetically morphed. Alchemy, in this sense, really initiated the process of projection, and ignited the course of its meaning as a form of transduction—­that is to say, as the process of transformation of matter and transmutation of matter-­energy. This material process of projection, propelled by alchemy, can be extended and replicated in different forms, for the alchemic, transformative condition that characterizes it, as we argued in our earlier discussion of cultural archaeology, re-­presents itself in other discourses that activate material transformation, including the arts.20 In other words, projection, as a term initiated by alchemy, puts into place a mechanism that produces further chemistry in the technological alchemy of modernity. Jung himself recognized that alchemic thinking led the way to other forms of knowledge that are based on projection when he stated that the alchemies of “projections repeat themselves whenever man tries to explore an empty darkness and involuntarily fills it with living form.”21 Although Jung does not mention cinematic projection, in listening closely to his words, it is hard not to think of a film theater or to imagine an art gallery in which moving-­images are projected. After all, as Thater evocatively shows with her projections, isn’t film’s own chemistry this actual

alchemy? The cinematic space of projection is indeed the very exploration of darkness, filled with living form. It is a place where things can see. In this material sense, and to further develop Thater’s alchemic use of projection, we should also consider that the basis of the process of alchemy, broadly conceived, “is, first and foremost, a problem of variants,” as Karen Pinkus puts it in her cultural study of its history and mercurial course.22 Variants are here, as for Thater, processes of ambivalent transformation, for “an (al)chemical solution is a bath, a state of sus-

5.6 Alchemic transmutation, using the mercurial fire of love: Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (Il Sodoma), Amore Celeste (Celestial Love), 1510. Oil on panel, 66⅛ × 28½ in. Collection Palazzo Chigi-­ Saracini, Siena, Italy.

5.7  Diana Thater, knots + surfaces version #1, 2001. Installation view, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 2001. Five LCD video projectors, sixteen video monitors, six DVD players and DVDs, and one VVR-­1000 synchronizer; dimensions variable with installation. © Diana Thater. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

pension in which various elements (often two, or perhaps more) exist together.”23 Alchemy is an admixture of opposites that does not oppose inside and outside. In this sense, its mercurial process is especially related to the practice of projection, as Thater conceives it, as a way of ambivalently negotiating interior and exterior space, the objective and the subjective, in sympathetic variants of exchange. Furthermore, alchemic transmutation includes “calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction” as well as “multiplication.”24 In this sense as well, cine-­projection, as a time-­based art form disposed to experiment with temporal change and material mutation, is certainly a part of this course of mercurial operations. It is a place where perception and atmospheres, produced by pro-

jective objects that can see, are variable and transform forms, alchemically. Thus the term projection, born in the very discourse of alchemy and able to carry with it an alchemic, transformative power through the history of projective techniques, can come to forge the artistic imaginary of Diana Thater. In her work, materials such as light and its technologically morphing variations, transforming space, in turn transform us in affective atmospheres that induce sympathy with the inanimate. In many ways, then, the art of projection can be said to operate alchemically, in its transductive capacity to show the power of so-­called inanimate things as living organisms, through the “vibrant matter” of a luminiferous transmission on the surface of things, in a temporal process generated out of darkness.25 And how can we

with transmutations of living form. In knots + surfaces, as in Abyss of Light or Delphine, space, organisms, and objects are altered not only in scale but also in sensorial, neurophysiological ways as stimuli are transferred between living beings, things, and situations, and sensations or perceptions are located at points other than those at which they originally occurred, creating sensory dislocation. Understood in this psychically and materially projective way, as a process enacting displacement and dislocation as well as material transmutation, Thater’s projections combine an alchemic sense of projection with the more neurophysiological course of projective displacement. In engineering live forms of spatial distortion, distension, and morphing, that is, she exhibits the fundamental sense of material deterritorialization that is the very cultural basis of the notion and operation of projection.

I N S T R U M E N T A N D A P PA R AT U S : T H E M E D I AT I C A N D M AT E R I A L HISTORY OF PROJECTION

The neurophysiological bent of Thater’s vibrant projections thus essentially returns us to a material historical conjunction, to the way projection appeared in visual technology just as it came to be defined in psychic terms.26 At the rise of modernity, a fascinating cultural conjunction of different forms of energy established projection as an essential instrument of a modern spatiovisual knowledge of the world, joining the analytic to the cinematic realm in electric ways. I am returning to this conjunction here to shed light on mechanisms that are pertinent to Thater, as well to other artists to be discussed, who creatively rework the paradigm of cine-­projection as a “cultural technique.”27 Their use of the projective dispositif reinvents a complex set of relations and operations in cultural history and cannot be explained simply by the restrictive findings of filmic apparatus theory.28 An apparatus is here, rather, deployed in the sense articulated by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who defines it as “anything that has the capacity to capture,

orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”29 The dispositif of projection may also be productively understood in view of the position of the feminist theorist and theoretical physicist Karen Barad, for whom an apparatus encompasses both discourse and matter.30 It can be especially reframed in the context of Barad’s “agential realism,” because such a formulation stresses interactive or, to use her neologism, “intra-­active” agency in the functioning of an apparatus, including a representational one. For Thater in particular, a projector that “sees” is not the object of a gaze but rather a conceptually material instrument of intermediation between the human and the nonhuman. Its operations of transmission are interactive and even “intra-­active,” and can be transformative. In this specific sense, the apparatus of cine-­projection can be said to share real qualities with psychoanalytic projection, for the latter, too, can be understood to function as a mechanism.31 In

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not think as well, in the alchemic sense, of the chemistry of celluloid, that transparent, flammable plastic made in sheets from camphor and nitrocellulose? This is also a thing of light that can alchemically “see.” Articulating the art of projection in this sense, we can now fully recognize that this particularly alchemic projective process is the precise operational mode that Diana Thater has extended to her own screening practice by enabling people to see in “the way projectors see.” In her work, we are indeed projected into the way machines, technical objects, tools, material formations, and other such things “see” and transform matters of space, while operating in luminous darkness. In this projective way, which does not separate the organic and inorganic, she also has established a quasi-­ animistic use of video projection that animates the natural world and activates the space of light by filling it

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5.8  Projective techniques: “Théâtre Optique” and its inventor, Emile Reynaud, in an etching by Louis Poyet, La Nature, no. 999, July 23, 1892.

a way, psychic projection is an actual dispositif: it is an instrument that regulates the boundaries between subject and object, and can also activate and transform the sense of what is internal and external. As such an apparatus, projection engages a wide sense of relationality. It works to capture, intercept, orient, model, and regulate these essential forms of boundary between the self and the surroundings. Furthermore, such a dispositif does not work in isolation but is an instrumental force comprising interactive, or rather “intra-­active” agencies. Projection is, after all, an architectural and cartographic apparatus that designs environmental relations, and its range expands in a variety of intersecting fields, from the configuration of psychoanalysis to the alchemy of cine-­projection. It is therefore evermore significant that the concept of a projective dispositif was formed in psychoanalysis in cultural correlation with the invention of devices

of projection, in the age of mechanical reproduction. It is important to remember also that Freud’s metaphors for unconscious processes, as Jill Casid shows, are “compounded out of an assemblage of devices of recording, projection, enlargement, and writing,” including such instruments and mediatic processes as “the microscope, camera apparatus, camera obscura, photographic positive and negative processes.”32 Let us also recall that the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein clearly articulated the idea of projection as an instrument, one enabling movement both inward and outward, as she addressed how affects can become embodied in and transpire from an object; in this sense, she was evoking a real process of cinematic projection. Klein made projection an instrument of all object relations as she established the idea of “projective identification,” leading to the matter of a “projective screen.”33 The concept of projection thus joined cinema to

transference relations to objects, acting as if it were a porous membrane, connecting inside and outside, the animal and human realms, the organic and the inorganic. And in this sense as well, her use of projection joins psychoanalysis to cinema in intermediatic, “intra-­active” ways. After all, a projective screen is a location of dislocation: a “transitional” environment that can both hold and diffuse affects, conveying their ever-­shifting, permeable transmission. And for Thater, this psychic intermediation is not an individual affair, for the interanimated operations that constitute her projective screening permeate the surrounding space, participating in, and changing, the very atmosphere of projection.

A P R O J E C T O R P R O J E C T I N G M A T E R I A L C U LT U R A L H I S T O R Y

Essential elements of the archaeology of projection, and its conceptual apparatus, are thus embodied in Thater’s work with this cultural paradigm as a mediatic tool. Projection is the material concept and the psychic mechanism that animates her screen architectures as she alchemically transforms time-­space and the phenomenal world through technological reinvention. For Thater, as for other artists engaged in this book, projection is therefore not simply a technique but, rather, an epistemological instrument. Her act of projection carries the cultural history of a projective imagination within its space and deploys it in creating atmospheric environments. Manifestations of projective porosity are displayed here, from her presentation of psychic projective atmospheres to her exhibition of sympathetic relations of projection. To see “the way projectors see” means to emphasize the objective character of projection, to sense its material presence, the thing itself, and to feel an atmosphere of projection. It asks that projection be understood perceptually as an affective space created by a projective technology. It requires that a viewer be in tune with its environment and enter into a state of empathy with space and things that interact

sympathetically with each other. Essentially, it calls for what the philosopher Richard Wollheim, writing on “correspondence” and “projective properties,” calls “being of a piece with” the work itself of projection.36 In his words, “projective properties are properties that we identify through experiences,” and this includes the affective realm and even the memory of a former projective history.37 A “complex projection is activated” when there is “an affinity between the inner condition of the person . . . and the part of nature that it is projected onto.”38 This complex projection engages a feeling of correspondence with the inanimate, and even a fellow-­feeling with the environment. In Thater’s work, such responsive projection is at work, for in being asked “to see the way projectors see,” one is asked to be of a piece with the dispositif, with the very apparatus that projects. For this artist, projection, then, means being in alchemic sympathy with the atmosphere, the affect, and even the memories or history that might be exuded from, even felt by, the projector itself as a thing, an objective device. Projection is understood here to be a complex phenomenon involving what we have called a seam with the inanimate. It is an interanimated, material, ambient

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psychoanalysis in material, “instrumental” ways, becoming a device of transfer between inner states and objective matter. This cultural history extends as well to the operations of the “influencing machine,” an object of material imagination defined by Viktor Tausk as an actual instrument of projection.34 In other words, throughout this history of envisaging transitive psychic mechanisms—­understood in Winnicottian terms as the locations of “transitional phenomena”—­a medium was configured.35 For artists such as Thater, projection is precisely this particular medium: a process of in-­betweenness that creates a milieu of transmission. Her projective site can “mediate” the boundaries of subjects and their

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form of sympathetic mediation that exposes its own mechanism of perceptual operation. This attention to the vital materiality of projection is manifested especially in the way Thater exposes the material existence of her medium and its operative process in relation to the cultural history of cine-­ projection. Her alchemic video projections, as we have noted, bear the traces of precinematic spectacles of light and shadow as incarnated in atmospheric, phantasmagoric projections. But they also mnemonically reference the treatment of projection as a material condition of cinema, gesturing knowingly toward the atmosphere of earlier experimental film and visual art practices. For example, in Abyss of Light, Thater’s idea of seeing “the way projectors see” engages the full significance of experiencing the material history of the projective medium and how it operates, from phantasmagoria to experimental cinema. Her abstract monochromatic projections make one think in particular of Paul Sharits’s Shutter Interface (1975), a film installation comprising four 16mm projectors placed sequentially in space that cast patterns of colored light onto gallery walls in abstract, pulsating form, creating an atmospheric screening. This calling attention to “the way projectors see” also recalls the experimental film practice of Morgan Fisher, who makes visible the invisible process and material composition of film.39 In the words of film theorist Laura Mulvey, Fisher’s self-­reflexive practice specifically addresses ways of “projecting the projector.”40 This reflection on the material conditions of film extends to the way a film projector, as a projective machinery, can indeed see even invisible things. Fisher’s 1976 film Projection Instructions, in particular, stages a choreography of projection, presenting

sonic and written instructions to the projectionist, thus revealing the invisible eye and moving hand of projection. Thater, aware of such filmic experiments, claims the experimental legacy of avant-­garde cinema for herself, along with that of the history of early video practices. Speaking of her work with projection, she states that she “wanted to use the color and dynamism of early video installation (prior to [Bill] Viola and [Gary] Hill), along with its parallel history in film: Structuralist film, as practiced specifically by Hollis Frampton.”41 In directing her artistic interests toward the color spectrum, in particular, Thater experimentally reworks this vibrant component of atmosphere, and makes dynamism a material condition of the projective ambiance. In atmospheric terms, one might also consider the relation of Thater’s video installations to the light-­projection experiments of Otto Piene and Aldo Tambellini, for the way they engaged technology and atmospherics, and to the “expanded cinema” practices of Stan VanDerBeek, with their immersive ambiance of projection.42 The legacy of Minimalism in Thater’s practice is also acknowledged, especially as it relates to the light-­filled color spaces of Dan Flavin, which created and changed atmosphere. One might also see links to the light installations of Keith Sonnier, for they reverberate in and transform the architecture of the space in which they operate, or also, in spatial ways, perceive a link to the experimental uses of projection by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham. In other words, a layered refashioning of the atmosphere of projection takes place in Thater’s moving-­image installations as she reworks the material base of projection by engaging foundational elements of its material and “elemental” history, in both visual art and film.

R E T U R N TO P H A N TAS M AG O R I A

Following this experimental line of projective relations archaeologically, some further considerations remain that return us to a reflection on the phan-

tasmagoria of projection, in its constitution as an atmospheric environment. Thater’s strategy of video installation represents a contemporary reinvention

of phantasmagoria that specifically reworks the material of its projective imagination as it was permeated with atmospheric thinking. Her work bears tangible traces of the material history of this mediatic scene, especially as it regards the process of materialization of an atmosphere—­its intangible particles and ethereal forms, including light, air, vapors, and smoke. Thater’s environments, layered with diaphanous, projective alchemy, enact their atmospheric surface play with a dynamic that feels elemental, even meteorological. This is particularly evident in White Is the Color (2002; fig. 5.9), as exhibited at Zwirner & Wirth gallery in New York, in 2005. There Thater once again used the windowpanes of the gallery as atmospheric screens and ensured that while the work was on view inside, it was also projected outward. This porously constructed space of screening was also populated by ethereal formations. The projected images appeared to be white clouds in the sky, which seemed to further

filter the light particles. But an alchemic, material transformation of projection tricked the viewer, for the clouds were in fact images of smoke from forest fires. Thus the space of projection was “clouded” by the artist in a phantasmagoric fashion, creating an ambiance suspended between history and the present. While the development of phantasmagoria engaged several fields of modern visual knowledge, it especially inhabited the ambiguous, hazy space between magic and science. As a precinematic device, phantasmagoria was in fact a scientific invention, but this technology was put to use to create mesmerizing effects of transformation of the material world that appeared magical. This kind of alchemy is of interest to Thater, who in 2010 produced Between Science and Magic, a layered film that references how projection was initiated at the origin of the film medium. The work conveys the sense of a device of wonder, which was much present in early film and represented a major form of the medium’s

5.9  Diana Thater, White Is the Color, 2002. Installation view, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2010. Two video projectors, two media players, and one 48-­inch single-­tube fluorescent light fixture; dimensions variable with installation. © Diana Thater. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

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mesmeric attraction. For this work, Thater screened a film she had previously made of a magic performance in the Los Angeles Theatre, an ornate movie palace built in 1930–­31, and refilmed this projection, finally presenting a doubled version as a split-­screen work at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. In such a com-

pounded way, the atmosphere of wonder that emanated from early cinema, together with the mesmerizing ornamental surfaces that characterized the architecture of the movie palace, enter the art gallery in phantasmagoric re-­creation.

P I C TO R I A L A N D P R E C I N E M AT I C AT M O S P H E R ES, R E P R OJ E C T E D I N THE ART GALLERY

The atmospheric surface play of Thater’s installations finally reinvents not only the visual effects but also the psychic dimension that phantasmagoria embodied and presented in spectacular form at the cusp of modernity. The magic lantern show, as Marina Warner observes in her book Phantasmagoria, was an especially “novel instrument” because its ambiance “reproduced externally the internal visions of the mind.”43 Thater’s visionary video installations incorporate this projective atmosphere through a psychic act of expulsion that is an analytic proiectionem. In articulated movements of exterior-­interior displacements and alterations, visible on the surface, her projectors “throw forth” something material resembling projections of the mind. These reversals of external and internal dwell in the liminal space of all those aesthetic movements that have eschewed classical framings and perspectives. Video projections such as knots + surfaces stretch the borders of pictorial space into a phantasmagoria of visions, warping and tilting and quivering the composition with a process of overlaying that expands surface space with multiple vantage points. These dissolutions and spatial apertures have been said to evoke the visionary pictorial world of El Greco, with its own “ectoplasmic clouds.”44 Multiplanar illusions of space in Baroque and Rococo art also come to mind, especially as they took shape in the expansive form of frescoes, whereby a ceiling could turn into a sky, or even into a geographic and astrological volume when painted by Giambattista Tiepolo (fig. 5.10).45 When the fresco-­ like architecture of shimmering light is reinvented in

Thater’s video projection on screen-­walls, pictorial flatness is yet again defied. A layering of visions shows the depth that surface may contain when figured as a layer of atmosphere, or a sheet of cloud.46 Thater engenders a pictorial expansion of representational borders in her video projections by combining the history of art with the material history of projection, creating a “perturbation” of projective surfaces. This process of infusing pictorial stratification with media archaeology was especially apparent in her 2009 installation of Delphine in Bremen, Germany, at the Kulturkirche Saint Stephani. There, luminous images projected against windows of colored stained glass produced an effect in which the light of the projections appeared refiltered, while the windows acted as screens. This ambiance of “screened” light suggests that we view the stained glass of Gothic architecture itself as an early form of screen. We are presented with a historical, protocinematic example of the material itself of projection—­an instance of what actually made the atmosphere of projection possible. As in Between Science and Magic, Thater offered in installation form a materialization of the history and architecture of cine-­ projection, constructing an atmosphere of cultural memory. In evoking the history of precinematic projection, with its elaborate surface play of interior-­exterior traversals, Thater’s video installations finally reenact the experience of absorption that occurs in modern visual space. Consider in particular the “superficial” world of knots + surfaces, a work that, while incorporating the

history of phantasmagoria that led to the invention of film, also reflects the form of panoramic vision that contributed generatively to the medium. It is an installation that refashions not only the mode of pictorial expansion of frescoes but also the dislocation of an extended pictorial space that first took root in panorama paintings, which were often illuminated and required viewers to “move” through an all-­encompassing space. Thater’s mode of video installation especially recalls the spatial reversals that were produced in a particular ambient form of panoramic expression: the papier panoramique. In interiors wrapped in panoramic wallpaper, as in Thater’s installations, scenes from the natural world or depictions of exterior spaces entered inward, while the inside was projected outward. The cinematic screen, a special

form of panoramic wallpaper, itself issued from this environmental history of projection: it emerged in modernity as a way to bring natural habitats inside, to access exterior spaces from inside dark, interior rooms, or to phantasmagorically exteriorize inner visions.47 The cultural itinerary of projection led visitors through these immersive spaces, taking them from the painterly projections of panoramic wallpapers and the surrounding spaces of phantasmagoria to the enveloping surfaces of cinematic wall-­screens. This absorbing ambient journey now extends, in renewed form, to the alchemy and phantasmagoria of projection that artists like Thater offer visitors as they reactivate the environmental depth of surface space in the contemporary art gallery, with their own layering of truly “projective” atmospheres.

5.10 Giambattista Tiepolo, Four Continents, 1752–­53. Ceiling fresco, 62⅜ × 100 ft. Würzburg Residence, Germany.

6.1  Jesper Just, This Nameless Spectacle, 2011. Installation view, MAC VAL Musée d’art contemporain du Val-­de-­Marne, France, 2011–­12. Two-­channel video installation. © Jesper Just 2011. Photo © Marc Domage. Courtesy of James Cohan, New York; Perrotin, Paris/New York; and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen.

6

The Nature of Scale Jesper Just’s Mareoramic Environments

A The spatial construct is, so to speak . . . a projection from within the subject, irrespective of whether we physically place ourselves inside the space or mentally project ourselves into it.—August Schmarsow1

particular kind of “environ-­mental” projection—­a form of empathy with space, its size and motion—­arises in the ambiance of Jesper Just’s moving-­image installation This Nameless Spectacle (2011; figs. 6.1, 6.4, and 6.6). This is due to the specific “spatial construct” of the installation. As viewers walk into the gallery space, they confront two very large screens that face each other. Each screen measures approximately sixty-­three feet in length by fifteen feet in height, so it is hard to escape the sense of magnitude of this projection.2 The massive scale of the installation provokes a physical reaction, and the work demands that the viewer become incorporated into it. Indeed, one cannot help being absorbed into the space of the projection, empathetically enveloped in its very atmosphere. An actual form of “empathic projection” is triggered here because, as we will see, the work lays bare its exhibitionary mechanism, showing off the moving form of its magnificent projective scale.3 This sense of magnitude, and of magnification, increases as one ponders the great distance that separates the two screens, which are placed more than sixty-­five feet apart. As one gives oneself over to the scale of the work, different types of scaling are confronted, haptically sensed, resulting in the experience of an overall sculptural sensation. The projective screen is a true sculptural object here, and impels the viewer to become more aware of volumes. In confronting this

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particularly large species of screen, and the distance that both isolates and unites the two screen entities in projection, one’s habitual relation to space acquires a different volumetric shape. The scale of this milieu of projection even changes your relationship to the space of your body. A sensation of displacement arises as you are forced to become more aware of the scale of your own body as it is measured up against this great physical body that is screen size. Being here, immersed in the space of this video work, viewers thus physically experience a form of spatial disorientation, and even “perburbation.” Further displacement is bound to occur as they notice that almost nothing is static on these encompassing screens. If they happen to walk into the installation at the beginning of the film, they will witness the camera tracking through the space of a park. An atmosphere blooms into being here: as the light shimmers on the leaves of trees for a long while, the sound of movement can be heard, but you cannot see what is producing it. You follow the sound cue that propels you to continue through the space of the park, sensing its atmosphere, breathing its “air.”4 There is a breeze, and the tree branches tremble and quiver. The motion of leaves in the wind on one screen always finds corresponding

atmospheric movement on the other. These screens, you discover, always move in unison, often giving the impression of a movement advancing through space. Different views and vistas are presented, and you feel as if you were actually “tracking” through the park’s atmospheric scenery. If you wish to understand what is going on in this ambiance of projection, you will have to find your own place in the scene or, rather, become part of the mise-­en-­scène. It is impossible to remain outside of it. You must position yourself in the midst of this moving work and negotiate a space between the large ambient screens. As you assume your viewing post and become ever more immersed in the magnificent ambient display, moving along the course of the gallery, not only a physical displacement but also an imaginary motion takes hold of your body. You are in for a ride—­buckle up. With This Nameless Spectacle, Jesper Just has created a voyage to a different time zone. This postcinematic ride will take us inside the history of screening and the prehistory of visual display. As it transports us through the atmosphere of the park, it leads us to rediscover a trajectory that marked the environmental emergence of modern visual culture and how this configured the atmosphere of cine-­projection.

P A N O R A M A O F A H I S T O R I C A L M O V E M E N T, W H I L E V I S I T I N G A P A R K

A park [is] a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region . . . a “thing-­for-­us.”—Robert Smithson5

The point of entry that Jesper Just stages for This Nameless Spectacle is the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a public garden situated in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris. This park was developed as part of the plan for remapping and remodeling the urban fabric of Paris directed by Georges-­Eugène Haussmann. A product of nineteenth-­century landscape design, this natural environment contains within its site a complex history. When Just animates the park’s landscape in his film, revealing its imaginative construction, he uncovers layers of

a visual history that pertains to the way the atmosphere of nature became “cultivated.” The manner in which Just films in this park, employing scale and movement in its depiction, reveals the spatial history and cultural ambiance of which the park is a part, a function of the development of a traveling eye. In the nineteenth century an ambient movement arose in various forms of cultural expression, including view painting and landscape design, and vision became transformed in relation to moving space. Moving along the path of modernity from

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view painting to garden views, from travel sketches to itinerant viewing boxes, from panoramas and other geographical “-­oramas” to forms of interior/exterior mapping, from the mobile views of train travel to urban promenades, a new form of spatial experience was born. In the words of the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, this new geography was the product of a “panoramic vision” that dynamically reconfigured the environment.6 This novel geovisuality incorporated a traveling desire that pushed spatial boundaries. Sites were set in moving perspectives, expanding both outward and inward as a new architectonics was put in motion. Space became absorbed and consumed in movement by the spectator. The new ambient sensibility engaged the physicality of the observer, challenging his or her ability to take in space and more space—­a mobilized space. From this moving panorama at the end of the

nineteenth century a new observer emerged in the persona of the film spectator, a body projected in moving images.7 With This Nameless Spectacle, Jesper Just impels us to travel back to this history of “site-­seeing” and puts us in touch with it. He employs a panoramic mode of spatiovisual construction, and does so to expand the potential of this precinematic history. His use of the projective space reinvents in particular the sense of scale and the atmospheric touch of panoramic vision. To better understand the terrain he threads together, it is important to note that, on the road to such an expanded “site-­seeing,” the modern traveling eye passed through atmospheric garden views to embrace broader environmental terrains. Moving through and with landscapes, scanning sites and cityscapes, an opening of spatial horizons fashioned spectacular spectatorial pleasures. Garden views were a prominent form of

6.2  Scale counts in the moving screens of precinema: Trans-­Siberian Railway Panorama at the Paris World Exhibition, 1900. Bilwissedition Ltd. & Co. KG/Alamy Stock Photo.

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this shared atmospheric experience. They combined a sensualist theory of the imagination with a touch of physicality. In the gardens of modernity, design was anything but static, and it engaged the body in the moving absorption of visual space. Automata, sculptures, and playful fluid mechanisms that included fountains and watery landscapes were made into moving views in some larger gardens to enhance their atmospherics, as is the case with the Parisian park Just films. The vistas themselves incited the viewer to move into the spectacle of an ambient space. Ultimately, then, landscape was designed for bodies to take in an ever-­changing form of atmospheric visual display. As one ponders the origin of landscape as such a physical form of atmospheric display, one realizes why Just chose this particular topos as the setting for This Nameless Spectacle. This is an installation whose strength lies in its efforts to enhance the physical, material aspect of a projective visual display. Landscape is not at all a simple background here but rather the catalyst for the work, the moving core of the projection. A historical setting emerges in the ambient form the installation takes. Indeed, its design holds within itself the actual movement in space that, in the end, led from garden views to the establishment of the filmic screen as a place for pictures not only to move but also to be “sensed” in projective, atmospheric motion. Atmospheric landscape design serves for Jesper Just as an extension of his penchant for creating a mobilized geography, which here includes the shape of the projective display. If we consider all of Just’s work as an ensemble, we realize that, no matter how different the topics, the artist consistently films in a way that strives to expand the parameters of a spatial experience, and explore ambiance. Just’s work engages the spectator in experiences that involve a geography of touch, among other senses, and a strong sense of the physicality of an ambiance. In this regard, the attraction to landscape design exhibited in This Nameless Spectacle is significant because the garden is not strictly an optical affair. The garden was the place that historically “enable[d]

the imagination to form the habit of feeling through the eye.”8 It was a “mode of processing the physical world for our consumption.”9 The modern configuration of landscape, and especially the sequential picturing that characterizes the experience of moving through a park, is deeply haptic. That is to say, it involves a virtual form of touch and engages all senses synesthetically in shifting sensations of ambiance. Different forms and degrees of affect emerge as one traverses the space of a garden, for affects are themselves “cultivated” here. This is because the garden was constituted in early modernity as an exterior designed to put the visitor in “touch” with inner space. As one moved through its space, the exterior of the landscape was transformed into an interior map—­the landscape within us. An elaborate form of empathy with space, close to a form of empathic projection, would become palpable as the inner map of affects was mobilized in the process of connection with the natural site. A reciprocal, sympathetic relation with the nuances of ambiance was indeed established in the atmosphere of the garden. Before cinema made it possible to approach an atmosphere closely and to move into it in projection, the garden thus enabled one to move physically into a sensorial ambiance, and it opened inner horizons of transformation. As it compels us to move into and through the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, then, Just’s installation reenacts this particular atmospheric movement of modernity, placing us inside its very landscape. In moving through the Parisian park in This Nameless Spectacle, the artist recapitulates the direction of an actual genealogy: one that gave rise to the mobilization of atmosphere, understood as well as affective ambiance, in a cultural process that traveled from landscape design to cine-­projection. Garden space, not unlike cinematic space, is an aesthetics of discontinuities—­a mobilized montage of multiple perspectives and asymmetrical views. Jesper Just works with this particular ambient “location,” enhancing in his work the asymmetric movement that connects exterior to

come to join the atmosphere of projection. A memory theater for such ambient perturbations as pleasures of the sensorium, and for transformative affects, landscape, reactivated here as haptic atmospherics, becomes a moving projection.

E N V I R O N M E N TS O F P R OJ E C T I O N : A D I G I TA L M A R E O R A M A

Announcing an upheaval in the relation of art to technology, panoramas are at the same time an expression of a new attitude toward life.—Walter Benjamin10

The sense of scale and the technique of projective display of This Nameless Spectacle deserve particular attention in the context of this environmental panorama, for it is the form and structure of the installation that establish the haptic, atmospheric communication. The spatial arrangement of the work, set on two large screens that appear to roll out moving images for a spectator in their midst, is extremely significant, and becomes even more so as the images continue to roll on. The destabilizing sensation mentioned earlier, which might take hold of your body as you navigate Just’s sea of images, is not only profound but far-­ reaching, for this work displaces you back in time as well as in the space of atmospheric perturbations. The mode of display Just employs derives from the fluid technology of movement that characterized modernity’s panoramic forms of exhibition. The digital form of projection of the installation enables spectators to experience a sensation of mobility that arose from a specific historical form of display: the “moving panorama.” The moving panorama was a product of the nineteenth-­century’s desire for exhibitionary culture, a craze that has been described as “panoramania.”11 The panorama form is usually associated with enormous paintings exhibited in circular spaces, often in 360 degrees, surrounding the observer with the weight of their scale. One application of this giant form of display included movement. Inspired by the circular panorama, the moving panorama was particularly

engaged with geography. As media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo shows in his comprehensive history of these panoramas, motion was an essential sensory component, both virtual and actual, of this particular precinematic form, which produced kinesthetic effects in the audience.12 A popular form of entertainment across Europe and the United States, moving panoramas offered spectators the sensation that they themselves were being transported as images of space scrolled panoramically before their eyes. Sound and light effects and presentations by traveling lecturers were common accompaniments to the moving panorama, and enhanced the overall sense of transport. The apparatus of display played an important part in the construction of this geography, which was not merely representational. A framed fabric of drawable curtains, moved by a mechanical cranking system, could suffice to produce the effect of a moving screen, turning into a scrolling screen. But more complex mechanisms were also devised, and the most advanced were exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle Internationale, in Paris. The Stereorama (fig. 6.7; see also fig. 1.4), for one, let spectators imagine they were taking a sea voyage, sailing along the Mediterranean coast, aboard a ship rocked by waves. This was an elaborate form of display that involved a feat of technological imagination and execution. A contemporary article, cited in Stephan Oettermann’s major history of the panorama as a mass medium, describes the main

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interior landscape, with all its unrest. In this ambient sense, as the shimmering light, the breath of air, and the motion of the wind come to be virtually sensed on one’s skin, another kind of atmospheric “perturbation” can be felt in the installation: an effect of weather. Phenomena that are present in a natural landscape thus

6.3  The technology of the Mareorama, a moving panorama. La Nature, no. 1416, June 30, 1900.

features of this technique of observation, in which the painterly turned into a moving visual display. The point is the scale of motion, for “unlike the usual panoramas,” here “the background is painted on the outer mantle of a slowly revolving cylinder with a wide protruding edge carrying forty concentric sheet-­metal

screens four inches in height on which the waves have been painted.” As for the screens, they “are moved up and down by an electric motor through a linkage system including rods, hinges, and wheels.”13 Considering this history, we might venture to propose that the invention of the projection of moving images on a screen, and the function with which we associate it today, arose from the scale of the enterprise of the moving panorama. This was an apparatus “that went around,” for it not only produced scrolling motion and waves of perturbation with its moving mechanism but was also an itinerant medium. A device that encouraged receptive journeys, it was often taken from place to place by itinerant showmen and, in this way, related to other forms, contemporary and older, of ambulatory entertainment.14 The moving panorama produced what became the cinematic sensation of ambling and traveling virtually from site to site in many different itinerant and ambient ways. A particularly precinematic development of this traveling medium, also presented at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, was the exhibition Trans-­Siberian Railway Panorama (fig. 6.2), which simulated a trip from Moscow to Beijing aboard the famous railway. As in the Stereorama, spectators were offered the sensation of taking a journey through the shifting atmospheres of a landscape. A succession of images of the diverse environment they were imaginatively traversing appeared, as if rolling past the framed window of their train car. With this spectacle, open to the landscape, a new frame of mobilized space came to life and a spectacular, virtual form of imaging atmospheric change was born. In the form of an object capable of offering mobile pleasures scrolling through an ambiance, the display gave rise to the material condition of existence of the cinematic screen. The projective screen, then, did not come into being as a small, flat, frontal, windowed geometry, as is usually assumed, but rather as a gigantic, geographic, moving display—­that is, it emerged as an environmental medium.15 It is important to acknowledge this

ing the moving vistas of the Parc Monceau, near Paris.16 But it is not only the motion of the representation that creates the emotion and triggers the empathic projection with space but also the moving mechanism of the projective dispositif, and especially its scale. The corresponding, diffracted motion that occurs in the space of the installation, not simply on but between the two large screens that face each other, is laid bare, and it is closely connected to a particular form of moving panorama. The configuration of Just’s moving-­image installation recalls especially the dynamic, atmospheric use of display that characterized the Mareorama (fig 6.3).17 This was a spectacular form of moving panorama that used two “screens” simultaneously, rolling out a set of moving scenes that simulated the atmosphere of a voyage at sea. Spectators were positioned in the middle of the display, aboard a ship, which rocked back and forth to enhance the sensation of motion and perturbation. An article written at the time suggests the sense of magnitude and inventiveness inherent in the technological enterprise that created this moving display in which spectators were projected in the natural environment of a seascape. It tells us that “the plan for the Mareorama presented . . . two screens, each 2,500 feet long and forty feet in height . . . to be unrolled,” with “a double, swinging movement [that] was to be imparted to the spectator’s platform which was shaped like a ship.” The scale of the scrolling screens was grandiose, for “215,000 square feet of screen was to be unrolled before the visitor’s eye.” And the movement produced was impressive: “One of the screens moves on the port side, the other on the starboard. Both are coiled upon cylindrical reels situated near the ends of the building where they are concealed from the view of the ship’s passenger.” In this description, we can sense both the scale and the fluidity of “the mechanism for the movement of the two screens,” which are “rolled [by] extremely heavy vertical cylinders supported by floats in a water-­basin.”18 In addition to this mechanics of perturbation, elaborate atmospheric

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lack of frontality, fixity, and flatness in early forms of screening, and to underscore a milieu of volumetric plasticity and movement, if we wish to rewrite the genealogic course of the projective apparatus as a set of environmental operations. It is crucial as well to stress for our argument regarding the atmospherics of visual display that, in the specific moving panorama just described, atmosphere was not only displayed but cultivated. The display constituted an environment in itself, and it was capable of registering change in the atmosphere of a site. The changes in ambiance were enhanced by cutouts that depicted objects in the scenery surrounding the train, moving in zones that extended from the foreground, near the tracks, to trees far out in the field. Rotating in endless loops around the scrolling canvas of the panorama, these cutouts “projected” a sense of depth to the transformation of the landscape. Multiple backdrops operated at different speeds to create a sense of rolling vistas, with the added effect that the differences in speed between each of them created variable combinations of scenes. In this display, which turned a means of transport into the emerging cinematic screen, endowing it with the ability to modify an ambiance, the scale of the display was as relevant as the rolling, diffracted, dispersed movement. As the “projective imagination” merged with a form of “atmospheric thinking,” a projective future was also envisaged, as here inscribed is also the magnification that characterizes display in our digital age. As we ponder the elaborate construction of Just’s This Nameless Spectacle, it becomes evident that his giant installation has, built into it, a mechanism that references the environmental history of screening and projective display we have just outlined. In its digital configuration, it creates virtual ambling and traveling through atmospheres that reenact the ambiance of the moving panorama. The perambulating movement through the Parc des Buttes Chaumont recalls in particular the function of the early roll transparencies created by Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle, represent-

6.4  Jesper Just, This Nameless Spectacle, 2011. Installation view, James Cohan, New York, 2012. Two-­channel video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin, Paris/New York.

effects reproduced changes related to different times of day and rendered shifts in weather and actual perturbations. These included the simulation of a storm that broke out as one traveled virtually between Naples and Constantinople. In the Mareorama the spectators were positioned in the middle of unfolding events, in a floating, situational ambiance—­even in climatic perturbation—­ precisely as happens in Just’s installation. Viewers were sandwiched between two giant, moving screens that enhanced the sensation of taking in an atmosphere and experiencing its changing states. All the kinesthetic effects that were added made the visitors to the space of the Mareorama not only feel the

motions but empathize with them, in every possible sense. In a similar manner, spectators of Just’s installation negotiate their own movement between complex apparatuses of rolling projective display, and do so kinesthetically, imaginatively, and virtually as well as with actual motion. In This Nameless Spectacle, spatial magnitude contributes greatly to achieving the desired effects of empathic absorption in the shifting, fluid ambiance, that is, in the environment itself of the projection. The Mareorama “ship”could accommodate seven hundred spectators. Just’s double-­screen movement likewise relies on the scale of the gallery in which it is exhibited, and on a physically grandiose sense of space that stands for a wide, open notion of

empathic projection triggered in Just’s installation is the fact that this moving spectacle did not simply offer a perturbed virtual voyage but turned the space of display into a vehicle, just as This Nameless Spectacle lays bare the projective dispositif that turns the gallery space into a moving vessel, while making it into a vehicle of atmospheric perturbations.

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the spectatorial space of projection. The Mareorama ultimately magnified the sensory impact of viewing an environment in atmospheric change; following its currents, Just’s own liquid mode of exhibition activates this ambient “sense” of display in installation form in its own empathic projection. Finally, what makes the Mareorama a particular point of reference for the NAPOLEONIC SCALE

Because the Mareorama combined scale of display with movement—­promoting the incorporation of the visitor into the act of screening and mobilizing the vessel of reception—­this experimental exhibitionary practice can be considered an actual prototype of the moving-­image installation form. It prefigures the very space of this projective environment. Although the mechanism itself faded away in time, other, experimental forms of cinematic exhibition later attempted to reproduce or reinvent imaginative forms of moving display in order to push the geometric limit of the screen and challenge its frontality. This Nameless Spectacle comes into being today in the context of this history of experimental forms of screening that display an environmentality. Its use of multiple screens in panoramic form emerges from the rich terrain of projective experimentation

that has characterized an architectural, geographic conception of cinematic exhibition over the years. In the history of film, a prototype of the experimental return of panoramic exhibition dates back to 1927, when the French director Abel Gance filmed and projected a portion of his epic Napoleon (fig. 6.5), using a process called Polyvision. Here Gance adapted the magnitude of the precinematic, panoramic form of exhibition to the making and display of a full-­length feature film. His interest in technological and artistic innovation resulted in a form of screening that cinematically reenacted the spatiovisual effects of the moving panorama. That gigantic visual display of horizontal screening found new form here. With Polyvision, the director experimented with using several projectors to simulate for the audience the sensation of immersion in the moving space of the narrative as well

6.5 Multiscreen projection of Abel Gance’s Napoleon, 1927. Film still.

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as in the ambiance. Originally intended for six screens, Napoleon ended up using three to magnificent results. Adjacent screens ran sequences shot simultaneously by a three-­camera system, as well as different scenes projected contiguously, to give the actual sensation of a moving panorama. With Napoleon, Gance used the conjunction of the screens to mobilize the very scene of projection and convey a flowing multiplicity, thus activating the diffracted mode of a continuously expansive panorama. Just’s use of double-­screen projection is precisely of this Napoleonic magnitude, for the large scale of the projection drives the multiform effect of the work. The artist adopts the same impressive aspect ratio that Gance’s panoramic spectacle employed, 4:1. In This Nameless Spectacle, however, he takes magnification to another level of technological scale, rebuilding the architecture of the screen in digital format. The act of screening becomes magnified as the expanded screen of the panorama takes gigantic digital shape. Just does not strictly concern himself with enlarging the human figure on his screens but rather enhances the scale of an ambiance. He extends the idea of magnification beyond the realm of the face and the close-­up, which,

as Mary Ann Doane has argued, are more prevalent ways of understanding scale in film history.19 Here, it is more the natural and the built environment that are magnified, and connected, in a form of projection that includes internal movements. In this projective space, two different registers of space, their perturbations, and several discordant rhythms of atmosphere can take place simultaneously. In digitally mobilizing the panorama, the representational content of which also ranged historically from landscape to urban settings, Just appears to have learned a fundamental lesson from Gance about the relation between scale and disjunction. For Gance, the expansive effect of panoramic viewing resulted from working not simply on the screen but especially in that space that constitutes the juncture of the projective screens. Just adopts this particular mode of panoramic magnification and takes it further, for he works not only between but across the screens. This Nameless Spectacle is an experiment in the atmosphere of spatial scale and panoramic transmission, which strives to build an unconventional narrative space and, in so doing, mobilizes the spectatorial position, creating in the process a challenge for the viewer.

D I S A B L I N G T H E S P E C T A T O R , E N A B L I N G N E W - ­O L D D I S P L A Y

The relationship between the two giant facing screens in This Nameless Spectacle becomes a crucial factor in the experience of viewing the work, because in this postcinematic mareorama the narrative also takes place in the transitive space of an “in-­between.” As spectators, we are caught between a sea of images that not only flow on two screens simultaneously but also ricochet across in the intermediate space between the screens. Caught in this tidal wave that spans the two screen entities, we end up rocking between the elements of the story and between its various points of view. In this digital mareorama, we navigate a narrative movement that, at some point, as we enter an urban environment,

ambiguously takes the form of a pursuit and makes us seasick with various motions of emotions. The installation’s journey through the park takes a dramatic turn when we see the major character of the film, an attractive middle-­aged woman, exit the park, pursued by a younger man. He follows her into an urban scene of apartment blocks where she and he live opposite each other, initiating a range of affects and responses on her part. The ambiguous relation between the two engages feelings ranging from the unsettling to the possibly seductive and erotic; these in turn become tinged by inquisitiveness and even concern and empathy, as if what is at stake is a revelation of the dynamic of the woman’s inner self. Marie-­France Garcia,

the iconic transgender singer and actress, who notably acted in the stage version of Marguerite Duras’s Le Navire Night in 1979, plays the woman. In Just’s video projection, she “tracks” through the romantic scenery of the park, confined to a wheelchair that she is nonetheless able to rise and walk away from as soon as she enters her apartment, sited in the particular urban situation of large postwar building complexes. Just’s insistence on narrative ambiguity draws us away from attempting to reason logically with any plot line or with the woman’s choices, leaving us instead to ponder what the device makes us see, or rather how it makes us see the surrounding environment. Just employs the wheelchair as the site of an (im) mobility, not unlike the way Rebecca Horn used it in her film Buster’s Bedroom (1990). In Horn’s film, the character of Mrs. Daniels, played by Geraldine Chaplin, is an ex-­diver and professional swimmer who gives up her bodily mobility to embrace the mechanical mo-

tion of the wheelchair. She has not actually lost the use of her legs, and might at any time leave her wheelchair and walk, but she does not. Despite the differences between the two works, both tackle the profound relationship between mobility and immobility that is central to the cinematic situation and the filmic experience of projection.20 They make us confront the fact that while a film travels and tracks around, the spectator is confined to one place, enraptured in a special kind of journey. This is a voyage that takes us out of place, that deterritorializes us without taking us out of a room, for in the cinema one goes away and comes back while remaining in the same chair. The spectatorial seat then, might be said to be a kind of prosthesis of mobility, a wheelchair of sorts. Because this is Garcia’s point of view in Just’s installation, the gesture virtually puts us, too, in her place. By asking the viewer to assume this position, Just questions the nature of the cinematic experience. The

6.6  Jesper Just, This Nameless Spectacle, 2011. Two screen stills from the video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin, Paris/New York.

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artist thus achieves a gesture of mobility that equally attempts to “disable” the spectator, or, rather, his or her place within cinematic conventions. This includes the destabilizing use of what is known in film language as suture. As defined by film theorist Kaja Silverman, “cinematic suture” refers to the situation in which “films are articulated and the viewing subject spoken by means of interlocking shots.”21 Central to this articulation is the work of editing, with its cutting and excluding, and in particular the formation of the shot–­ reverse shot, which reveals the existence of an absent field. In the work of suture, the spectator occupies what, in psychoanalytic terms, is a lack, an absence, a missing field. In This Nameless Spectacle, the man and the transgender actress lock gazes in the pursuit of desire, a gesture that takes place across the windows of their respective apartments in the urban complex, but they do not do this while inhabiting the same screen. Because their different fields of vision, angles, and points of view are kept on separate screens, the register of the relationship between the shots, the dynamic of shot–­reverse shot, and the crosscutting occur in the void inhabited by the installation viewer. This Nameless Spectacle concretely engages the absent field of the spectator, who holds the desire and the power of the interlocking mechanism. The “suture” of the image, then, shifts away from the gaze and toward that space that the spectator inhabits across screen space. The interlocking of the images essentially passes through our bodies, which register the waves of suspense in the pursuit and the passing of sexual desires that transit in many forms on, between, and across the screens. Ultimately, the waves of the montage fill and traverse the large,

empty space of the gallery, which becomes the site of a real crosscurrent. In the situation in which the frontality of the screen is defied by the use of two screens facing each other, the work of suture thus takes a mareoramic turn and becomes architecturally constructed as a spectatorial movement across active planar fields. In this sense, the space of the art gallery constitutes a real part of the installation, and the persona of the gallery viewer becomes, quite poignantly, “installed.” In Just’s installation, the viewer, who dwells in the breach between the two screens and in crossover space, tracks not only the physical motion of the two characters but the affective, mental movement that attracts them or sets them apart. This Nameless Spectacle magnifies the scale of Just’s interest in ambiance as a vessel for the flow of sentiments, and as a trigger of affects that defy convention. In his moving-­image installations, the artist always creates works of atmosphere, navigating our journeys with image and sound through the tactility of affect and the motion of emotion. His moody films and evocative soundscapes have been described aptly as “geographies of tenderness.”22 After all, this is an artist who staged a materialization of a carte de tendre in his trilogy of works from 2008, A Voyage in Dwelling, A Room of One’s Own, and A Question of Silence.23 Having traveled and dwelt in imaginative geographies for some time, Just easily sails into This Nameless Spectacle, where even affective ranges can become magnified not only in but as ambiance. In this atmospheric mode, the very site of exhibition guides the navigation of affects. Displayed here is a virtual form of “transport” in gallery space that is as haptic as it is affecting.

A N O C E A N I C V O YA G E F R O M P O S T C I N E M A T O P R E C I N E M A

If the art gallery can become a place of transport, it is because Jesper Just is used to “driving” the spectator, and driving visitors to his installations into affecting ambient situations; that is, he impels

viewers to ride the atmospheric waves. This extends to the way the artist self-­reflexively treats the atmosphere of projection. In Sirens of Chrome (2010), which preceded This Nameless Spectacle, he makes

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us drive around to visit the grandiose space of an old movie theater, now in ruins and adapted to use as a parking garage. In the course of the drive, the artist transforms the majestic old architecture of the movie palace into a novel site of mobilized spectatorship. Here, the frame of the car’s windshield becomes a renewed, mobile screen. This moving-­ image installation is practically a reinvented drive-­in movie theater. Continuing this mode of spectatorial transport in This Nameless Spectacle by riding the waves of motion across two screens, Just transports us further back into the rocky space of a history of geovisual culture. In the end, This Nameless Spectacle does have a name, for this moving double-­screen form of projection is indeed a contemporary remake of that Mareorama on whose boat viewers became passengers. A product of the digital age, this installation reminds us that haptic virtuality first became embodied in the spectacle of the moving panorama when it appeared on the surface of scrolling screens.

Just’s installation returns us to that historically dynamic, multiple form of ambient display without, however, reproducing the construction literally. He does not exhibit the actual machine or mechanism that is at the origin of the work but rather incorporates the scale of the Mareorama and its movement across screens in the physical spatiality of the installation, which encompasses the transit of viewers in gallery space. In this sense, the installation does not follow the trend of display that has been spreading since the arrival of the digital age, in which artists have taken to exhibiting outmoded forms of visual technology in the gallery. Just does not belabor the obsolescence of the cinematic apparatus or its panoramic predecessor or show any sense of nostalgia for older forms of display. This Nameless Spectacle rather works at historicizing from within, reinventing the possibilities of screening expressed by the moving, modern mode of ambient display that gave rise to the cinematic era of projection.

6.7  A panoramic view of projections in Stereorama. La Nature, no. 1408, May 19, 1900.

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Just offers us a compelling postcinematic interpretation of a precinematic space of exhibition by joining the natural and the urban in an experiment concerning magnified display.24 On this screen interface, the turn of the last century joins the beginning of the new millennium in a reflection on the environment of projection and the ecology of the image. This work links together the energy of potentiality that characterized the idea of display in early modernity with the potential expressed today by the rise of

digital technology. The artist not only shows us how central the environment of projection is in our time but argues that the desire for geographic display is truly enduring. Ultimately, This Nameless Spectacle demonstrates how the architecture of the screen has traveled across time in projection while exhibiting the screen itself as an environment, even an ambient architecture—­the atmospheric form in which cine-­ projection emerges, comes into being, and can even dissolve.

PROJECTING A GLOBAL URBAN SCALE

The manner in which the atmosphere of both natural and urban environments is “screened” in moving-­ image installation, and the way in which it becomes “projected” across time and space, are central concerns for Just, and this goes beyond the ambient construction of This Nameless Spectacle. With Intercourses, a large-­scale, multichannel video and installation that premiered at the 2013 Venice Biennale, the artist turned the contemporary global scale of the urban environment into the main protagonist, or performer, of the work of projection. Reflecting on how a pavilion at the Biennale represents a country inside another country, Just engaged the architectural configuration of this conflated projection and intervened in the site of the Danish Pavilion, itself a composite structure. By walling in the grand entrance of the building’s neoclassic façade, he enticed viewers to walk around the colonnade and enter instead through a courtyard, which ushered them inside the modernist part of the pavilion. Here, the interior space had been transformed into a construction site. Walls built from concrete cinder blocks created another architectural path within the already hybrid space of the pavilion. The rough, impermanent fabrication of the concrete blocks lent a sense of eeriness to the site: though it appeared to be a place in the making, it felt as if it were already in ruins. In constructing an installation space that evoked the atmosphere of a ruin in progress, Just made material the

layered process inherent in the imaginary fabrication of such sites, closely engaging their imaginative “projections.” The large scale of the five projections inside the pavilion reinforced this hybrid imaging of space by heightening the feeling of cultural dislocation. This five-­channel video installation (fig. 6.8) is set in a suburb of Hangzhou, China, that has been built as a replica of Paris, France—­a place that people inhabit, in states of construction that evoke decay. In this composite setting that is the site of imaginary projections, we follow three black men in a meandering, interwoven narrative that connects them psychically, via the space, in an atmospheric way. The camera lingers on barren places and empty streets, surveying uninhabited façades and unfinished staircases that lead nowhere. The black-­and-­white photography and an eerie sound that evokes sweeping winds together create a moody, postapocalyptic ambiance, adding a quasi–­science fiction dimension to what is actually a real space. This Paris imagined in China is not simply shown here but rather appears to perform itself on the five screens. The screens of these projected images work together with the architectural design of the installation to instill in us a concrete sense of how a global urban imaginary is made, and what scale this process has assumed. What is performed and projected here is an image of space that is in a state of becoming—­a state that contains processes of transformation, dislocation, hybridization, and even entropy.

Intercourses is named after that which lies in between: things like connections and exchanges or processes of interstitial construction. In other words, it deals with the actual process of projection as we have been defining it: that is, in terms of connective relations and intermedial spaces. In this projective sense, the work follows the course of Just’s profound interest in both spatial intersections and in the imagistic, spectatorial constructions of the projective space. The work particularly extends his penchant for offering the viewer the possibility of inhabiting environments of projection that create an imaginary

landscape; for Just, as we have shown, creates works of atmosphere, often navigating our journeys with image and sound through the motion of emotion. His moody imagery and evocative soundscapes traverse a territory that is never too far from projection understood as psychogeography. In both This Nameless Spectacle and Intercourses, in fact, the projection site itself is a magnified psychogeography, for the very magnitude of the exhibition space drives a navigation of atmospheres, engaging viewers in the scale of the projective ambiance in which they are themselves projected.

6.8  Jesper Just, Intercourses, 2013. Installation view, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, December 17, 2017–­March 11, 2018. Five-­channel video installation, black and white. Photo © Studio Hans Wilschut.

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SCALING

As screens become increasingly incorporated into both our private and public lives, the work of scalar reinterpretation that Just pursues becomes particularly significant, for a reinvention of the act of screening in the environment is especially pressing today. Screens proliferate in widely different forms in our surroundings. They have decreased in size, becoming more portable: computers, smart phones, and iPads, which enable us to scroll haptically, now travel with us at all times as our personal panoramas. The rise of the miniature form goes hand in hand with magnification. In contrast to the shrinking size of our personal screens, we are witnessing an increasing use of the gigantic as screens have become especially magnified in the spectacle of three-­dimensional exhibition. Digital technology has enlarged the possibilities of projection in expanded cinematic form. Large-­scale panoramic forms of projection, such as LED video walls, proliferate and have changed the very panorama of the city, creating a veritable urban screen, or rather screenscape.25 The technique of 3-­D projection mapping, in particular, can turn an entire building or landscape into a screen.26 Heirs of the atmospheres of son et lumière shows, and of modernity’s dioramas and panoramic spectacles, these magnified projections design a performative environment. A haptic, immersive urban landscape is digitally fashioned as the façade of an edifice turns into a projective skin. Cities are punctuated by these seductive large-­scale projective envelopes that create ambiance. In projection mapping, a two-­or three-­dimensional object is spatially mapped by using specialized software that mimics the real environment it is to be projected upon. This software can interact with a projector to fit any desired image onto any surface, small or large. The idea of an environment of projection thus risks becoming literalized. If the ambiance of projection is remapped in a reductive way, the notion of ambient media itself shrinks. The effects of media

façades created in literal ways are often questionable, as “ambient” begins to take on environmental connotations that are pacifying and not far removed from commerce.27 After all, large-­scale projection mapping is mostly used, contiguously with artistic and urban-­branding pursuits, by publicity and advertising firms. Basking in the glow of giant projections can lead to opiate effects or the simple encouragement of consumption as opposed to the production of engagement and perturbation. As the ambiance of projection is being transformed by digital technology, artists are increasingly responding creatively and critically to these issues of the sculptural and panoramic scale of projection. Just, for instance, reflected upon how large-­scale projection transforms the urban environment with the projection of his Servitudes (2015), a cinematic, architectural work consisting of eight sequences filmed in and around the World Trade Center in New York. Originally conceived for the subterranean gallery space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, this filmic work was scaled up in November 2015 and displayed on a series of large electronic billboards on the building façades of New York’s Times Square. In 2019, the same work was also projected onto layers of semitransparent fabric in yet another geographic location, in museum space—­a fact that makes one question the function of scaling as well as further reflect on the nature, location, and fabric of projection.28 Just also has adopted LED screens in ways that question a simplistic use of video walls. For his 2020 exhibition Corporealités (fig. 6.9), he explored the potential of this form of projection and pushed the sculptural edge of this type of screen. Five mural-­sized sculptural screens were positioned in the bright white space of the Perrotin gallery in New York, enacting a play between screen and environment of projection.29 Because the advanced LED screen technology that Just employs enables projection to occur without dark-

ening the space, the gallery did not need to transform itself into a black cube to host moving-­image projections. As a result, one had the impression that the luminous white surface of the gallery walls had been transformed into the enveloping, pristine white canvas of a screen. In this white environment of projection, the sculptural LED screen-­objects are themselves reconfigured. Sections are cut out from the main body of the large screens, and either laid down on the floor or perilously hung, all the while continuing to project images. As the screen body is anatomized in this way, the analytic sectioning reveals the projective mechanisms that are

embedded, or actually embodied and incorporated within the LED screens, and also exposes the electrical cables that power the projections. In this way, Just reinforces his penchant for “empathic” projection, for, as we have noted, this process is set in motion when works lay bare their own projective mechanism. On these large corporeal digital screens, classical dancers are seen in costume, hanging in space, stilled. They are being watched as they react to electrical impulses that are sent to their bodies by electrodes, which provoke them to jolt. In Corporealités, then, the body images on the screen body are electrified as the electric mechanism of projection is itself exposed. The

6.9  Jesper Just, Corporealités, 2020. Installation view, Perrotin, New York, 2020. LED panels, multichannel video, sound, steel, and cement; placement of LED, speakers, and concrete components variable. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin, New York.

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installation thus creates a vibrant atmosphere—­one that feels both current and historic. Watching these large-­scale LED projections, we are reminded of the pioneering experiments in bioelectromagnetics performed by Luigi Galvani, which revealed the existence of electricity in the body, and of the path of research on electrodynamics and electromagnetism that we have traced, with its own atmospheric currents of energy. The nature of this projection, that is, materializes the “impulses” that turned electromagnetic waves into X-­rays and other forms of screening, including ways of screening affects.30 Using large-­scale advanced LED technology, Just thus gives “corporeality” to the very electric impulses that made projection possible, taking the pulse of how they permeated the history of the atmosphere of projection, albeit reinventing it in a contemporary, experimental way. Such experiments on the vast projective potential of digital technology thus force us to rethink the issue of large-­scale projection in light of its own complex history. It is particularly urgent to ask ourselves questions about the nature and consequences of scaling. What happens when we scale? How does this change the nature of the screen itself as an object? With what kinds of projection, understood as forms of cultural transmission, does magnification comport? We have seen how Just’s earlier work This Nameless Spectacle interrogates the architecture of the projective screen as a cultural, material, and sculptural object and exhibits it as an object of a mediatic transmission that resonates across geographic, historical, and stylistic spaces. When This Nameless Spectacle explores the “mareoramic” function of projective scale, laying bare its empathic mechanism, it exposes a current of energy that connects the history of precinema to postcinema, as does Corporealités, with its own way of engaging magnified technologies of screening. Intercourses also confronts the technology of magnification and especially investigates the question of scaling in contemporary digital culture. As it portrays the composite urban environment of a Paris-­in-­China suspended between

states of ruin and construction, this work offers projections that can vary radically in size, from one to fifteen meters, depending on the site of the installation. In this sense, it engages the different forms of screen scale that proliferate in our digital environment. In this work of scalar construction, the diverse spatial configurations of its five screens make a difference, for they generate further geographic dislocation through their differing positions in space and angles of view. As the screens create a dialogue of spatial projection with the concrete walls, the gallery viewer, made aware of their objecthood and sculptural presence in the space, becomes especially attuned to their change in scale. In laying bare the projective mechanism, Just triggers a critical response to the cultural phenomenon of variable screen size, making us reflect on how miniaturization relates to magnification in digital culture. By confronting what happens in the process of scaling up or down, from one size to the other, he creates cultural awareness of the state of screening today while exhibiting the process itself of flexible projection. Furthermore, for Just, large scale does not consist in simple magnification. The magnitude of the largest screen in Intercourses, rather, challenges the conventional use of magnitude in film.31 Less associated with figurative facial close-­ups, as in the cinema, it is more attuned to the vastness and complexity of the geographic and cultural landscapes it renders. Scale is here also anything but monumental and does not constitute a direct correlate of the sublime. Rather than monumentalizing its own objecthood, the large scale of the projection takes the gallery viewer into an ambiguous affective and cognitive space that asks for attentive, almost contemplative absorption. This process of absorption in scale is also notable because it leads to deciphering the geographic hybridity of the site. After all, wandering through a look-­ alike Paris with French actors of African descent, one could easily believe that this is in fact Paris—­and that would be an acceptable response. But if, galvanized by the scale of the large screen, the installation viewer

paradigms, and also engage the panoramic form of exhibition as an environment. In a compelling way, Lisa Reihana also questioned the scale and atmosphere of projection at the New Zealand Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale with her large-­scale installation In Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015–­17), for which she reinvented the giant form of the panoramic spectacle in scrolling digital fashion. Inspired by the French scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804–­5), the installation created a large-­scale panorama in which real and invented narratives of colonial encounter take place. This work took the very surface of a panoramic wallpaper and made it into an animated, moving surface of unfolding projection. Here, videographic and animation technologies contribute to a reimagination of the nineteenth-­century shape of the moving panorama while probing its historical and ideological dimensions. In Reihana’s reinterpretation of this mode, history is not only displayed but scrolls out and drifts along panoramically, in a critical reading that questions the very form of its spectacular, colonial projections. In the face of digitally expanded magnification and the return of the spectacular phenomenon of large-­ scale panoramic projection, one can only welcome the kind of environmental research that motivates Jesper Just and Lisa Reihana, for this is a critical exploration that is aimed at excavating, and exhibiting, the layers that underlie the history itself of visual display, its media culture, and the culture that it transmits and circulates in the environment. Only if we are put in a position to experience the cultural movement that links scale to screening in its multifaceted historicity can we hope to redefine the terms of, and give a new name to, this particular spectacle: the milieu itself of projection.

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scans the surface, and “screens” the space closely, she can sense that something is off: the urban scale here is quite different than that of Paris. As one tunes in to surface, scale, and atmosphere, scanning the big screen, and further notices the presence of Chinese inscriptions or too many air conditioners dotting the building façades, one can finally understand how, working with and against architecture, inhabitants of this replica of Paris in China, located in the district of Tianducheng, adapt the space to their own use. In Intercourses, then, Just enhances scale as a geography, detecting defining nuances in ambient projection and working with dimension in culturally affecting ways. He furthermore conceives the composition of the large screen, and its installation, in ways that defy the simple effect of immersive viewing, for here immersion is not understood to produce virtual illusion or presence but, rather, spatial awareness.32 As was the case in This Nameless Spectacle, or in Corporealitiés, the artist works specifically against the hyperrealistic and spectacular use of magnification, reminding us that, as Susan Stewart suggested, “the gigantic” is a particularly enveloping notion.33 For Just, it even functions as an environmental modality. These installations invite close discernment of the surrounding space and engage contact with the larger environment. They resist using scale as a building block to create virtual monuments and, working with movement and active screening, also resist the mere sense of awe associated with boundless magnitude. In other words, Just is an artist who does not fall into the trap of large projection as mere manifestation of a technological sublime. Jesper Just’s critical investigation of this pressing subject finds correspondence in the practices of other artists who are attentive to scale, reconfigure scalar

7.1  Cristina Iglesias, Passage de coure (Copper Passage), 2004. Permanent installation, Barcelona International Convention Center (CCIB), Barcelona. Braided wrought iron, 492⅛ × 98⅜ ft. (seventeen screens: 42⅝ × 29½ ft. each). Photo: Kristien Daem. Courtesy of the artist.

7

The Thickness of Projection Cristina Iglesias’s Weathered Screen Casts

T The canvas as a whole—­the window, wall, plate, table, fruit, draperies, scattered towels—­could serve as a screen, poster, leaf or veil: a patterned curtain, a tattoo, like the skin.—Michel Serres1

he framed world of the artist Cristina Iglesias is a place of thresholds, suspended in a state of ambient transition. Here, textural sculptures are built in imaginative dialogue with architecture and the environment, exposing their materialities and temporalities. Made of materials that suggest a metamorphosis of live states, the works appear to live, breathe, and die in the atmosphere, constantly reacting to its agents. Even when not organic, they seem to be in the process of transforming their own states of matter. Ambient forms of living, environmental morphoses, these artworks call for fluid forms of inhabitation. Even when they apparently prevent gallery-­or museumgoers from physically entering them, they offer a virtual, visual form of access to their material construction. They are like doors—­portals—­that invite the visitor to cross boundaries, including limits between interior and exterior. Upon accessing these framed architectures, one encounters atmospheric spaces, often in the form of imaginary rooms that are carefully partitioned or visually layered. Iglesias provides us a medium with which to open up and, at the same time, curtain off space—­an effect of visual mediation that might be called a “screening” of space. Without using any technique of projection, she creates a potential screen for the viewer, in the widest possible understanding of that term, especially in relation to architecture, ambiance, and the projection of moving images.2 She offers a filter, a partition, a veil:

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an ambient surface on which to experience different dimensions of space and transfigurations of time. Opening up the inner doors of experience, the artist invites us to traverse places imaginatively and to screen them intimately, especially by way of light and atmospheric agents. Let us, then, walk into this luminous

environment of atmospheric materiality. On display will be sites that are densely coated, elaborately textured, and even weathered like an organism. And if we look closely, on the ambient surface of this imaginary screen-­ environment a perceptual ecology, and even a psychic architecture, will come to light.

SCREEN ARCHITECTURE

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. . . . [But] there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.—Robert Musil3

A journey of inner exploration begins the moment we encounter this form of sculpture, which does not conceive of space as simply contextual or treat architecture or the environment as a corollary. Space 7.2  Cristina Iglesias, Jardin de Behuliphruen, 2001. Installation view, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2003. Photo: Kristien Daem. Courtesy of the artist.

is the work here, and one must become aware of its different planes of existence. The artist underscores this idea of multiple planarity and environmental commitment when she says, “I am interested in making

with, to be negotiated both physically and metaphorically. Acting not only as interstices but also as intersections and intervals, they play on notions of the edge and the boundary, questioning the relationship of plane to perimeter as they section space. As they virtually partition space in this way, Iglesias’s works exude a tangible sense of surface materiality. Everything happens on the surface here. We are encompassed in layers of ambient space, sensuously immersed in atmospheric coatings. The sculptures are so sensorially attached to enfolding, overlaid surface that they resemble envelopes, and even evoke the feel of shells. The material surface is as embracing and porous as the encircling layer of an atmosphere or the envelope that is skin. In this epidermic sense as well, Iglesias’s sculptures can be called screens. They are tangible interfaces. Here, one senses the “superficial” intersection of inside-­outside that links face to façade, our body to environment.

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pieces that are sensitive to the space they occupy.”4 The sculptures Iglesias makes engage the perceptual surfaces of the walls they are pinned against, the shapes of the ceilings they are suspended from, or the configuration of the ground they rest upon. The architectural wall activates her inner walls, its geometry either responding to her own gridded geometry or forming a counterpoint to her arches and vaults. These topophilic spaces are makeshift dwellings and temporary shelters. They produce mutable, intimate frames of inhabitation, with doors of access that shift borders between inside and outside.5 In this interstitial way, as they create a “dooring,” the works function in a specific architectonic and atmospheric way as imaginary screens. In architecture, a screen is essentially a framed surface that creates a filtering of space, a function that includes providing a visual shield. Iglesias’s artworks present themselves as screens in that they are partitions for us to contend

7.3  René Burri, Mexico City, Tlalpan. Chapel of the Capuchinas Sacramentarias del Purísimo Corazón de María (1954–­60) by Luis Barragán, 1969. Photo © René Burri/Magnum Photos.

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At times, a literal screen is used to create this sense of ambient materiality. Such is the case for the series of works named celosías (latticework, or jalousies), which the artist produced from the 1990s into the first decade of the 2000s. These are chambers delimited by intricate wooden latticework that resembles the grid of an architectural screen. As viewers, we are surrounded in these pieces by an elaborate structure composed entirely of walls constructed as screens. The grilles of the sculptures carry with them the carved shapes of Moorish architecture, which employs the gridded screens of mashrabiy’ya and celosía as doors for rooms and cabinets, dividers, and window screens. In the sculptures, the latticed grid filters the ambient light and functions as a louvered shelter, mediating the atmospheric relationship between exterior and interior space. To compound the effect of ambient passage, Iglesias has positioned these screens in various environments, with which they interact, including outdoor gardens and even underwater settings.

The artist uses the gridded pattern in sculptural ways much in the manner of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, who sculpted with natural light in his buildings and, as the artist James Casebere emphasizes in his photographs (fig. 7.6), used latticed screens, stained glass, and effects of translucency to screen outdoor light, both inward and outward.6 In similar ways, Iglesias constructs gridded structures that double the sense in which the celosías function as screens. These jalousies are not only shutters that filter and act upon the surrounding light but also partitions that shape our sense of space and curtain its borders; in other words, they function architecturally as actual screens, which not only make but change ambiance. Moreover, the structures question the enclosure of walling with the notion of “aperture” and shelter, and thus change the way in which we conceive the function of a wall. Iglesias portrays a wall that is not a barrier but is as open as a door. This is a wall that is a filmic aperture, as light as a screen, itself a form of “dooring.”

AMBIENT SCREENS

A complex material fabrication of ambiance is felt here, inscribed in the fabric of Iglesias’s imaginary screen architectures. This screen is a medium that renders porous the relationship between the world and us, acting as an atmospheric mediator. And in mediating a haptic, sensorial experience that engages the relation of outer and inner space at a deep level, it includes the dimension of time and the flow of memory. The celosías craft a material souvenir of the way in which the latticed screen has negotiated the temporality of private and public space in historical Arabic-­ Hispanic architecture. And when considered in the context of Iglesias’s oeuvre, they convey an even wider sense of mnemonic flow. As art historian Nancy Princenthal has shown, Iglesias creates veritable “screen memories,” in the expansive perceptual sense in which a screen creates an inherent “substitution of physical

for visual access.”7 For Iglesias, the screen is the kind of blind that can protect and shield, enabling access to layers of time and even to unconscious temporal states. The permeable, fragmentary architectural surface exudes the melancholic feel of a ruin or even of organism and life decomposing. And thus the screen-­portals open up experiences of memory that are lived space. This screen space can hold and transmit fragments of existence that are not only lived but imagined, and furthermore “projected.” The term celosía suggests an emotional form of projection, referring as it does to a wordplay that exists in Spanish, English, French, and Italian between the emotion of “jealousy” and the louvered structure of a jalousie screen. Iglesias gives her latticed architectures this ambiguous name, intentionally using a term that both denotes a screen and connotes an affect. In this sense, her “jalousies” are to

2000s. Suspended celosías, these sculptural pieces are also framed spaces, dynamic configurations, and forms of atmospheric passage that invite mental itineraries. On these grilled, transitive surfaces, nimble modes of inhabitation can take place, and can also turn into emotional journeys. Projections that are forms of material imagination—­states of “environmentality”—­ are held on the surface of these suspended ceilings and pavilions that are designed as ambient screens. In these peripatetic installations, modes of shelter and dwelling are released from the status of enclosed, fixed structures and become portable architectures. They too turn into movable screens. The viewer who becomes a passenger in these sculptural installations is encouraged to explore uncharted forms of experience of the environment.8 And over the course of this atmospheric journey between inside and outside, empathy with space and relational possibilities of encounter with others materializes. The screen surfaces invite subjects to engage in the kind of transport that is an empathic projection and an intersubjective transfer. Such relational opportunities are inscribed in the very “surface of design,” because, as Jacques Rancière puts it, “distributing surfaces, one also designs partitions that enable one to partake in communal space, . . . configurations of what can be seen and what can be thought, forms of inhabiting the material world.”9 As she constructs the actual materiality of screen architecture, Iglesias ultimately makes walls that are profoundly movable materials: partitions that do not part space but make it intimately participatory.

“A T M O S P H E R I C S C R E E N I N G ” : T R A N S L U C E N C Y

As Cristina Iglesias turns walls into screens, insisting that viewers participate in the transformative, projective act of screening space and time, her unstable screen architectures become veritable thresholds. Her porous, framed architectural surfaces act as screens

especially in the sense that they convey a psychic passage that is dependent on atmospheric agents such as light. This is particularly evident in her use of the celosías, whose geometric patterns filter light in a way that, quite literally, screens it. In this specif-

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be understood as a particular kind of screening device: the site of display of mental conditions, the projection of emotional states. These screen surfaces do not simply name an affect but rather become affective. They are doors that enable imaginary access into the architecture of interiority. Iglesias’s architectural forms repartition the design of the interior, rendering it more fluid. As happens on a cinematic screen of projection, on the theatrical stage of the group of works titled Untitled (Jealousy), a passage occurs between motion and emotion. To experience walls that act as screens, the viewer must become an active spectator, moving through a shifting visual and sensorial space in order to be virtually moved. In the course of this physical journey, a psychic itinerary, with lines to be liminally crossed, unfolds in a flux that, reconfiguring boundaries of inside and outside, creates evolving atmospheres. In this ambient journey, the screen-­walls end up acting as emotional partitions to be crossed, affective refuges in which to dwell, mnemonic shelters in which to be enveloped, or even sentimental material from which to shield oneself. On these screen-­walls, as on actual cinematic screens, the motion of different emotions is harbored in transient ways. States of mind can shift and change in this spectatorial movement, for affects, which come to be displayed on the surface as atmospheres, are themselves a kind of screen and form of projection. In other works, too, Iglesias turns walls into doors of access to imaginary paths. Consider the design of the works in her series Suspended Corridor, Suspended Pavilion, or Passage, made in the first decade of the

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7.4  Cristina Iglesias, Alabaster Room, 1993. Installation view, Cristina Iglesias: Metonymy, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2013. Iron and alabaster; dimensions variable (six pieces: 98⅜ × 43¼ × 11¾ in. each). Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the artist.

ic ambient sense, the surfaces of these walls make one think closely of cinematic screens. After all, a film screen is composed of a material that is sensitive to light; it is essentially a luminous surface on which imaginary figures are projected. The play of light enacted in the space of Iglesias’s work strongly evokes the condition of being in a site of projection, in the presence of a screen. As we move through one

of the artist’s luminous architectural spaces, then, we are offered an experience that is fundamentally close to the environment of cine-­projection. In this work, we experience the screen as an object in space, in an almost pure material sense. As we marvel at the effects of light produced on and by the surface of the walls, we can reflect on the actual material that constitutes the screen as a surface of projec-

7.5  Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Anastasis (άνάστασις), 2018. Installation view, southeast side, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, 2018. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy of the artist and Oude Kerk.

7.6  The atmosphere of Luis Barragán’s 1977 Casa Gilardi in Mexico City, envisioned in James Casebere, Yellow Passage, 2017. Framed archival pigment print mounted to dibond paper, 44⅜ × 66½ in. Courtesy of the artist.

tion. The treatment of the architectural surface reveals to us the plastic quality of atmospheric luminosity that defines the cinematic screen. In this way, Iglesias makes visible to viewers a foundational yet elusive structure. In viewing cinema, the screen is often taken to be only the support for the image or a receptacle for figuration, a somewhat invisible architecture. Despite its ubiquity and ever-­increasing importance in our contemporary visual culture, the screen as an object in its own right, as an actual architecture endowed with scale and format, has long remained, with some excep-

tions, undertheorized in the history of film theory.10 As we engage Iglesias’s screen-­walls, however, we become more sensitive spectators and critics, more aware of how a screen functions architecturally, how an act of screening takes place and, most important, how it defines our environment. We exit the space sensitized to the primary, elemental projective surface that makes mediation and communication possible. The screen—­ that superficial object that constitutes a medium of transfer and transposition—­becomes materialized, and exposed as an atmospheric “element.”

the projection of an inner light. In this sense, Iglesias uses material translucency in the manner that recalls how Barragán created an inner ambiance of projection with his forms of screening that projected interiority. This is most evident in his Chapel for the Capuchinas Sacramentarias del Purísmo (1952–­55; see fig. 7.3), built in the Tlalpan neighborhood of Mexico City, where the light filters through a hidden latticed-­and-­stained-­glass panel to the side and a latticed window at the rear, as well as through a gridded screen the opens into an interior courtyard. The interior of the space is sparse, rigorously minimal in conception, and unadorned. As the sun rises, the light from the vertical stained-­glass window bathes the structure in rays of golden light, which are delicately diffused in the space and texturally reflected on the surface of a gold-­leaf altar, with different shades of intensity depending on the time of the day and the weather conditions. In this way, Barragán’s modernist fashioning of atmospheric screening produces an effect of reflective, meditative interiority that reprises the interior atmosphere produced by ancient alabaster windows. In addition to treating alabaster in a projective way, Iglesias herself finds means of producing atmospheric modes of screening by exploring the projective quality of translucency that different materials can convey. She has used amber glass in Untitled (Venice II), also from 1993, and is fond of creating both forms of reflection and layered, textured effects. The sculptor uses a variety of materials to make what curator Ulrich Loock calls an “interspace”: a space that is “modified by light filtered through stained glass or alabaster, by effects of light and shadow, the sheen of copper or aluminum, by photographic or ornamental representations of landscapes, architectures or her own works.”12 In this sense as well, her way of repartitioning space can create a projective screen environment. With her translucent play of light, Iglesias engages the architecture of cine-­

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Looking carefully at Iglesias’s work makes us see the screen as a specifically ambient architecture—­the luminous form on which filmic images come into being and are transmitted. This sense of surface luminosity that is foundational in the celosías marks many other of the spaces Iglesias constructs. If most of her works can be considered ambient screen architectures, it is because she explicitly cultivates, as she puts it, “the capacity of a translucent material to be a medium of light and to function as a screen.”11 In her architectural sculptures, she often works with materials that alchemically turn into luminous surfaces. This is the case with her use of alabaster, which strives to enhance the luminous semitransparency of the material, its dense translucency. She treats alabaster as if she wished epidermically to transform this solid, mineral material into a screen fabric. In Untitled (Alabaster Room) (1993; fig. 7.4), for example, the artist employs thin, translucent panels of alabaster, framed in iron, to stain the surrounding light. This and related works remind us of the screening effect produced by ancient alabaster windows, which filtered light as if in projection. The very material of an “atmospheric screening” comes to the surface here, as we feel in the presence of a tinted screen that is a perceptive veil. We are given the sense of how those ancient translucent windows, the progenitors of Iglesias’s alabaster canopy, were indeed early screens and, more importantly, enacted a process of screening before the age of mechanical reproduction made it technically possible. They functioned in an ambiance to produce modulations of atmosphere by way of shifting light far in advance of the technological invention of an act of screening. In other words, we sense the history of an ancient “projective” device at work, atmospherically. The material of alabaster, used before stained glass, offers a sense of light projection that diffusely pervades the atmosphere, affecting change. The ambient effect of Iglesias’s screening is such that it can even appear to be an interior illumination,

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projection as a place of luminous passage where transparency flirts with opacity. In this material sense, her sculptural interspaces activate a real

cinematic atmospheric “dimension” as they sensitize us to the material plasticity of screen space and the ambiance of projection.

T H E C U LT U R A L A T M O S P H E R E O F T H E A C T O F S C R E E N I N G

For Iglesias, the luminiferous material transference that is the medium of filmic screening, its atmosphere, becomes the partitioned materiality of luminous sculptural and architectural mediations. Her work, as a surface of design, returns us not only to the architectural plasticity of the screen as an object but also to its cultural and material history. This history, as we have seen, is even written into the morphing etymology of the word screen, which reveals that the term developed its meaning from architecture, where it defined a framed translucent surface or covered framework.13 A medium for screening light, the screen emerged in early modernity primarily from the material world of space, developing as an architecture of filtering of environmental conditions. Iglesias’s sculptural installations reference a particular ambient aspect of this history. The objecthood of her sculptural “screens” reminds us that what we now call screen, and understand to be a projective surface, did not come into being with the birth of cinema or even with protocinematic projections but originated much earlier, in the late Middle Ages, as the world of objects that were filtering structures, including various forms of window screens, partitions, and curtains, populated material space and defined interior design. The screen was a particular thing: an object of furniture, a domestic item that was used in interiors to engage exteriority. It especially acted to negotiate inside and outside, and transformed the atmosphere of a site with its filtering of light and air; that is to say, it created ambiance. When installed to divide private and public space or to make partitions for privacy and intimacy in the home, the folding screen presented itself as a framed surface often richly illustrated with im-

ages. Its quality of fabric emerged from its being also a form of window dressing. The screen was even more than a visual fabric, however. It was a piece of material culture, a matter of decoration and adornment. And this ornament could be ornate in many ways. There were portable versions of it in the form of “panorama hand-­screens” or even “mechanical screen fans,” which could respond to a personal ornamental desire and which often depicted moving atmospheric scenes.14 In its many configurations, the screen had a real plastic visibility, and yet it was an imaginary structure. Its material substance could lead into, and mediate, the dimension of the imagination. The screen, in this sense, was a veritable piece of “interior” design. It was this particular object of décor that made possible a visual, imaginary passage, and in so doing foreshadowed our current sense of what a screen is and what forms of “projection” it may potentially hold for the future. It is such an object that we find both reflected and projected in Iglesias’s own screen world. When encountering her celosías, in fact, we can experience at a tangible level precisely how the fabric of the screen—­its projective potential—­ stems from architectural ornament, and even from elaborate window dressing. The kind of screening exposed here is not about transparency, for it does not reference a clear, transparent glass surface. That is to say, it is not the mere “window onto the world” that is sometimes conceived as the function of the film screen. This body of work, rather, reminds us that window screens are exposed to the outside elements, and react to them. They are not only sensitive to atmosphere but themselves become agents in interacting with the environment. In this sense,

ward, because of their capacity to create passage.19 If the screen can function as a transitive element in this sense it is because it can enhance a relational quality, as we have argued, that is potentially inherent in an act of projective screening. A screen space can even create community and forms of “commoning,” as Jacqueline Jung puts it in her book Gothic Screens, because of “the communion it allows, of visual stimuli, or of air circulation, or sounds and smells.”20 In this sense, the gridded screen and latticed glass window-­screens, used to create atmosphere in communal settings, can be said to “project” forward the secular communal atmosphere of cine-­projection. Iglesias’s celosías are themselves transitive structures for the way in which they haptically mediate the alteration of light and air, the modulation of smell and sound, in the creation of sensuous atmospheres for the community of viewers that pass through these screen-­doors. As ethereal luminosity is filtered through the grille of thin wooden partitions, it becomes palpable in the surrounding space. Different kinds of “elements” come into play here, as these kinds of screens are sensorially connected to weather and time as well as suggestive of the complex intercultural links that historically developed around the gridded screen pattern. In this environmental light, the latticed screen form exposes a thick structure of both material and historical intersections, with intricate patterns of relations and connections. In other words, it exhibits a number of cultural projections. Insofar as it represents a folding cultural technique, the display of celosías thus constitutes a real projective architecture.

F O R M AT I O N S O F “ E N V I R O N M E N TA L I T Y ”

Even beyond her use of celosías, it is evident that many other of Iglesias’s works fold together architecture, interior design, and cinematic elements in translucent forms of ambient, even truly environ-

mental projection. She has a way of curtaining and veiling space with luminous, moody modulations that can make three-­dimensional, architectural sculptures into a phantasmic atmospheric architec-

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Iglesias’s installations reproduce the actual ambiance of screening. They activate the subtle atmospheric shift that a screen device can provide when it acts as a mediator and as an active atmospheric agent. In particular, these works refashion not only the shape but the function of the Moorish window screen. They rebuild the act of screening provided by the Arabic mashrabiy’ya that translates into the Spanish version of celosía—­the latticed structure used since the twelfth century to negotiate interior and exterior space.15 Acting from the outside in and the inside out, this type of screen creates a special atmosphere by allowing light and air to penetrate and circulate into the house. Light appears woven through the latticework of the jalousie as if through a veil. Air transpires together with other atmospheric elements. This kind of screen does not simply filter luminosity and diffuse breaths of air but, in crossing spatial boundaries, also provides shelter, in shade and ventilation. It can create a “curtained” space, a form of privacy, especially for women, who can see out without being seen.16 This atmospheric screen can even “project” a mood, a sense of intimacy, as it produces a cool, calm, meditative ambiance. Furthering this atmospheric quality, Iglesias’s celosías also remind us how the latticed screen has long been used as a “cultural technique,” especially in Arabic architecture but also in Western cultures, beyond the domestic realm, in public spaces.17 It has served a particular function in the making of sacred space, due to its quality of being a physical divider and yet permeable threshold.18 In the words of art historian Sharon Gerstel, “Screens can be located in nearly every setting . . . from primitive shrines” on-

7.7  Cristina Iglesias, Tres aguas, 2014. Permanent installation, Torre del Agua, Toledo, Spain. Stainless steel, hydraulic mechanism, and water; 354⅜ × 118⅛ in. Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the artist.

7.8  Cristina Iglesias, Untitled, 1993 (detail). Installation view, Centro Botín, Santander, Spain, 2018. Fiber cement, iron, aluminum, and tapestry; 96½ × 143¾ × 27½ in. Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the artist.

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ture. Pushing the elemental, ambient aspect even further, in her installations the artist often recreates the natural folds of weathered surfaces as if part of a process of atmospheric formation, even ecological tranformation. In an ongoing, citywide project for Toledo, Spain, aptly titled Tres aguas (2014–­; fig. 7.7), she created three large installations based on water that gave the river back to the city. The works flow in truly ambient fashion through the different environments, interacting with each of their terrains, sounds and smells, fluids and airs.21 As viewers walk through and reflectively pause in these liquid settings, from the Town Hall Square to the Water Tower to the Convent of Saint Clara, with the option of taking a river path, they become aware here of how water that flows acts on the ecology of natural forms, weathering them and transforming the atmosphere. The environment is also brought inside by the artist, as in a series of large installations collectively titled Phreatic Zones (2015), works in which water ebbs and flows over organic relief forms within a terraced gallery floor.22 These site-­specific works exemplify the artist’s long-­standing engagement in building experiential environments, and especially in remaking the architecture of sites in liquid form. Constructed and natural forms are fused as they are rendered in materials that redefine an environment by fluidly confounding their own material structures and states of matter, as well as the modalities of interior and exterior space. Mixing the organic and artifice, and architecting natural environments, Iglesias produces sensory atmospheric sites that require slow, extended experiencing to be absorbed and metabolized. A contemplative mood is created while breathing the air, “listening” to the liquid surrounding, and sensing the sounds, effluvia, mist, and vapors that the installations produce in their own slow time. Iglesias’s atmospheric projective screens also contain the trace and fabric of temporal atmospheres, for, as we have seen, her screen spaces act in close concert

with the environment (see fig. 7.2). Furthermore, they also can react as real atmospheric agents. They are surfaces of corrosion, fields of alteration, and sites that induce other textural effects of “weathering.” Think of the effect of screening in Polyptych IX (2008) or in a number of the pieces titled Fuga a 6 voces (Diptych) (2007), works that exhibit the imprint of natural tapestry in silkscreen, on a sheet of copper, as if creating weathered landscapes in projection. Or, for different effects, consider Untitled (1993; fig. 7.8) and Untitled (Venice I) (1993), works employing tapestry as a medium that the artist has built in space.23 In these latter works, the screen tapestries stand in space as ornate partitions, as they often stood in the home, in dialogue with the outdoors. These works clearly reproduce how the screen, developing in history as an interior partition, ordinarily included a folding fabric and was constructed as an enfolding architecture that acted with and on atmospheric elements, creating a modulation of ambiance. Iglesias’s use of folding screen architectures recalls as well how artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Ed Ruscha used the hinges of this foldable architectural structure both to push boundaries of artistic mediums and to connect them together.24 Iglesias’s own pieces are constructed in a twofold way: a panel of the ornate tapestry, affixed to one side of a constructed concrete slab, is reflected onto a plane of shiny metal that appears as a sheer, translucent material, as if imprints of the tapestry were made on its reflective surface. Treated as a reflective surface, sheets of metal act here as another form of screen, returning to us the fabric of decoration in projection. This essential ornamental quality is suggestive of the structurally decorative elegance of a Japanese folding screen, whose translucent, light-­diffusing panels enable the creation of fluid transitions through spaces and lightly transform atmospheres of interior architecture. Unfolding upon themselves, Iglesias’s tapestries thus become not simply screen fabrics but fabrics of

with this evolving definition of the environmental materiality of projection. Exposed here is the layered, interstitial fabrication that connects mediums together to create a surface effect of “atmospheric screening.” In returning us to this tapestry that is screen history, Iglesias ultimately gives substance to the idea that the screen originates, and acts, as a piece of ambient construction and interior design—­a sheet of profoundly reflective, projective material.

AT M O S P H E R I C TA P ES T R I ES

In the ambient folds of Iglesias’s screens, patterns of visual tailoring present themselves in a textured, material way. There is a thickness to surface here, a historical depth, which is also the result of how visible states of spatial transformation and environmental morphing come to light. This surface effect approaches a real sense of both natural and cultural tapestry. In her work, several coatings and planar surfaces are often built up out of different materials that are composed and decomposed, and all are folded together in a way that recalls both geological creases and the process of weaving. With so many layers to traverse on the surface, the wall itself becomes a matter of fabric, as layered as cloth, as stratified as earth, as encrusted as soil, as patterned as grid, as wavy as water. In this environmental materiality of fabrication, as the architectural wall itself becomes a composite organism, another bond to the texture of the screen emerges. Not only does Iglesias’s work exhibit the elaborate web of relations that, artistically and mediatically, connect the wall to the screen as a woven fabric; it further reminds us that this connective thread has deep historical roots in yet another sense. The history of the wall is in fact closely associated to tapestry. As the nineteenth-­century German art and architectural historian Gottfried Semper showed, walls have an origin in textiles, as hanging cloth or woven mats.25 They were initially conceived and made of a material

like carpet, which would hang in space, functioning as a divider. Walls could actually be pieces of cloth. They were dressed in fabric and functioned as movable partitions and environmental filters. These clothed panels could quickly create a private ambiance that interacted with the outside, and that could be easily changed and transformed. Such textured walls were thin surfaces that could breathe like skins. And not only did they breathe, they inhaled the atmosphere. In other words, walls were effectively screens—­“ light” atmospheric agents. Semper, we should also note, uses the German word Wand, which connotes both wall and screen, and places it in relation to Gewand, meaning garment or clothing. When speaking of mashrabiy’ya, this is particularly significant, as architectural historians Bechir Kenzari and Yasser Elsheshtawy argue, for these interwoven structures show us that “transparency in architecture possibly found its historical genesis (and meaning) not through the use of glass but in weaving.”26 When thinking of screen-­walls or window-­screens here, this reconfiguration of transparency in forms of enfolding and weaving becomes crucial; as we have suggested, a tapestry of translucencies can be pushed forward in atmospheric terms. In this cultural interweaving, the screen itself can move further away from an association with transparent glass windows and closer to translucent

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atmospheric projection. And in so doing, they reveal several archaeological layers of the medium’s history. In these works, we can experience the historical trajectory that created screen space as an environment: an itinerary that begins in the world of architectural objects, which negotiated interior-­exterior passage and atmospheric transits, and extends all the way to our current sense of what constitutes a projective environment. The history of the act of screening is displayed

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fabrications of environments. In light of Semper’s conceptual tapestry, walls themselves can be conceived as environments of ambient, lighter fabrics and associated with the realm of adornment as a creator of atmosphere. Semper’s hybrid definition perfectly suits Iglesias’s own construction of screen-­ walls that are tapestries, where this ornamental, atmospheric history comes to the surface, interwoven in the artist’s architectural work. This creative capacity to redraft a history of ornament in ambient terms also can be witnessed in contemporary architecture, where matters of surface and texture are being environmentally reconfigured, along with the hard fabric of the wall.27 Walls today are constructed more superficially, and tend to lose their tectonic quality; they are treated as breathing surfaces or translucent elements, as if they were actual screens. Lighter and more tensile, the surfaces of façades are energized by luminous play, texturally decorated as if they were canvas, stretched as membranes, and molded increasingly as porous, permeable elements of the environment. Rather than being conceived as a shield, these surface-­screens are built to respond to atmospheric agents and to transform in relation to environmental conditions. Iglesias’s atmospheric architectural tapestry, an interweaving of window-­wall-­screen, relates closely to this contemporary architecture of breathing envelopes. It resonates in particular with

such architectural projects as Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest), a building-­environment completed in Milan in 2014 as a residential site of urban reforestation, whose façade is a vertical tapestry of green space. This genealogy of atmospheric and environmental correlations, connecting Wand to Gewand, hence becomes a productive matrix for making space today. In taking up this possibility of dressing walls as breathable screens, a textural refashioning of space comes into being, and the vital connection between surface and ornament can be reactivated in the environment. The topoi of wall and screen become even more closely connected as fabrics when the division between hard and soft materials becomes less pronounced. This is the case for an artist such as Iglesias, who employs both cement and tapestry, moving swiftly between the two materials. It is also the case for some contemporary architecture, which has come to reconsider such belittled industrial surfaces as concrete, revamping Brutalist architecture, playing with it as if it were the surface of modern ruins, or molding it into more malleable shapes. A tactile, sensual quality of adaptability is being rediscovered in cement, which is treated, as Iglesias does in her work, as a less harsh and more porous texture. With such a different conceptual fabrication of materials, even concrete walls become a fabric.

O R N A M E N T A N D AT M O S P H E R E

The renewed ambient porosity between Wand and Gewand goes far beyond a question of materials as it engages the material relation to an environment. This also points to a more specific shift in fashioning aesthetics. It is the nature of materiality, and the distinction between wall and decoration, that are becoming more porous today.28 What needs to be questioned is the long-­standing, unproductive dichotomy between tectonics and ornament, struc-

ture and décor. Iglesias’s work is exemplary of a contemporary aesthetic concern for ornament that can overcome these divisions and turn matters inside out. She openly speaks of her desire to redefine “mechanisms of construction and ornamentation . . . [as] a perverse use of the idea of decoration.”29 Ornament is not a simple pattern for Iglesias but rather a conceptual architecture. It is, in many ways, a constructive language that has an environmental history.

by the Swiss architects, the grid appears modified, reinterpreted with environmental sensibility in the context of the history of ornament. A surface effect is created by a structure that explodes the strictures of the modernist grid and exposes the richly layered meaning of reticular filament as well as its history, as conceived in other times and cultures. As for Iglesias, this architectural screen-­wall displays a structural pattern that incorporates the finery of lace, the texture of the miniature, and the ornamental yet systematic drawing of calligraphy. The grid of this screen reproduces the surface effect of textured wallpaper as well. Only apparently flat, it has the three-­dimensional, haptic quality of ornamental bas-­relief. In these façades by Herzog & de Meuron, and in Iglesias’s own screen spaces, the richly textured surfaces are tactilely formulated as ambiance. These architectural forms are furthermore modeled in a way that is not far from nature’s own interwoven structures. The patterned walls are similar to geological strata, contain the reticular configuration that defines vegetable life, and expose the intricate formation of organic matter. This ornamental structure can be observed in a state of natural becoming, metamorphosis, and even decomposition. Corrosion, decay, and disintegration are at home in this organic, weathered environment. Rust, moss, and mold as well as every other form of natural growth are familiar elements in this ambiance of textural materiality, which is never too far from recalling the maze of a garden. In this sense, for the architects and the artist, a wall that is a screen finally becomes an environment. This “superficial” landscape ultimately asks us to question old assumptions about structure and materiality, and it affirms the building capacity of surface and ornament in ways that do not separate nature and culture, architecture and the environment. The latticed patterns of Iglesias’s work, both decorative and structural, convey this depth of surface effects, for these screen-­walls are, authentically, constructive

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Think again of her celosías in this respect. The use of the screen here is not decorative but rather structural, for, as we have shown, these screen fabrics are effectively ambient walls. Tectonics and ornament become connected here in atmospheric ways, and with substantial surface effect. Moreover, as the philosopher and historian Patricia Falguières has noted, Iglesias does not treat the figure of the grid as mere motif but as a plane of signification, equipped with a syntax.30 The latticed configuration is a language, whose system is particularly tied to architectural tapestry. Let us recall that Iglesias’s grid is a contemporary tapestry that reinvents the reticular fiber of Hispanic-­Arabic decoration, as inscribed in the actual fabric of the walls of the Alhambra. Its textural shape, far from being mere décor, is a structural element that activates an ambient surface play. This grid is not a pure visual geometry but rather a complex sensory geography. Iglesias makes gridded walls into tapestry in a way that anchors folds of architectural history into the present. Her work specifically resonates with the reconfiguration of ornament that marks the ambient architecture of our times, which contends that surface is structure. The patterns of textile tectonics she exhibits are becoming familiar geographies on our urban walls, where we can experience how ornament can effectively turn into a breathing structure, even a gridded green wall. When perceived up close from this perspective, Iglesias’s celosías from the early 1990s find particular correspondence in the tapestry walls constructed more than a decade later by Herzog & de Meuron, architects who employ the material of screens as walls, activating a new ornamental language of building. Think for example of the gridded screens, the veritable celosías, that make up the façade walls of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, completed in 2005. One may also compare Iglesias’s treatment of surface to the ornate reticular growth that defines the façade of the CaixaForum in Madrid, a museum and cultural center that opened in 2008 (fig. 7.9). In both these buildings

7.9  The green reticular environment of Madrid’s CaixaForum (2008), a cultural center and museum designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Fabrizio Troiani/ Alamy Stock Photo.

aural planes, which enhances an inner sense of living and breathing matter—­that is, an atmosphere of environmental awareness. As a tensile structure, the fabric of the screen thus joins the texture of the wall in a reconfiguration of the importance of ambiance, where art forms connect in luminous, atmospheric transport. This material transformation of the breath of space—­a vital “becoming screen”—­is the permeable envelope that defines our times. It is our landscape, the delicate surface of our environmental survival.

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ambient tapestries. As the fabric of her walls rebuilds the translucent, veiled, woven materiality of screen history, multiple layers of projection emerge. The screen is here the fabric of an atmospheric construction and the organic site of a material transformation. Iglesias’s artistic screen-­wall relates in this sense again to contemporary architecture, which has its own atmospheric mode of writing ecology on the surface. Today, in both building and landscape design, ornament and texture are called upon to produce a structural movement of visual, olfactory, and

8.1  Chantal Akerman, Now, 2015. Multiple-­projection video installation, color, sound, 41 min. 46 sec., looped, with two Chinese fake aquarium lamps and fluorescent lamp tubes. Image and direction, Chantal Akerman; image-­and-­sound editing and spatialization, Claire Atherton. Courtesy of Chantal Akerman Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/London.

8

Elemental Empathy Chantal Akerman’s Psychic Atmospheres

A A landscape expresses a mood. Such “expression” says exactly what we intend by the term “empathy.” —Theodor Lipps1 [The way] I would like to film . . . corresponds . . . to the idea that the land one possesses is always a sign of barbarism and blood, while the land one traverses without taking it reminds us of a book.—Chantal Akerman2

ttuned to sensing ambiances, Chantal Akerman created a hybrid landscape of moving images that was projected in various environments as she traveled freely between fiction and documentary film and between the film theater and the art gallery. The celebrated director and writer pioneered a new form of cinema in the 1970s, attentive to the spatiality of film form, and inflected by European modernist cinema and by her encounter with the “structuralist” paradigms of North American avant-­garde artists such as Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton. She also engaged the space of live performance, as documented in her 1983 portrait of the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, One Day Pina Asked. In the mid-­1990s, Akerman also began to engage in the expanded field of film-­based installation art, in the early stages of the cultural movement that propels today’s filmmakers and artists to exchange roles and work increasingly between media. Akerman holds a particular position in this expanded field for the way she nimbly employed venues of projection. While she made work specifically for gallery exhibition, she also showed or “installed” her theatrical films in gallery spaces, generating a dialogue between artistic languages and environments. Her gesture questions the clear art historical distinction between medium and site, and challenges how each medium is normatively sited in a specific way or venue. It is work that opposes the canonical separation between different genres and forms of exhibition of vi-

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sual art, for it not only moves back and forth between different kinds of cinema and moving-­image installation but interchanges their modes of presentation and projection.3 The hybrid screen space Akerman constructed is a landscape that comprises images of places, exploring their atmospheres perceptively and empathetically from both the inside and the outside. Cities, lands, and homes are portrayed in long takes that underscore the life of the site and, letting it speak for itself, produce an expanse of duration.4 We may call this an “ambient cinema,” for her camera is particularly attuned to the elemental conditions that forge a place and its ambiance. In capturing the unfolding of everyday life, the life of women especially comes to the fore, in a flow of slow temporality and in relation to cultural memory. Forms of passage take place on her screens as, held by the steadiness of the long takes, we are led to experience and empathize with sites of transit and separation, and to sympathize with instances of cultural movement and transmission. In this ambient, durational way, we are especially given the opportunity to access the inner workings of displacement, migrancy, and diaspora.5

This style of durational, atmospheric filming dotted with minimal, often casual action, which defined Akerman’s long-­standing signature practice, transferred well from the film theater to the art gallery. With some exceptions, the way she liked to film fit perfectly well into the meandering itineraries of contemporary forms and ambiances of viewership. In the gallery, the work found a new dwelling place as Akerman experimented with the fabric of projection and the scale, position, and number of screens. Understanding how this new location would affect her spatial way of conceiving moving images, she often enhanced the environmental impact of the work. The result made the installation accord closely with the digital era’s nonlinear itineraries and with the performative, subjective, roaming stream of imaging that has come to inhabit our screens. Her itinerant manner of filming proved especially suited to the peripatetic mode of reception that exists in the museum or art gallery, where visitors wander in space, at their own pace, interacting with an ambiance and with screens that enhance not only displacement but also passages that are forms of encounter and liminality.

T R A N S I T I V E S PA C E , P R OJ E C T I V E A M B I A N C E

Whether in theatrical or installation form, the fabric of the screen always functions in Akerman’s work as a porous material that mediates an intense sense of projection: it is a transitional site, a place of passage and negotiation between exteriority and interiority. It is a form of “dooring” to access both physical and mental space as well as the life of others, including the nonhuman elements that create a sense of place. This atmospheric, fluid geography of wandering states of mind, with a fixed yet transitive topography, was first established experimentally on the screen of Hotel Monterey (1972), an architectural survey of the random presences that populate a hotel lobby and elevator, which displayed the life of the inanimate. It took further shape in News from Home (1976), in which a

primarily stationary camera records the movement of New York City, making the subway a protagonist, while exploring the intimate etymology of metropolis, the “mother-­city” across which we travel to the rhythm of the letters that Akerman’s mother sends her.6 The geography of Les Rendez-­vous d’Anna (1978) is rigorously composed of the atmosphere of train stations, trains, cinemas, car interiors, and hotel rooms, and this moving panorama of transitory environments, structured by a railway trip, tracks for us an intimate journey.7 The protagonist, a filmmaker on tour with her film, meets her mother in a hotel room and, away from the family house, tells her about her lesbian life. A family or personal history can only be displayed in a virtual place of transit—­the railway or the hotel at

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that time, the smart phone or the laptop now—­a site inhabited each “night and day” by different stories, as the title of a 1991 film by Akerman further suggests. This geographic porosity that projectively interweaves internal and external space, endlessly reconfigured in Akerman’s work, found new ground for expansion in the art gallery through the installation work that Akerman began to produce. The moving-­image installation Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre (2008; fig. 8.2), for example, gives further shape to the filmmaker’s recurring creative interest in the screen as a transitional site of passage, capable of conveying atmospheric nuances. The space of this installation, which creates ambiance by chronicling moments of life in the city, threads through ground

first traversed in her film Toute une nuit (1982), in which a series of disconnected stories intersect on the urban pavement. That atmospheric, moody film enters and exits the lives of several urban dwellers as they come together or split up, kiss or fight, in Brussels’s cabs and cafés, homes and hotels, forming a narrative mosaic of love in, and of, the city. Like the installation, Toute une nuit is a noctural work that resides in the passageway. The film insistently takes place on the sidewalk or on stairways, and halts by windowsills. It is suspended on the balcony and lingers in the corridors. Doors open and close as we are left to ponder at the doorsteps. Throughout these edgy urban encounters—­atonal fragments of a city symphony—­we always remain at the threshold.

8.2  Chantal Akerman, Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre, 2008. Stills from multiple-­projection video installation, color and black and white, silent, 20 min., looped/4 min., looped. Direction, Chantal Akerman; editing and spatialization, Claire Atherton. Courtesy of Chantal Akerman Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/London.

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As Akerman’s video/installation work extends the potential of her cinema of thresholds, it reinvents it in even more spatial projective terms. Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre, in particular, reframes her atmospheric mode of transition and suspension, transposing her “ambient cinema” to the space of the art gallery. Here the artist makes use of the actual site of the gallery to construct an architecture of displacement in twofold projection. In the installation, short narratives are presented in long, horizontal, split-­screen format, in the form of a landscape. In this way, we are offered an ambient urban portrait as we encounter a woman, a flâneuse, captured in a moment of suspended time, smoking at night in various street settings. The installation renews Akerman’s specific ambient sense of inhabiting a city, dwelling especially on slow time, extending those instants of pause and transition, reflection and anxiety, when women are on their own, ambling, walking in the rain, lingering, caught in an intermediate zone. The work is atmospherically suspended between a before and an after, in the unsettling time of a transitory moment that we, the gallery visitors, can sympathetically share, becoming flâneuses ourselves as we amble and ramble, stroll and stray, taking our time as we meander, and pause, in the ambiance of the gallery space. The sequence of images projected in the installation behaves as an actual landscape, unfolding in space as an urban panorama. In this sense, the installation contains a history of environment within its visual space. It is layered with the mode of representation of urban views from art history, as it displays the atmosphere of view painting and carries within its wide format the history of the relationship of cine-­projection to panoramic vision. Watching this installation unreel in a gallery space, we are reminded yet again that the wide format of panoramic painting, which historically portrayed the city as well as the landscape, is the precursor of the filmic screen.8 At the onset of modernity, in fact, a panoramic visual architectonics was set in motion: as frames became distended and sites were set

in moving perspectives, they expanded both outward and inward. By presenting multiple, expanded, mobile perspectives and suggesting a mobilized observer, the urban views exhibited a protocinematic attempt to expand the field of haptic space, changing our sense of environment. It was this cartographic mobilization of perspective, inscribed in the movement of urban imaging, that informed nineteenth-­century panoramic culture, with its metropolitan transit, arcade life, and railway travel, and transited in the very “transport” of motion pictures. Using the wide format to make a contemporary urban panorama in projection, Akerman’s installation re-­creates this particular experience. With the aid of the scale of the art gallery, it remakes the kind of panoramic image that made the city into a landscape and the cityscape into a moving screen. The precise time in the history of visual culture in which the panorama emerged as the generative milieu of cine-­projection thereby becomes a renewed screen and projective space. In Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre, as well, various painterly genres become connected as the face joins the landscape in the twofold urban portrait of female flânerie. In this projective work of ambiance, the face itself becomes a landscape. The human seams with the nonhuman, the animate with the inanimate, in a form of “empathic projection” that connects the two.9 We are reminded here of the words of Gilles Deleuze, who spoke of the face as a surface, a landscape, a map. Deleuze himself pointed to a projective seam of the human with the inanimate when claiming that “the face has a correlate of great importance: the landscape.”10 The philosopher recognized not only an empathic projection but a sympathetic correspondence when emphasizing that “architecture positions its ensembles—­houses, towns or cities, monuments or factories—­to function like faces in the landscape they transform.”11 “Painting,” he wrote, “takes up the same movement but also reverses it, positioning a landscape as a face.”12 In Akerman’s installation, as the face becomes the landscape, it turns into a screen. The surface of her

ethereal substance, and vaporous beauty. A “microphysiognomy” is manifested on the surface of the screen, activating what Béla Balász calls a “visual life,” which is also a character of the “face of things.”15 The image reminds us, in particular, of Jean Epstein’s writings on Stimmung and especially on the face as a landscape.16 With the large scale, in Epstein’s words, “I look, I sniff at things. I touch,” and, in this sense, “magnification acts on one’s feelings more to transform them than to confirm them. . . . The close-­up modifies the drama by the impact of proximity.”17 For Akerman, the magnified screen image is indeed a transformative landscape, and it is furthermore a mnemonic atmosphere redolent of film history and informed by projective translations between film and gallery exhibition. It is a transposition in gallery space of the atmospheric subtlety and haziness of the waxed world of celluloid, expanded in panoramic fashion. As it enacts such relocation, the “sur-­face” aesthetic of the installation can be seen to refashion as well the texture of American film noir of the 1940s, with its own particular use of diffuse lighting and nebulous ambient effects. As the hazy ambiance of Akerman’s installation becomes an elegy to cinema’s atmospheric fascination for vapors and haze, it leads us to reflect on the fabric of imaging itself and its transient ambient nature, which is transmitted in projection. Immersed in a smoky, misty world of slow projections, we are absorbed into a composite vaporous aesthetic. This misty, cloudy, rainy, and foggy atmosphere is perturbing, for it makes us sniff in different directions and ultimately offers us a pleasure that is pneumatic in nature. And as pneuma becomes the core of the installation, the very breath of the moving image is felt upon our skin.

S I T E S O F E M PAT H Y: PA R T I T I O N A N D PA R TA K I N G

Moving fluidly between moving-­image installation, fiction film, and documentary form, Akerman haptically and synesthetically takes us into a world of projective images that become deeply layered, textured,

and nuanced as they float in a precise way in space. In her work, we travel through a specific architecture of atmosphere, a formally rigorous aesthetic of frontal long takes with stationary and moving camera, often

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projective screens appears painted, and in the process the root of the term surface comes to be exposed. Akerman shows the face as a haptic surface and also exhibits the face, the body itself, of screen surface. In exposing the hyphenated form that is a sur-­face, the artist remakes it into her own screen surface, not only showing the layers of depth that this surface may contain but animating them in projection.13 In Akerman’s world, we are held on the surface of things. And on this surface-­screen, more depth of imaging is activated in a projective passage of forms that creates an interconnection of artistic atmospheres. The installation Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre, insofar as it is a portrait, works at joining art forms as the texture of the art of painting transfers to the art of projection. Furthermore, the woman in this portrait-­installation emerges from a multifaceted filmic landscape of specifically ambient urban portaits, which include other instances of “slow cinema.”14 The scene resonates in particular with the atmosphere of the urban landscapes constructed by Michelangelo Antonioni, with their own metropolitan ramblings and temps morts, that is, their display of nonaction and times in between, textured gaps and ellipses. This is a portrait of absorption in self-­reflection à la Monica Vitti, exuding observational, minimalist tonality. It is also rooted in previous forms of cinematic portraiture that construct the materiality of atmosphere. A face emerging in black and white shows a layered textural history, for it appears to surface out of the history of early film and film theory. The installation celebrates the aesthetic attraction of a woman’s face in close-­up, atmospherically veiled by the nuances of a cloud of smoke. In this way, Akerman refashions a typical silent-­cinema image of nebular consistency,

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crafting symmetrical compositions with minimal narrative. With these frames fixed as if to seize motion, Akerman constructs a geometry of projective passages and a relational form of screening that empathetically includes us. By virtue of the camera position, which often refuses to move with the characters and rolls independently, remaining steady in time, we cannot pry. We are simply there. Witnesses, we are made to exist in the space, like objects in site. And we are asked to stay overtime. This “being there” in time enables us to make a psychic leap, to go beyond mere attendance toward a more intimate involvement. Refusing voyeurism and reaching for a closer spectatorial position, the work allows us to become participants. As an affective atmosphere unfolds in slow time-­space, we can let ourselves slide in. We can absorb what is “in the air,” sense a tone, and partake in the mood of the space. By articulating this empathic atmosphere, Akerman can allow the spectator to experience the ambiguous architectonics of thresholds and the “environmentality” that characterize the act of projection itself. Visitors to her world can be at the same time in their own physical and mental space and in the space of her voyage. The position of Akerman’s camera sometimes indicates where the author stands—­in all senses, since it even includes the measure of her slight height. It is a position that marks her presence there, never so close as to interfere or so distant that her presence as a fellow traveler is not felt. In holding to her rigorous point of view while crossing the borders of different visual art forms and genres, the “borderline” work of Chantal Akerman thus transgresses boundaries of various natures. This includes a recurring interest in social diaspora, depicted across different landscapes, as in the installation South (1999), which captures the landscape of the North American South, highlighting its history of racial tensions. Akerman is so attracted to the diasporic threshold that she often “sites” her work in actual border zones or borderline situations, insisting on crossing over to enable a change of viewpoint, and

using projection to emphasize a possible access to the other side. This kind of sociopolitical “dooring” is most effectively exemplified in the installation From the Other Side (2002), which includes a film of the same name in which Akerman records the history of undocumented Mexican immigrants and their stories of dangerous US border crossings. As the third part of this work, which premiered at Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, she made A Voice in the Desert (2002, fig. 8.3), for which she installed a huge screen, thirty-­three feet wide, in the Arizona desert, on the border between the United States and Mexico, and streamed live in Kassel the contents of the projection of the border zone. In response to this contested space of immigration, and to walling it off, literally and figuratively, Akerman highlighted the political and aesthetic force of enabling and activating passage by encouraging the transit of people and the transmission of cultures. She projected images of people trying to cross borders on one or the other side of the screen, with the perspective changing depending upon the side of the border from which the screen was viewed. This site of projection, standing in the desert, clearly responded as much to a political climate as it did to the weather. It actually took the temperature of our times. Facing the elements, literally and figuratively, Akerman’s atmospheric screen stood there, firm in its desire to project access, against acts of division and enclosing. The projection exposed the basic elemental circumstances of border-­crossing while engaging all kinds of exterior and weather conditions. In this way, the plane of this screen object, planted in the landscape, became a real, active environment. It was not only responsive to the natural ambiance in which it was positioned but receptive to its changes. The screen surface was open to receive and diffuse rays of sunlight during the day and to project luminous images in the night, illuminating the darkeness. In the morning, at sunrise, when the natural light hit the screen, the projection disappeared.

In this light, at the border of darkness, in this twilight of passage, one could experience the real “elemental,” environmental agency of projection. Akerman uses projection as a transitive mediation of territories, an active element that can change perspectives. Projection is here a transformative, even transformational force. Dissolving into the light of both the day and the projection, the screen of this border-­installation makes one listen to people “from the other side” and hear an underrepresented “voice in the desert.” This variable light does not simply reflect or refract physically; it changes the cultural ambiance, and our experience of it. In this sense, Akerman’s atmosphere of projection exhibits a process of transduction at work. The white fabric of the screen, strung on scaffolding on the border, conveys a complex process of projection in ambient, relational terms, and furthermore contains a history. In the climate of this

installation, on the weathered fabric of its screen, one can sense the inception and dissolution of cinematic projection come to light. The kind of screen Akerman constructs in A Voice in the Desert shows how the act of projection was historically born from a filtering of light and the phantasmagorical, atmospheric play between light and shadow. This site of projection is deeply tied, in form and function, to the environmental history of the screen, and it reminds us once again of its specific genealogy as an elemental, ambient object that is a divider in space, a thing that enables the negotiation of sites. As it appeared in the early Renaissance, from an earlier Germanic root common also to Latin languages, the screen was born as an architectural entity to define and confound a site of partition.18 Its translucent material, often fabric or paper, stretched on a wooden frame, was used to create a partition between

8.3  Chantal Akerman, A Voice in the Desert, 2002. Third part of the installation From the Other Side, 2002. Single-­projection video installation, color, sound, 52 min., looped. Direction, Chantal Akerman; editing and spatialization, Claire Atherton. Courtesy of Chantal Akerman Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/London.

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interior and exterior space, as in a window screen or folding screen. But such a partition was also meant to be a site of passage. A screen was an object whose function was to mediate between spaces, especially between what (and who) is inside and outside, and furthermore, to overcome that division. And it is in this way—­as a medium-­milieu—­that Akerman employs the screen in the desert part of the installation From the Other Side. This is a screen and not a wall, not a barrier but a boundary. Such a screen, precariously hung in space in a border zone, then filmed and reprojected in a distant gallery space, is

a partition that produces a passageway, and even a possible new threshold. Facing the environmental fabric of this screen, a visitor to the installation cannot simply stare at its surface. The tension of this tensile surface forces one not only to listen but to become engaged—­to the point of wishing that borders might be crossed and contact might be made through the membrane, across the fabric of the screen. In this way, Akerman sites the projective movements of diaspora and migration on the very fabric of screen surface in the transitional, relational ambiance of projection.

A F F E C T I N G AT M O S P H E R ES

However far Akerman journeys, otherness is always close, never something to curtain off or confine “on the other side.” This is a function of the intrinsic empathy one feels for the cultural and social landscapes the artist puts us in touch with, and asks us to negotiate with, in close proximity. Her work always appears to house the affect of someone who is not quite a stranger to the places she visits. Akerman’s artistic journeys, indeed, often end up revisiting places close 8.4  Workshop of Robert Campin, Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece), ca. 1427–­32, oil on oak; central panel, 25¼ × 24⅞ in.; wings, each 25⅜ × 10¾ in. Cloisters Collection, 1956, 56.70a–­c, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

to her own history: the disparate locations of a Jewish diasporic geography.19 Writing in an exemplary way for the 1995 installation that grew of out of her film D’Est (From the East, 1993), Akerman speaks clearly of a journey that is a personal topography, for here she travels through Eastern European countries that had also been sites of Jewish diaspora. She does not pursue identity as an attachment to place or even an adhesion to ethnicity but, rather, considers that a

8.5  Chantal Akerman, D’Est, au bord de la fiction (From the East, Bordering on Fiction), 1995. Installation view, Imagine Europe: In Search of New Narratives, Bozar, Brussels, 2016. Video installation in two parts (twenty-­four monitors/one monitor), color, sound. Made from the film D’Est (1993). Courtesy of Chantal Akerman Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/ Paris/London.

living environment is that which makes movement possible. For this installation, D’Est, au bord de la fiction (From the East, Bordering on Fiction, 1995; fig. 8.5), she engages this personal exploration as she speaks of the “moving” nature of moving images: a capacity, akin to the condition of life itself, to resist permanence in the configuration of material space. “I would like to make a grand journey,” she declares, “I’d like to shoot everything. Everything that moves me.” This is an environment of “faces, streets, cars going by and buses, train stations and plains, rivers and oceans, streams and brooks, trees and forests.

Fields and factories and yet more faces. Food, interiors, doors, windows, meals being prepared.”20 In Akerman’s grand journey through this living environment for the installation, motion becomes emotion as it touches the spaces of everyday life of ordinary citizens from the former East Germany, Poland, and Russia. To portray, almost in real time, the unstable time after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, she designs an active, material assemblage of bodies and food, woods and streets, vehicles and rivers, plains and doors, seas and rooms—­a map of projective passages that are external but incorpo-

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rate the nurturing architecture of the interior. An inner world is composed of still lifes and pictures of side rooms, which are framed and reframed in the monitors of the installation as if they were landscape paintings. There are also endless tracking shots in which the emotion of motion itself is captured. In this movement of dwelling, we abide. The installation of D’Est expresses, and even exemplifies, the making of an “affective atmosphere.”21 In Akerman’s work, one can sense that indeterminate yet specific quality of affect that emanates from the assembling of all living bodies in space, across human and nonhuman forms, an affecting force that exceeds containment and is transitive. This transpersonal intensity is a quality of environment, a concrete yet dynamic sense of place. For Akerman, it engages an “atmospheric attunement,” a receptivity to being in the world, in light, noise, and space.22 Her work demands a receptivity to the workings of the world’s bodies, to how they act in tension as well as in unison in their vital materiality. It projects a relational modality, a sentience of the movements produced in the contact, and the actual rhythm of these interactions. For Akerman, an ambiance itself moves in this interrelational sense, and this moves her. Comprising an atlas of life, her work is quite a grand tour. And, as an atlas, it is a cumulative experience, dependent on the environment in which the exhibition takes place, on the site and configuration of the installation. As Akerman decomposes her film D’Est into the form of an installation piece, she gives particular attention to its “siting” and to the interior architecture of the installation. Her gesture of “siting” is particularly relevant to our discussion of an environment of projection. It supersedes site-­specificity to engage the wider sense in which a moving-­image installation constitutes an environment. As we enter into the space of the gallery or the

museum where the work is sited, we access a space in which the film “resides” in twenty-­four video monitors, arranged in triptychs. The disposition in triptychs has an aesthetic affect, an art historical flavor that brings us to inhabit a specific time and location. It reminds us of a series of panel paintings divided into three sections, or three painterly panels hinged together, a triadic design that appeared in the Middle Ages and was popular through the Renaissance, especially in altarpieces (fig. 8.4). While recalling this history of painterly arrangements, the monitors, placed on visible pedestals and spread across the museum space, also convey a solid sculptural sense. On these sculptural monitors, the camera collects images as it remains still, circles 360 degrees in a train station, or tracks streets independently of the objects or subjects that enter the frame. The aesthetic and affective impact of the collection accumulates in the ambiance of the installation. In the end, the video monitors become a storage space for a mnemonic itinerary, turning into an archive. In this place of collection that is recollection, in time, we are transported. With these motion pictures archivally housed on screens that are composed in painterly fashion and sculpturally positioned in the gallery space, viewers become aware of layers of visual history and also experience the materiality of filmic projection. Walking around the sculptural screens, they are offered the spectatorial pleasure of physically and imaginatively entering into a film, projecting themselves into projective space, and haptically retraversing a language of montage and camera movements that creates assemblage and the transit of bodies in space. The final effect is that cinema itself becomes dislocated in the art space. This kind of viewership ultimately signals a passage between art, architecture, and film, predicated on shifting notions of exhibition and forms of screening that are as effective as they are affective.

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8.6  Chantal Akerman, Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide (To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge), 2004. Sculpture of spiral tulle with multiple-­projection video installation in two parts, black and white, sound, 24 min., looped/40 min., looped. Direction, Chantal Akerman; image-­ and-­sound editing and spatialization, Claire Atherton. Courtesy of Chantal Akerman Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/London.

TRANSITIONAL ENVIRONMENTS, PROJECTIVE HISTORY

In Akerman’s observational chambers, as the relational threshold that is projection is architecturally materialized, the screen itself takes center stage, becoming its own border space. In reframing the screen while fluctuating between experimental cinema, fiction, and documentary, and moving to work in gallery installation, Akerman especially cultivated the projective side of the act of screening. She made the fabric of the screen into an object for exploring the self and cultivating interiority in vital contact with the material world, and in light of manifold times and traces of memory. Her use of scrims came to enhance the actual architecture of

the screen, giving environmental form to the fabric of the projective fabrication. In Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide (To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge, 2004; fig. 8.6), Akerman dwells on a diary in which both her grandmother and her mother wrote, and which also bears marks from the time when her sister and she found it as children. In one part of the installation, a spiraling wall made of a white, diaphanous material evokes the properties of a screen or scrim, into which one can walk, and in which words from the artist and from the multilayered diary are inscribed. In this room, the large screen has a sculptural presence,

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suggesting an environment designed by Richard Serra. But it is as if, here, Serra’s monumental Torqued Ellipse steel sculptures could dissolve or dematerialize and take on a different kind of materiality: a ‘light” projective space. As we traverse Akerman’s scuptural space of light and shadows, it enfolds us. In her volumetric space, we are literally folded into screen fabric, almost sympathetically embraced. Meanwhile, in another room, a flat screen made of the same diaphanous material becomes the site of a three-­part simultaneous projection and inscription of the writing of the women at different times. As the traces of the past are materialized in the present, the scrim holds a polyphony of projective experiences in sartorial fashion. It not only fabricates but transmits a shared psychic fabric, and does so along a mnemonic maternal line. Akerman’s use of projection thus reconnects us to an important layer of projective history and screen design. In the archaeology of the act of screening, as we have seen, the history of the term projection is entangled with the subtle and diverse display of psychic processes. In Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide, Akerman exhibits the particular phenomenon of projection that Sigmund Freud called “screen memories.”23 Here, intergenerational memories come to the surface and become exposed in ambiance, mediated by a screen that functions as both a display and a filter for the projection of mnemonic images and affective atmospheres. In Akerman’s work, the concept of projection joins cinema to psychoanalysis in this as well as other transitional ways, emphasizing how, at the time of film’s invention, the notion of projection was developed as an instrument that is essential not only to the formation of the subject but to the understanding of boundaries.24 Recall that, analytically speaking, projection is a mechanism that regulates the boundaries between subject and object and negotiates the sense of what is internal and external. As Melanie Klein developed this notion after Freud, insisting that forms of projection inward and outward are related to oral functions, she spoke of “projective identification” with the first object, the mother’s breast.25

In her view, this projection, deriving from the maternal body, is the motor of all object relations. From the beginning of the life of the subject, object relations are molded by an interaction between introjection and projection, a transfer between internal and external objects as well as situations. On her screens, Akerman activates a mode of projection in this Kleinian way, for the screen for her is both a boundary object and a threshold space. It is, indeed, a place of dialogue in which introjection and exchange between the internal and the external transpires. Such a screen is fundamentally an architecture of psychic transfer and bears tracings of the transposition. Here, a projective process is conveyed through object relations, acted out in an experiential site that Winnicott termed “transitional space.”26 An object among other objects of material culture, her screen of projection has a transitive function and a relational capacity of linkage, transmission, and joining. This ability to connect is acted out in the process of making space, in the environment of projection, in the intermediate area of experiencing. As for the objective quality of her screen of projection, this is an actual “projective screen” in the sense articulated psychoanalytically by André Green: it is a surface that becomes animated, activated, vitalized in a psychic sense in projection.27 Akerman’s screen is also a space deeply permeated by the maternal, which is ever present in her world. In this sense, the psychoanalytic faculty of the projection becomes even more evident, since the maternal function, for Klein, is an essential component in the negotiation of boundaries and, for Winnicott, is crucial to the development of “transitional phenomena.” On Akerman’s screen, then, projection becomes a notion that holds not only the attribute of subjectivity but also the mark of the memories and unconscious relations that “objectively” inform the transitive environment of a projective experience. Once analytically revisited and retraversed, this intense territory of transitional affects can be displayed but also can become the ground of psychic transformation in projection.

In Akerman’s moving-­image installations, as in her cinema, the art of projection is thus practiced as a transfer that deeply engages the material world and the transformations that occur within its space. Her particular ambient use of screens of projection as an architecture of becoming and an environment of relationality involves the kind of projections that are also products of the empathic imagination. As Akerman exposes those projections that are mental, psychic processes, exhibited in the material world as space, she works with a particular form of projection: Einfühlung, or empathy, understood as “in-­feeling.” Her work, in fact, goes to the root of empathy, which is, literally, the act of “feeling into.” Let us recall that, as defined by German aesthetics in the late nineteenth century, Einfühlung is a dynamic conception that accounts for a material response to an object, an image, or a spatial environment.28 This act of “feeling into” is a notion sensitive to the surface of the world. It depends on the ability to sense an inner movement that takes place in ambiance and reciprocally between the object-­space and the subject. As Theodor Lipps showed, writing on Einfühlung and space, one does not simply empathize with a person but with things and sites.29 One empathizes, that is, with the expressive, dynamic forms of art and architecture—­with lines and shapes, colors and sounds, scenery and situations, surfaces and textures. And these “projections” include a sympathy with the inanimate that is generated within the environment and transmitted through ambient qualities. In other words, this process expresses the force of inorganic elements while exposing such transmissions of affects as atmospheres. Akerman’s projections offer this kind of “feeling into” that engages the landscape and the streetscape and various matters of spatial construction, including nonrepresentational aspects such as forms, fabrics, and shades. Here, a pure formal arrangement, like an empty frame, can convey an affect. The white fabric of

a screen of projection, dissolving into the light in a deserted border zone, speaks volumes to us. Her work is, indeed, about this particular affect: a resonant tone, a vibration of objecthood. We can recognize here a form of Stimmung at work, a sense of “atmospheric attunement,” itself coming into the light. This is a psychic atmosphere that transpires on the surface of things. Shot in what I would ultimately call a distant intimacy, her images are formally arranged and carefully spaced as well as sited to allow for the kind of reserve that is needed to engage us closely. They enable, that is, the kind of analytic detachment—­the form of screening—­ that is necessary to create real empathy. This is particularly evident in the video installation Là-­bas (2006; fig. 8.7), which makes compelling use of the screen as such an architecture. Là-­bas chronicles Akerman’s trip to Tel Aviv with the intent of making a film, but during which she, interestingly, mostly remains inside an apartment. Static long takes enable us to wander around the interior of the place and observe a scene of little action. We can see out the window, although not clearly. We peek through blinds made of loosely woven reeds, which filter the light, as well as our vision. What is portrayed here is nothing but a screen, deliberately positioned between the world outside and us. Such a screen-­partition forms a delicate physical boundary between inside and outside. It serves to both reveal and obscure our view of the city, and specifically of the neighborhood. In this filtered way, through the fabric of a screen, we get to know the neighbors. Observing the unfolding of their daily chores, we begin to imagine their conversations, which we cannot hear. Meanwhile, off-­screen, we hear Akerman’s voice, speaking in diaristic fashion about matters of daily life, (family) history, and filming, and never failing to answer her mother’s calls. Dwelling on the architecture of the screen as an active site of filtering, Là-­bas articulates an elaborate geography of thresholds. By focusing our attention on

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E M PAT H I C A C TS O F S C R E E N I N G

8.7  Chantal Akerman, Là-­ bas (Down There) 6, 2006. Digital color photograph. Courtesy of Chantal Akerman Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/London.

this window that is a screen, “dressed” to resemble a scrim, Akerman asks herself and us to engage in a subtle, processual act of screening. We sense a resistance to filming a world for which the artist has ambivalent, even conflicting, feelings of belonging, and that is marred by traumatic histories, including her own family history of diasporic travails.30 It is precisely by exhibiting such resistance, and materializing it in the physical form of the screen partition, that Akerman is able to make a film that is otherwise impossible to make. This screen is not a barrier but a “transitional object.” It functions as a transitive site, a threshold, for it not only marks passage but enables actual access. A complex material fabrication is felt here, inscribed in the very fabric of this imaginary screen. The diffuse “feeling into” of the screen-­shade empathetically involves us in a rich act of interpretation. As we come

up against its reedy material, we too negotiate a textured boundary. The screen not only functions to filter the outside world but also “curtains” the space inside, enabling layers of history and memory to sift through. It offers Akerman the shelter she needs “over there” to look out and see inside herself. Such a screen makes a process of introjection possible within its boundary, which can be crossed. Over time, then, the strawlike screen becomes a richly textured space that holds complex forms of projection within its fabric. In the end, the interwoven material of the screen enhances the fabrication of intimacy, for it tangibly “suits” Akerman’s experiential perspective and filmic point of view. This screen is tailored to hold in its very fabric her particular version of empathy: a position of distant proximity. It shows how cinematic projection itself fundamentally relies on distance as a way to achieve closeness.

reaches an end with the terminal No Home Movie (2015). In her final chronicle of women’s lives, interior scenes set in her mother’s Brussels apartment are intercut with moving, weather-­beaten desert scenes, shot in Israel, “elements” that also appear in her gallery film Now (2015; see fig. 8.1).33 After opening the film atmospherically, and pneumatically, with strong winds blowing across the desert environment, Akerman documents her mother ailing and dying in her presence, even in virtual presence. She uses Skype to film her at times, as a way not simply of communicating but of making a film where proximity is probed by technical means and there is no more distance left. In this way, she renders the time of aging as it is, not as it is shown in movies. Caring for one’s mother is here an everyday occurrence, a quotidian worry, even a tedious experience made of daily chores, constant care, and watching. One waits for that meaningful conversation that might shed some light on a traumatic family history and afford release, but in vain. In this personal documentary, time flows as it does in real experience, not as series of events or actions but as inexorable, elemental flux. In the end, after her mother has died off screen, Akerman herself exits the scene, leaving an empty room behind. We are left with the ambiance. As we contemplate this gesture retrospectively, as we dwell in this last atmosphere, the affect of void lingers on, accompanied by complex feelings. In film, as in life, that chamber can no longer be inhabited. As the ambiguous title of the film suggests, Akerman’s very last work was not a home movie, and there will be no more home to look into. The door of that familiar, exploratory chamber has been shut forever, for her and for us.

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We emerge with Akerman into the world only to look inward; we remain inside to look out. In this way, we plunge into the depth of the artists’s own psychic, subjective space and personal history. Regardless of the distance we have traveled, the journey of discovery inevitably turns out to be an inner journey, not too far removed from self-­analysis. We recognize this particular chamber. We know this curtained world, filtered through the screen of the installation of Là-­bas, for we have been asked with regularity to dwell in this room. Traveling the architecture of the interior in films such as Saute ma ville (1968), La chambre (1972), Je tu il elle (1974), or even Demain on déménage (2004), we have visited a textured geography of interiority, a scene that is both familiar and familial. This sense of familiarity invokes the familial because Akerman’s inner explorations are the kinds of projections that are consistently, deeply haunted by the maternal, in film as in writing, as her 2013 memoir My Mother Laughs testifies.31 As Akerman herself has said of her transitional journey, “I want to film in order to understand. What are you going there for, someone asked? . . . I’ll find out when I get there. . . . It’s always your mother and father you run into on a journey.”32 Despite the different media employed, as we step into any of Akerman’s viewing chambers we access rooms of projection that envelop us empathetically, for in these chambers we sense the depth of an intimate experience we can share. Resting on the border of the screen of projection, this particular “feeling into” the space can become a mutual boundary to cross. And thus, safely positioned at a distance, we too can engage our own perilous history of projection: a voyage to—­ and a view from—­home. We do so, that is, until, abruptly, Akerman’s journey

9.1  Rosa Barba, Blind Volumes, 2016. Installation view, Malmö Konstall, Sweden, 2017. Eighty steel frames, platforms, screens; dimensions variable. Photo: Helene Toresdotter. © Rosa Barba. Courtesy of the artist.

9

Atmospheric Screening Rosa Barba and Performative Projection

A What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. . . . The projection booth would be made out of crude timbers, the screen carved out of a rock wall and painted white, the seats could be boulders. —Robert Smithson1

s we design the landscape of projection as an actual environment, the materiality of the projective mechanism comes to the fore and asks to be further investigated as an ambient technique. How are forms of connective intermediation, and especially sympathy, materially reinvented through the dispositif itself of projection? What specific material structure and environmental configuration can the relational atmosphere of projection take in future forms of visual art?2 Such questions appear particularly pressing at this juncture. This is a time in which contemporary artists are deeply preoccupied with materiality and ecological forms of “environmentality,” and when many are questioning the material conditions of their mediums in various forms and ambiances of projection.3 The work of Rosa Barba is especially compelling in this respect, for her cinematic explorations expose the very materiality of the act of projection in geologic and atmospheric forms. Barba is an artist who engages the full range of the material existence of cine-­projection, revealing the elemental components of film language in sculptural form and performative iteration.4 In her work, the qualities of celluloid film, the shape of the screen, and the tangible mechanics of the projective apparatus come to be “exhibited” in the space of an art installation.5 But this is not a fetishistic display of filmic materials in the gallery or museum space. Barba explores the atmospheric materiality

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of projection in order to expose spatial, technological, and durational forms. The physical properties of the projector or the filmstrip, the environmental texture of projected light, and the reflective canvas of the screen are subject to a systematic analysis. Their components are dissected and disassembled, then reassembled in space in different forms and with performative variations. As Barba reactivates these filmic elements in the gallery, she causes them to metamorphose, transmuting them into renewed conditions of technological luminosity and atmospherics. This is an artist who “sculpts” with light and makes space with the rhythm of sound, the matter of air, and the physics of movement. In such an “elemental” way, she transforms the moving matter of mediums into a new kinetic and kinesthetic art space, dotted with cinematic objects dancing in an ambiance. At the very moment of film’s demise or obsolescence, at the time of its dissolution, the dance of a roll of celluloid, the unfolding of a reel or spool of film, or the spinning plate of a projector can take on particular significance. For Barba, this is not a nostalgic act but, rather, the activation of alternative timelines and paths of history, for she explores

the creative potentialities latent within past forms. In her hands, as kinetic forms are refashioned into vibrant, moving objects, they become transformed into a way of reactivating material space, conditions, and relations. Materiality, here, is not a question of the materials per se but rather concerns the substance of material relations and the space of relationality, as configured on the surface environments of media and, especially, on screen surface. The projective screen is in fact the “white material” on which Barba establishes various forms of sympathetic connection. It is also an object that she physically reconfigures to construct projective ambiances. In transitive, performative ways, as we will show, landscapes of material projection are linked on her screens and layered together in space in a form of “atmospheric screening.” Conceived as a spatial concept, projection is here used in both ambient and psychic senses, and fundamentally as an architecture of passage, firmly rooted in environmentality. This is a space of object relations in sympathy with ambient conditions, an environment in which texture and materiality, surface and light, sound and movement come to life, activated in vibrant performances of technical operations.

ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT OF PROJECTION

In approaching Rosa Barba’s projective techniques we are again reminded that, from the very beginning, the translucent surface of the screen was constituted as a transitional space in which even art forms could become mediated and connected. Today, the diversified language of the screen crosses many fields and spaces of communication as it has turned into an actual material condition of our existence. Ours is a real environment of projective surfaces that hold multiple planes, host simultaneity, and convey transit, combinations, and connectivity. We live surrounded by screens that,

as Vachel Lindsay foresaw back in 1915, are pieces of “sculpture-­in-­motion”—­plastic objects of transport that are themselves transportable. The portable digital screen is an “architecture-­in-­motion” that not only moves with us but has become an actual piece of “furniture-­in-­motion” in our homes.6 With the art gallery and the museum themselves becoming pliant environments of projection, imaginative screening experiments are taking place that resonate strongly with this futuristic media archaeology and with past forms of expanded cinema.7 Screen-­based new media practices enlarge the

of projection is also evident in an installation with the explicit title White Curtain (2011), where light from behind transpires through a fabric partition. This imaginary screen is an actual form of window dressing, a decorative architectural object that has the material constitution of a shade or a drape filtering light in an ambiance. As it creates a luminous, textural plane, White Curtain reveals the actual atmospheric materiality of screen fabric. Acting as partition, shelter, and veil, it can be a permeable material envelope, and it constitutes habitable space. In this way, Barba’s contemporary screen refashions the material, environmental archaeology of the medium outlined earlier as we retraced the genealogical fabric and architectural fabrication of the screen.9 Art rejoins film here as a place in which to reflect on the transformative architecture of screening, and on the stability and mobility of its ambient fabrication. Considering the process of projection in this sense also highlights the fact that a movement between art forms occurs on the luminous surface of an act of screening. When the avant-­garde artist László Moholy-­Nagy emphasized light as a way to texturally connect painting to photography, architecture, and film, he created experiments that find correspondence in contemporary experimentation with the surface of light as a material form of passage creating a transformation of mediums.10 In Barba’s own artistic practice this connective thread, which involves linking together the luminous material condition of viewing in the visual arts and media, is very much alive. In her work, light is a photographic condition that has the material texture of painterly pigment. And because this pigmented photographic light has body, it can become a sculptural element and even be transformed into radiant architectural space. The luminosity of projection is thus a form of artistic connection across mediums and of transformative resonance

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environmental potential of the act of screening in several ways that we have explored. They do so especially by working in space with the size, scale, or number of projective screens, reconfiguring the architecture of the technical operations of projection, and expanding their temporal, ambient, psychic, and mnemonic capacities in the site of exhibition. The process of screening thus becomes increasingly spatialized as different positions, locations, surfaces of communication, and forms of traversal are explored in environments of projection. Rosa Barba herself engages the process of projection in its ambient materiality. She makes haptic use of the screen as a cultural technique, designs its object form, and installs it sculpturally to activate an ambiance of projection. She also constructs artworks that function as if they were projective screens. In her body of work, there is no fixity in the conceptual configuration of the screen, which becomes the surface of an aesthetic and mediatic transformation that incorporates a projective fluidity. Her work participates in an aesthetic phenomenon that I have called “the surface tension of media,” which includes the creation of “screen-­ membranes” and “curtain-­scrims” in the art gallery.8 Often made of translucent material or illuminated fabric, the projective screens Barba fabricates are conceptually closer to the surface of a canvas, a sheet, a shade, or a drape. Transparency is always defied in favor of layering, translucency, and diaphanous materiality, which are exposed as the actual materials of an atmosphere of projection. In the installation Stating the Real Sublime (2009; fig. 9.2), Barba exemplarily enhanced projection as an environment. She suspended a projector against a gallery window displaying the exterior landscape and projected a diaphanous loop of celluloid film of white light that obfuscates transparency with a play of reflections and projections that reverberate with the exterior environment. The ambient texturality

9.2 Rosa Barba, Stating the Real Sublime, 2009. Installation view, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, 2015. 16mm film, modified projector. Photo: Peter Harris. © Rosa Barba. Courtesy of the artist.

between the arts. It is also a way to explore the materiality and experience of time, for light is here atmospheric matter in a state of becoming.11 Barba, who thinks and writes with light, furthermore understands cine-­projection, in Moholy-­Nagy’s terms, as a “light-­space modulator” that has an elaborate acoustical texture.12 In this intermedial way, the space of the art gallery itself can be modulated, transformed into a projective space of intersections. Barba’s projective art joins a range of aesthetic practices that push at the

boundaries of their specific mediums and pursue forms of environmental materiality through the use of such materials as technologies of light, motion, and sound. Transitive movements of the arts reside today within these haptic, vibrant environments of projection that connect art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media. In the ebb and flow of technological change, the art of projection has indeed found new ways to hold our fascination in intermedial and intermediated forms.

R ES O U N D I N G C O N V E R S AT I O N S, P E R F O R M A N C ES O F P R OJ E C T I O N

This fundamental rethinking of the art and atmosphere of projection is not merely a theme in Rosa Barba’s work but the very protagonist of the show. The fabric of the white film screen, the atmospheric texture of projected light, and the material accoutrements of the dispositif of cine-­projection, with its own characteristic noise, do more than simply populate the art gallery; they function to transform its space into a renewed material of resounding projective architectures, acting in sympathy with one

another and resonating across the environment. Working in space across diverse mediums that include sound art and text-­based forms, and often collaborating with the electronic composer-­musician Jan St. Werner, Barba restages the modulation of cine-­ projection musically, creating rhythmical resonance. She practices a “performative” form of projection reminiscent of the experimental films of Morgan Fisher, who exposed the materiality of projection and whose film Projection Instructions (1976) even gave a set of

9.3 Rosa Barba, Western Round Table, 2007. Installation view, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, 2016. Two 16mm projectors with film loops, optical sound, 2 min. Photo: Studio Hans Wilschut. © Rosa Barba. Courtesy of the artist.

9.4 Rosa Barba, The Hidden Conference: About the Shelf and Mantel, 2015. 35mm film, color, optical sound, 14 min. Film still © Rosa Barba. Courtesy of the artist.

instructions to the projectionist as if it were a score.13 Fisher made the hand of the projectionist an actual performer in the dance of projection. Barba’s own dynamic projective environments not only stage the working choreography of the machinery but “play” the projective apparatus, and they are sometimes even created in a form of live performance. For Blind Volumes (2016; fig. 9.1), for example, Barba erected a constructivist iron structure to stage a polyphonic choreography of projections. Inside this complex structure, resembling a building skeleton, she presented White Museum—­Live (2016), an acoustically controlled light show.14 The performative projection of light is orchestrated here by 70mm and 16mm film projectors that are activated by a sound frequency. Plexiglas screens are mounted, as if on scaffolding, onto the large archi-

tectural construction, which is further adorned with colored glass screens. Here, as elsewhere, Barba makes an environment of reverberating projections. In works such as In a Perpetual Now of Instantaneous Visibility, staged in 2019 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, an expanded performative, ambient choreography takes place.15 Projectors become real kinetic sound sculptures as, this time, a sound frequency, coming from musical instruments being played, reaches the projective mechanism and electronically activates it. As the light from the projectors pulsates in response to the frequency, a set of screens even begins to vibrate and move, with the effect that all the elements of the projection appear to perform in unison with a dissonant beat. Barba thus exposes, reconfigures, and reactivates the dynamic mechanism

of the projective apparatus in an effort to modulate not only light space but soundscape as an environment. Furthermore, in her performative pieces, the rotating plate of an outmoded 35mm projector can come alive with noise, as in Bending to Earth, a work that she presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015. A running projector can be grounded on the floor; suspended from the ceiling as in Stating the Real Sublime; or transformed into an active scriptural object, as in Spacelength Thought (2012). For Barba, a projector is a dynamic volume, a real “sculpture-­ in-­motion,” as Lindsay would have it. Because this

sculptural object of projection can transform space, it also can function as an “architecture-­in-­motion.” There is a pronounced quality of objecthood at work here that can even turn a projector into a piece of “furniture-­in-­ motion” in ambiance. The life of the object is exposed in these material configurations of cine-­projection. A filmstrip, a reel of film, or a film projector is a vital thing in this performative artistic environment. Barba exposes the inner work of her “instruments.” And she does not just exhibit the material operation of

9.5 Rosa Barba, The Personal Experience behind Its Description, 2009. Installation view, Tabakalera, San Sebastián, Spain, 2018. Cutout text on felt. Photo: Mikel Eskauriaza. © Rosa Barba. Courtesy of the artist.

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the technical mechanism; her installations show, or rather stage, how the apparatus of cine-­projection actually “plays.” The resounding material process leads the gallery viewer to sense a relation with the rhythm of the machinery, to feel a connection with the working dispositif. In this sense, this artist can create an “empathic projection,” which, as art historian Michael Fried claims, is stronger in artworks that lay bare their own projective mechanism.16 But Barba’s sense of empathic projection goes further than Fried’s notion, for she does not fixate on the human subject’s imaginative identification with the projective device, and there is more at stake here than creating a seam with the inanimate. As can be seen in works such as Western Round Table (2007; fig. 9.3), two projectors perform for each other, one facing the other as if engaged in conversation. In this way, the work makes one aware of the life of the instrument itself, and calls attention to the labor that the projective mechanism endures while performing its capacity of communication. Staging this play of objects of projection, and performing it with sound, Barba practices a real object-­related materialism, for her inanimate objects are animated in ways that are not at all anthropomorphic. Things have a real life of their own. And they play, communicate, and move in sympathy with one another. This is a theater of objects and a projection of sympathy also because there are no singularities in this installation practice. All things relate and resonate with one another. The motion of loops, the unwinding of reels, the shape of skeins, the dynamics of systems, the rhythms of repetition, and the dissonant polyphonies create sympathetic connection and dialogue between the disparate entities of cine-­projection. These mechanical, automatic, acoustical technical objects are vibrant materialities that are receptive.17 They exist in cultural space, surround us with their motion and sounds, and flow through us in an

act of real environmental projection. Barba’s cinematic objects are not only materially related in these energetic and sympathetic ways but convey material relations. When, in Color Studies (2013), she places two film projectors in a room and makes them face a screen with their motors running, it is as if their imaginary conversation with each other was mediated through the screen. An active dialogue is created in performative projections, with and through things that move, vibrate, and make noise, creating sympathetic connections and interactions in the environment. These resounding conversations also occur in gallery or museum situations that engage archival objects that are not necessarily cinematic or technological. In her three-­part series of projects titled The Hidden Conference (fig. 9.4), Barba investigates materiality by filming collections of art objects in such a way that the items appear to speak to one another.18 Her camera travels through artworks deposited in museum storage spaces, connecting together sculptures randomly packed and stored away and linking them up to disparate series of paintings, often strapped according to size alone to compact vertical panels that move on tracks. Perusing in this way the stored works in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Capitoline Museum in Rome, and the Tate Modern in London, Barba shows that objects in a museum storeroom can create unconventional alliances and surprising relationships with one another. As these not-­on-­v iew artworks are filmically exhibited, exposed in their hidden spaces, a different kind of art historical archive emerges. A creative, unconventional genealogy of art histories is brought to light as the fortuitous placement and assemblage of the art objects trigger nontraditional interpretations and associations. This connective, dialogic way of reading an art space thus produces an inventive museology. In a similar manner, in A Curated Conference: On the Future of Collective

into spatial and material dialogue with one another, as if they were engaged in a public performance, participating in a panel discussion.19

P R OJ E C T I N G M AT E R I A L R E L AT I O N S

Conversations and material relations surface in Barba’s practice particularly through the material configuration of such things as screens, which mediate forms of communication. Conceived as canvas, textile fabric, or a sheet of material, the screen also can become, figuratively, a sheet of writing paper in this artist’s world. Optic Ocean (2011), a silkscreen print on canvas, is one such scriptural work that is a canvas of inscriptions. The silkscreen, doubly printed in red and green, is illuminated by a spotlight in such a way that it becomes a screen fabric in its own right, on which words are inscribed as if indexical traces, appearing to move when seen at a distance. The Personal Experience behind Its Description (2009; fig. 9.5) also presents a material screen fabric that is illuminated and inscribed with typographic letters. This work conveys the actual geometry and material texture of a filmic screen as it manifests projective effects onto a plane, its title all the while evoking psychic projection. Recorded Expansions of Infinite Things (2019) functions projectively in even more evident ways, with light cast onto a rectangular white surface made of silicone. By way of this projection, the material nature of the silicone becomes transformed, turning into a radiant, translucent, cinematic texture. The projected light gives evanescent body to this installation, forging a screen space of architectural, ambient consistency. The surface of this translucent, screenlike material acquires volume and depth. The letters appear cut into, chiseled, even raised from the flat surface as if in relief. In facing this volumetric screen that is haptically sculpted by light, one ultimately has the impression of being in the presence of an ancient bas-­relief.

Inscriptions have their own haptic materiality in many of Barba’s sculptural representations of screens. Red (2014) is a screenlike work made of dark felt, from which the word red has been repeatedly cut out, as if to merge text with textile. As light is projected onto the fabric it shines through the cutout letters, revealing the text on the wall behind as if in projection. This work creates a space of projection but doubles it up, conjuring a twofold screen fabric that reminds us of the architecture of a traditional folding screen. This screen is not just multiple but layered, as is also the case with I Made a Circuit and then a Second Circuit (2010), where a projection through cutouts on felt again creates two layers of screen fabric. In these works, the surface is turned into a pliant, even pliable space. One layer of screen fabric reveals the shadow of its projection on the texture of a wall. Hence a textile becomes a screen fabric as a wall turns into an object of projection. Canvas, wall, and screen come to be connected, and put into dialogue. Their materials are conceptually combined, folded together, in a way that creates a surface matter that is a composite environment. Surface space is not an incidental part of the artwork but, rather, is stretched and pushed to the limit of its potential to become the actual core and structure of the piece, exposing strands of connective thread between material fabrics and mediums. In the pleats of these illuminated, twofold surfaces, a material act of layering takes place that ends up displaying the sheeted quality proper to the filmic screen itself, in accordance with its media-­archaeological architecture. This is a mate-

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Strength within an Archive, an exhibition she staged at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid in 2010, Barba put various art objects in the museum’s collection

9.6 Rosa Barba, White Museum (Vassivière), 2010. Installation view, Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière, France, 2010. 70mm white film, projector. © Rosa Barba. Courtesy of the artist.

rial surface of design that is coated with multiple inscriptions of a “projective imagination.” On the surface of a screen, as on the page of a book, many stories unfold, for the pliant, imagistic fabric of projection captures multiple signs of representation. An environment of projection is indeed a layered space, for it retains many traces of cultural writing over time. Inscribed on the projective surface, such trac-

es can haunt the space in the manner of memories. In this sense, the screen is not only configured as a fabric; it also can be understood to be a “sheet of the past.”20 Retained in its material fabric, as if they were stains, inscriptions of cultural memory come to be stored in endless layers. And so, in projection, screen texture becomes a storage room—­a real material archive.

The sense of an archive emerges also from Barba’s insistent representation of sites and landscapes that contain deep, geological times and can appear to be storing discarded memories in their geographic configurations. The artist excavates the folds of a landscape to reveal the layers of temporality that are inscribed within it, archaeologically exposing the strata of history that a particular topography can contain. Her projections reveal the unfolding of temporality especially through the atmospheric use of light, which becomes a document of the experience of time passing, creating an archive of time in space. Developing the relation of history to geography in luminous projective ways, Barba is especially attracted to terrains and landscapes that are or feel geological. Exemplary of her geological projections is the 2019 film Aggregate States of Matter, which employs atmospheric aerial views that map the history of an environment.21 Here, the artist travels to a particular zone in Peru where states of matter are indeed aggregate, for here the territory is both extremely arid and the site of melting glaciers that turn into violently running water. Depicting this atmosphere as well as the local population’s engagement with the geology and their devotion to the spirit of the mountain, the film engages us in a sympathetic act of awareness of the environment. As the voices of the inhabitants are transcribed, they are presented as a translucent sheet of text on the screen, with a typographical design that strongly recalls Barba’s earlier sculptural works of inscriptions. Here the inscriptions are projected, and as they are animated in moving, pulsating form, they become a screen on a screen. As the projection of the indigenous voices acts to “screen” the land traversed, layers of geological history come to be projected, and their aggregate states of matter become visible in the process. In similarly geologic fashion, Barba treats projection itself as a landscape and turns its environ-

ment into an archive. This is particularly evident in ongoing iterations of the public artwork titled White Museum (2010), a performative, live incarnation of which was described earlier. Typically, in these large public installations, a stream of white light is projected from a building onto the surrounding landscape, cityscape, or streetscape (fig. 9.6). A building itself thus becomes a literal mechanism of projection and creates a surrounding projective space. The evanescent white light lends the landscape a more solid appearance, turning it into a dimensional, sculptural space of projection. As it is projected outward, the light also sections the space and geometrically defines its contours. Hence the landscape is framed, and it effectively turns into a filmic screen. In turn, the act of projection acquires an environmental consistency. In the White Museum works, the geometric figure of projected light is an ever-­changing screen environment, for various elements of an atmosphere emerge in projection, and they change, in turn, the configuration of the screen of light. Passersby on a streetscape can become incorporated into the luminous screen frame, and their bodies mobilize the very space of projection. This can also occur in an interior, as in White Museum (São Paulo), where visitors to the city’s 2016 Biennial entered the pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer and walked on a ramp into a light that made the shadows of their bodies palpable. Both the traces of their passing and the changes in atmospheric light were registered in time. Several layers of passage and traces of temporality are inscribed into the various configurations of this white light, which is as absorbent as a white film screen. And thus, as white light retains these various temporal inscriptions, it shows its full potential to become archival matter, a shining storage space—­that is, an actual “white museum.”

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WHITE SCREENS, WHITE MUSEUMS

A G E O G R A P H Y O F AT M O S P H E R I C P R OJ E C T I O N 9.7 Rosa Barba, The Color Out of Space, 2015. Installation view, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, 2015. Five colored glass filters; steel base; HD video, color, sound, 36 min. Photo: Peter Harris. © Rosa Barba. Courtesy of the artist.

As the White Museum performances of light reveal, the materiality and immateriality of projection are at once present and coterminous in Barba’s artistic practice. Her screen of projection is a solid light space that is always inflected by an ethereal sense of atmosphere while firmly placed in geographic ambiance. This environmental form of “atmospheric screening” becomes particularly evident in one version of the White Museum, conceived as a site-­specific installation in 2017–­18.22A projector was installed in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome to illumi-

nate a huge tree and the surrounding environment. Depending on the state of the weather, the light emanating from the projector enhanced and produced an atmosphere: the more cloudy and nebular the environs, the more “atmospheric” the effect. A similar metereological effect was explored in Solar Flux Recordings, conceived for the glass-­and-­iron structure of the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid in 2017.23 Here, the architecture of the pavilion and the natural landscape of the surrounding park were involved in a performative piece that was activated by the weather,

particularly refashioned the celestial films of Georges Méliès. As the atmosphere of the globe and of film history coated this wall-­turned-­screen, the sound of atmospheric explorations could be heard on the radio by those driving past the site. In a way, Barba made a drive-­in movie, a cinema en plein air. As the white light projected from the observatory collided with the sky, and representations of ethereal space coated the façade of the building, the site turned into an actual outdoor cinema—­a cinema of atmospheric conditions. In the fall of 2015, Rosa Barba scaled this large site-­ specific public work down to become an intimate indoor installation.26 In this incarnation of The Color Out of Space, the luminous images of astronomic proportion are reduced in size and projected digitally through a series of colored glass panels (fig. 9.7). The layers of gasses surrounding the planet take solid shape and are registered to our senses in layers of projection. In this atmospheric installation, we experience an act of screening becoming an activity of projection. The glass panels are configured as partitions; that is, they are screens in their own right. As the light of planetary atmosphere passes through them, it becomes “screened.” The invisible takes shape in screens of molecular agitation as atmospheric gasses are made into solid light forms and planetary matters become ethereally conjured in projection. Here, atmosphere materializes not only on screens but as screens. We are made aware that the atmosphere is imbued with ethereal light particles that move in space, and that such qualities also define the process of filmic projection. In exhibiting the environment of cosmic light, air, and movement, then, a real sense of cine-­projection is exposed, for it too is a medium of atmospheric luminosity and elemental motion. Hence, The Color Out of Space evokes both the atmosphere of the cosmos and that of projective filmic matters, integrating them as an ensemble. The ethereal quality of the medium of projection—­ its atmospheric materiality—­surfaces here in pure projective fashion, even in abstract, colored-­light form. The glass panels that are screens are exquisitely

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choreographed in the ambiance, and actually “conducted” by the sun. As the interior ambiance of the glass pavilion, enhanced by Barba’s installation of colored-­ glass panels and screenlike metal plates, interacted with the exterior atmosphere in modulation, an ever-­shifting environment came to life that, both materially and conceptually, connected atmosphere to projection and caused them to resonate in conjunction. In terms of ambiance, consider also The Color Out of Space, the two-­part, site-­specific project that the artist created at EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) in the spring of 2015, produced in collaboration with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Hirsch Observatory. Here we have a performance of light that is truly atmospheric. A modified 70mm projector placed in the observatory emitted pure white light high up into the atmosphere, in a version of her White Museum performances that turn the sky into a projective medium. In this sense, the work reminds us of early experiments with projection that made the sky into a screen.24 But Barba’s projection goes further as it addresses both a conception of “sky media” and the architectural construction of an “atmospheric screening.”25 Here, an observatory of aerial and planetary space became a space, even a mechanism, of pure atmospheric projection. At the same time, the building’s exterior was effectively turned into a screen fabric, as a film, made in collaboration with scholars and students of solar systems and galactic atmosphere, was projected in turn onto EMPAC’s 8th Street façade. The skin of the building slowly transformed into an atmospheric screen as the projection of planetary surfaces displayed diverse textural dimensions of atmosphere. The ultimate effect of the installation was a nebulous affect. Both the atmospheric envelope of our planet and the look of film history were exhibited as cloudy matters. In addition to early forms of aerial projection, the installation evoked the soft-­focus, hazy imagery of early cinema and the particular “air” exuded by the projection of silent films. In re-­creating the mood of film’s origins, its very climate, the installation

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tinted, and as light is projected through their surfaces it changes shape and tenor, creating a rich ambiance of hues. This gives the moving-­image installation a strong pictorial sense, a sensation of materiality that is full of pigmentation, as if the projection were rendering the motion of brushstrokes. The textural facture of tinting and coloring, dying and staining, is enhanced in this chromatic atmosphere. And it accrues over time, through the spatial layering of the glass screens and the temporal passage of the ethereal light. Thus atmosphere becomes a tonal mood. This atmospherically charged projective experience can also create a melancholic climate. The Color Out of Space is deeply infused with the dissolution and obsolescence of filmic forms and with a sense of cinema’s inception and prehistory, arising in shades from the geographic ambiance. The tone of the installation evokes in particular a defining moment in the history of projection that was saturated with atmospheric matters: the series of glass partitions that act as screens, that is, recall the luminous projection through tinted sheets of glass that characterized magic lantern shows. The nebulous consistency and textural effects of the lantern’s projection, developed in the seventeenth century, are, in this instance, exposed and reenacted in new, technological ways via digital projection through ornate panes. Such a digital atmosphere of projection is permeated as well by the material trace of other forms of precinema and media archaeology, specifically the stereoscope. Stereoscopic slides produced a movement of forms and a depth of space that could be perceived when a viewer looked through a bipartite screening mechanism. Barba’s layering of glass panes that are screens re-­creates the stereoscopic effect of this transformation of forms. As in the large-­scale version of The Color Out of Space, one also feels the atmosphere of early film here, when prints of celluloid films were hand-­tinted, frame by frame. And finally, the installation refashions the time in precinematic history that was saturated with phantasmagoric projections. In the hazy atmosphere of phantasmagoria, the immate-

rial light conjured foggy, ghostly matters and shadow forms in projection. In this theater of shadows, as in Barba’s installation, appearance turns into apparition. Through layers of screen partitions, “sheets” of historical and material projection are thus constructed in this mnemonic installation, which has the texture of vapor and the density of haze. Light activates matter in a stratified atmosphere of projection, coated in multiple planes of tensility. This is a media-­archaeological reinterpretation of screen surface that engages ornament and “feel,” in forms of projective hapticity and composite materiality. In this surface condition, atmospheric materiality is affirmed in the largest sense of that term, including a play of affect. In The Color Out of Space, a material intersection between inside and outside, interior and exterior space, plays out on the surface of the multiple glass screens. Over time, the sense of an external world bleeds into the sensation of an inner world, and a space of interiority emerges in this tonal, moody kind of intimate atmospherics. These permeable effects of “atmospheric screening” amplify the act of layering screen surfaces performed in works discussed earlier, such as The Personal Experience behind Its Description, Recorded Expansions of Infinite Things, Red, and I Made a Circuit and then a Second Circuit, which also exhibit intimate strata of projection. As Barba’s work demonstrates, the act of projection reveals ambient character as “a quality pregnant with a texture.”27 The pliant surface that is a screen of projection is capable not only of texturally retaining the inner structure of temporality and the folds of historical memory in its material substance but of expressing the sensorium of affect, the sensations of mood, and the sensuality of atmosphere. This atmospheric surface is thus anything but flat. Densely built up in layers, with dimensions of volume and psychic fabric, this is a landscape of connections. Such a surface, far from being superficial, is a space of real dimension and transformation. Which is to say, it is an actual projective screen: a site capable of holding the very fabric of material relations—­the surface of a depth.

The indexical quality of celluloid may be no longer with us, but Barba’s conscious investment in activating “pellicular” modes, geological strata, and archaeologically layered spaces is a way of renewing the surface tension of mediums that always has been expressed in cine-­projection, even in elemental terms. Her recurring performative acts of casting light through air indeed produce “perturbations of surfaces” that are ultimately climatic.28 Here the ethereal atmosphere of projection is as thick as weather. It is dense with moody, luminous particles dancing in the space of air and imbued with an “air” of cloudy, permeable palpability. The projective haze can even turn into pure atmospheric miasma, as in the performance of White Museum—­Live presented at MoMA PS1 in 2015. In this work, spectators are immersed in the continual fog produced by a smoke machine, which further veils the space of phantasmagoric projections of sounds, colors, and white lights. Here, again, media archaeology is evoked in gaseous fashion. How can one not think of the historically vaporous moment in which the art of projection developed? We are especially reminded that the spectacle of phantasmagoria made active use of vapors to create a projective environment that surrounded and affected viewers.29 Magic lantern projections were full of atmospheric effects, and especially produced a clouding of the air. At times, as noted earlier, images were even projected onto smoke and fog to enhance the atmospherics and smoke issued from the lantern projector itself. The gaseous trend did not evaporate with the end of the phantasmagoric experiments of Étienne-­Gaspard Robertson, for early cinema featured “airy films,” where such things as spirit visions might even come to materialize.30 And let us not forget Eadweard Muybridge’s precinematic experiments with “atmospheric cameras” or his picturing of “vertical stream pumps” and the environment of smoky volcanoes.31 Last but not least, we should recall that Étienne-­ Jules Marey himself experimented with a fog machine,

a precinematic apparatus built to capture the motion of smoke. This is how forms of projection developed in history—­as elements of atmosphere. The work here was a nebulous, steamy affair: a weathered ambiance of vaporous visions. Projection was indeed always such an active environment, and in art today, it is becoming even more so an atmosphere of vital energy. Atmosphere is at the center of a vibrant reinvention of projection. Barba’s sustained interest in both the aerial and the geological layers of atmosphere is exemplary in this respect, as she continues to work these elements in different variations in the projective ambiance. The 2018 film sculptures Drawn by the Pulse (fig. 9.8) and Send Me Sky, Henrietta extend her sustained atmospheric research as they highlight the achievements of the American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868–­1921), who worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a so-­called human computer. Henrietta had a real connection with the atmosphere. She was one of many women who carried out the task of studying photographic plates of stars, looking for their fundamental properties. This scientist spent hours intent on the observation, quantification, and calculation of the color and luminosity of stars made visible on photographic glass plates by two telescopes pointed at the sky. In the process of this time-­consuming, repetitive task—­a kind of “woman’s work”—­Leavitt made an extraordinary discovery. She unveiled the existence of Cepheids, a class of variable stars that flicker periodically. Having established that a star pulsates at a specific and regular rate, this female scientist revealed an important configuration of the universe. The period of the flicker correlates to the star’s instrinsic brightness, which could be compared to its apparent vividness; in this way, the distance of the stars from earth could be surmised. As a result, Cepheids have become an essential and accurate measuring instrument of astronomical distances.

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A N E N V I R O N M E N T O F P R OJ E C T I V E AT M O S P H E R ES

9.8 Rosa Barba, Drawn by the Pulse, 2018. Installation view, Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany, 2018. 35mm film sculpture, silent, 3 min. 8 sec. Photo: Marcus Meyer. © Rosa Barba. Courtesy of the artist.

Barba’s work highlights Leavitt’s mapping of atmospheric space. In elaborating through filmic means on her discovery of this pulse of the universe, the installations make a conceptual contribution to the relationship between atmosphere and projection as environments. As Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s astronomical flicker is explored, it is revealed as related to the cinematic effect of the flicker. The flickering pulsation that is the astronomical vitality of stars is here shown also to be an essential property of cinematic means of projection. In this sense, Barba’s film sculptures extend the range of experimental works that have historically

exposed the pulsation of projection, most notably Tony Conrad’s film The Flicker (1966).32 Such work amplifies a basic property of projection, its luminous, dark materiality. As any spectator has historically experienced in the film theater, when the celluloid strip passes through the projector and the shutter briefly blocks the illumination as the next frame advances into the projection gate, light imperceptibly yet tangibly flickers in the dark. Projective light is like a candle that shimmers and waves. It glimmers and glitters, pulsates and twinkles. Just as a star flickers in the sky. Conceived in such a way, a fascination with the

plein air, designed for the buffer zone between the Greek and the Turkish sectors of Cyprus, significantly calling the project Inside the Outset—­Evoking a Space of Passage (2021).33 For this contested zone, Barba has envisaged a permeable screen fabric that enables films to be viewed from both sides, potentially giving access to different communities in an open space. This environment of projection intends to project the idea that diverse spectators can find a space of encounter and a chance of border-­crossing while sitting together under the stars in an outdoor amphitheater. And so, as the space of cinema is reconfigured and rematerialized environmentally, one is returned to the vital, relational fabric of projection, displayed on new forms of screen-­ membrane, in atmospheres that aim to project how environmental forms of art can participate in transformations of “astronomical” proportion.

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atmosphere of projection does not produce a dematerialization of the medium but, rather, activates an array of vital material relations in which the bodies of spectators are incorporated as the pulsating atmosphere projects bodies of light and darkness. Barba’s own sensory, transformative ambiances of projective materiality, always embodying a virtual public, are then experienced communally in the art gallery and in the environment. The public dimension inaugurated in the cinematic mode of exhibition becomes reactivated in these gallery and outdoor projections, which reinvent the ritual of a spectatorial public intimacy as they remake cinema into a veritable “white museum.” It is thus not by chance that forms of “atmospheric screening” have become even more central for this artist, who continues to experiment with environments of projection. She has even built a cinema en

10.1  The liquid atmosphere of Therme Vals, Switzerland, designed by the architect Peter Zumthor in 1996. Photo: Hackenberg-Photo-Cologne/Alamy Stock Photo.

10

Fluid Ecology Giorgio Andreotta Calò and Liquid Screens

W If we truly participate through material imagination in water’s substance, we project a fresh outlook. —Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams1

hat material forms of environmentality can the relation between imagination and projection take? How does a “material imagination” become a form of projection? What are the actual environmental elements of a projective act? These questions, probed in some form throughout this book, were addressed specifically in the environment of the exhibition Il mondo magico (The Magical World), where artists used their imaginations as an active form of interpretation and projection, and as an instrument to reinvent the material world.2 Usually considered an invisible and cerebral form, imagination here manifested itself as a tangible, spatial phenomenon emerging from environmental substances and, in turn, capable of acting on matter. As we will see, this is a vital force that has an alchemic quality and can contribute to the transformation of material space in forms of projection. As we look in particular at the environmental materiality of projection as exposed in the work of Italian artist Giorgio Andreotta Calò, we will encounter a lively ecology and fluid “elemental” world. Putting his work, and that of other artists, in the context of the luminous transformation of fluid conditions, a liquid environment of screening emerges. To frame this material ecology of projection, let us first take a step back in time to reconsider the groundbreaking view of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who linked imagination to matter and produced a fundamental notion of the “material imagination.”3

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Bachelard pictured the environment in which the imaginary operates, anticipating the contemporary aesthetic interest in materiality and cultural ecologies.4 Sensitive to material space and invested in the history of science, the direction of his research should be revived, for it can specifically contribute to advancing the modality of material, environmental thinking that I have been calling “environmentality.” His imaginative research on the elements of our material world also can expand the horizon of “elemental philosophy” and go beyond the scope of “ecocriticism.”5 This is because Bachelard’s mode of elemental thinking exposes a complex interrelation of forces, in forms of becoming. Imagination becomes a form of matter’s energy and is, in some way, projected out of the material world and its specific environmental conditions. There is indeed a profound materiality in the process of imaging, for it does not operate abstractly. Imagination arises from physical elements of the environment and is released from real substances. It relies on the world of things, which, in turn, it can act upon, activate, and animate. Forms of imaging can even alter states of matter alchemically. Conversely, a metamorphosis in material life always involves some aspects of creative imagination. One must actively extend oneself into the sensory world, project oneself into another material reality, to imagine how present conditions in one’s environment could possibly change. Imagination is a material energy, but also, matter itself possesses, displays, and projects imagination. In this reciprocal way, then, imagination is a form of projection. It is a

projection of and into the material world, as well as a projection of material states of mind. To develop this sensory, projective matter in environmental terms, one must address the actual imagination of matter. What are its elements? For Bachelard, who cultivated a creative “environ-­mental” form of elemental philosophy, there are four basic substances that constitute a material thinking: water, fire, earth, and air. These elements are revitalized in his philosophy in tune with a pre-­Socratic sense of matter, yet with a phenomenological inclination and a psychoanalytic twist. Water, fire, earth, and air are forms of the outer world that also are elements of an inner world. A psychic dimension thus emerges from these vibrant matters.6 They are, furthermore, elements of a projection. After all, as we know from psychoanalysis, the term projection signifies a particular psychic dimension, for it connotes a passage that is both an externalization of an internal process and an introjection of exteriority.7 An important aspect of this discourse was developed by Carl Jung, who, as we have noted, explored the relation between psychic projection and alchemy, especially in terms of the potential to animate matter and to recognize its vital combinatory force, that is, its alchemic chemistry.8 Material substances can thus be understood to act projectively in the sense that they form a connective tissue between interiority and exteriority. Sympathetically, they also relate to and resonate with one another, in forms of contact that produce variation and modification of elementary forms. A transformative material quality is in this sense at the core of the imaginative act of projection.

PROJECTION, AN ALCHEMY OF FLUID ELEMENTS

In the arts, this projective process can become manifest creatively in the ways artists fabricate mediatic textures and activate the materials they work with in forms of sympathetic resonance and active transformation of environments. As forms of “material imagination,” psychic projections too can be rendered

visible to the viewer when they are made tangible in elemental transmutation, or become “architected” and spatialized in the artwork through the alchemy of materials. This is the case for Giorgio Andreotta Calò, who animates matter in various forms of projection between interior and exterior space, and enacts a

canals below sea level. This is not simply an element of the artist’s work. With water, he appears to be in his element. A substantive part of a cultural and emotional geography, this liquid matter has appeared in several forms in his imaginative work. In this sense, his work is in tune with the flow of artistic interest in fluidity that forms a significant strain in modern and contemporary art. Water is indeed a crucial element of the fluid artistic imagination. In art, it has long served an important function but, especially since modernity, has become a sign of the dissolving of forms. The variety of liquid art forms that have dissolved conventions ranges from Bernini’s fountains to Monet’s and the Pre-­R aphaelites’ watery landscapes to the seascapes of J. M. W. Turner (see fig. 1.11), all the way to abstract art and the moving form of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an earthwork conceived for a watery setting and long submerged under water. Water has gained prominence and significance in modern and contemporary art as a metaphor for the modern condition and as a signifier of a larger processual fluidity. This is a vessel for a process of dissolution that, as the art historian David Clarke argues in Water and Art, can even encompass the melting of limits, borders, and boundaries.10 Turning to water as a processual material in this way can lead to transductive transformation of solid into liquid forms. It can also lead to a kinetic impulse that can liquefy boundaries between art forms and, at the limit, even connote the dissolution of the art object. In this sense, then, as media scholar Douglas Kahn argues in Noise, Water, Meat, one can see artists turning to water to express the active, processual qualities of fluidity and their transformative potential, including all the potentialities that a liquid process of imaging can activate.11 In such a fluid way, artworks may expose the actual “course” of their process. Learning ductility from a material’s own fluctuating condition can produce diverse processes of fluid transformation. Adopting liquidity both artistically and conceptually, as Esther Leslie claims, can even lead to

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transformation of states of matter. Andreotta Calò is an artist who works his process both in situ and from the site, and often undertakes long walks as experiential paths of research. In this way he constructs a “poetics of space” through the exposure of primal matters and architectural elements, which he transductively transforms.9 His raw materials are abandoned buildings or recycled materials that interact with natural phenomena and environmental conditions. Small objects or architectural fragments are exhibited as they have been exposed to the alchemical transformations of atmospheric agents. Here, we can experience the metamorphosis that the built environment or a found object undergoes when exposed to the natural elements activated by Bachelard: fire or water, air or earth. The scale of Andreotta Calò’s work varies significantly, ranging from large-­scale installations that are themselves environments to minimal environmental interventions that are nearly imperceptible. In both cases, as well as in his sculptures, the spaces and the material elements exposed often evoke the sense of an interior world. They especially project an internal sense of time. In this work, we can experience how objects’ exposure to natural elements makes manifest the very process of time passing, retaining its trace, and how that temporality can transform states of matter. In each of the works titled Clessidra (Clepsydra, 2009–­16), a piece of wood from a water-­eroded pier is cast in bronze in such a way as to become a sort of water clock. In the installation November. Dead leaves, still life, still alive (2009), a glass-­framed space turns into a natural history diorama, filled with fallen leaves that quiver as if breathing. In the series Carotaggio (Core Sample, 2014–­16), a stratified geology of time is exposed. Here, as in the cast of a shell fossilized by seawater, a physical experience of memory can take shape, cast in the elements, not only retained but altered, materially transmuted. Water is a favorite material for Andreotta Calò, who was born in Venice and, since 2008, divides his time between that lagoonal site and Amsterdam, a city of

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a more flexible, creative form of materialist thinking, reshaping political aesthetics.12 Imaginative possibilities thus emerge in a form of processual thinking that

resists fixity, working with forms of expression that are themselves fluidly transitive and transductively transformative.

FLUIDIT Y AND TRANSDUCTION

In the work of Giorgio Andreotta Calò, the use of water as a material exposes the process of a fluid imagination while exhibiting an “elemental” sense of environment. In the presence of the work, one becomes aware that water is a prime element. This is, in ways both literal and metaphorical, the stuff of life, a principal constituent of the material world and the base of all earthly living forms. Our bodies are largely made of this liquid. Water is generative, embracing, and bonding in the form of amniotic fluid. Animal and plant life also live on water. There is even an idea that the primordial medium of all life is the sea. A vital substance, water incarnates the very fluidity of matter. In the words of the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, because matter itself is in flux, “living beings cannot exist other than in a fluid environment,” in a state of interpenetration with the environment, in a constant sea of change.13 We should think of space itself as fluid, for “we do not stand before [our environments] the way we stand before objects, we live in them as a fish lives in the sea, as primordial organic molecules live in their primordial soup,” that is, in a form of reciprocal immersion.”14 Fluidity, in this sense, is an encompassing ontological and experiential condition, for life exists in a current; it is “perpetually unstable and constantly caught up in a motion of self-­multiplication and self-­differentiation.”15 Thinking in this processual way, we also should emphasize that, out of the aggregate states of matter, water emerges not simply as the most fluid medium but also as the most transitory of elements.16 As we know from Heraclitus, one can never bathe in the same river twice. Bachelard’s Water and Dreams shows that this fluid is most transitive in the sense that it is also a most receptive, connective, reflective, and projective element of our “material imagination.”17 It drives the

way in which matters can connect, interpenetrate, and communicate with one another on our planet. And as a basic form of nourishment and sustenance it is, of course, a precious resource, essential to the health of the planet. But this vital force is at the same time a destructive element. It is responsible for storms, tempests, and natural disasters. And, of course, cities set on water endure floods. So it is appropriate that in 2010, in Amsterdam, Andreotta Calò made a site-­specific installation in which he flooded his studio in the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. A few years later, he created a large site-­specific installation at the Venice Biennale, Senza titolo (La fine del mondo) (2017; fig. 10.2), whose title referred to “the end of the world,” evoking flooding in biblical terms. Here, as if responding to the city’s acqua alta, a Venetian structure was visibly submerged. Entering the Italian Pavilion, one walked under a large structure that made the space beneath feel dark and cavernous. Ascending a set of stairs, as if emerging from a marine underworld, one soon realized that this scaffolding had been built to support a pool of water. At the top of the stairs, in a very dark space, the viewer encountered an expanse of liquid so large and calm that it felt like a lakeside. Spectators could sit on the stairs, as in an amphitheater, and contemplate the liquid mass that was as reflective as the lagoon of Venice, in which buildings are mirrored. Viewers of the installation were in the presence of an imaginary mirror that reflects in many liquid ways. On the immediate level, the fluid plane mirrored the architecture of the pavilion, and did so in such a subtle manner that viewers might be unsure of what they were seeing. Some mistakenly saw a real mirror in place rather than a fluid, mirroring matter. One had

to look carefully to discern, for the dark liquid plane did not appear to flow or move as water typically does. If observed too quickly, one may not even have been aware of the reflecting pool and instead thought the artist had simply built a physical double of the pavilion below its roof structure, mirroring it. Time alone enabled one to resolve all the reflective and projective ambiguities of fluidity that emerged out of the darkness. It was such a shifting of matters—­between solid and liquid, still and moving—­that constituted the environmental force of the installation, its very projective architecture.

When the liquid plane mirrored the architecture of the pavilion, this imaginative construction in fact became visible on the flat surface as if it were projected on a screen. Space was not passively reflected but materially activated on this liquid mirror, which acted fundamentally as a screen fabric, for this, too, is an apparently flat surface on which particles glide. Haptically sensitive, the reflection on this fluid screen made the spatial structure feel so close that it became tangible, reachable, and inhabitable. Furthermore, a large, actual mirror covered the surface of the wall across from the steps of the amphitheater, reflecting

10.2  Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Senza titolo (La fine del mondo) (Untitled [The End of the World]), 2017. Installation view, Il mondo magico, Italian Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, 2017. Photo: Nuvola Ravera. Courtesy of the artist and La Biennale di Venezia.

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the entirety of the space, including, potentially, the bodies of the spectators. The watery surface that was a liquid screen, further mirrored in this reflection, acted to enhance the volume of the space, with the outcome of spatial expansion. The mirror-­screen effect did not simply duplicate the architecture or create purely optical effects; nor did it reinforce perspectival vision. It rather created a perspectival breakthrough by expanding as well as overturning the space, rendering it both upside down and inside out. The work challenged the usual analogy between mirror and screen, which have been generally associated in terms of opticality and perspectival unity, and presented a different material form for the connection.18 Here, the environmental condition of the screen was revealed, with its capacity to rearrange and transform space. In capsizing and expanding perspective, a perspectival perturbation of elemental proportion emerged as this environmental projection turned mirror and screen into liquid form. Projected in this haptic way was an exteriorized interior space that became as immersive as the liquid it contained. Amid multiple projections of inner and outer space, architecture itself became subject to more fluid, even intimate projection. For finally, in this mirroring expanse of liquid space, not only our bodies but also our emotions and thoughts were reflected, as if on a liquescent screen, and became projected in the environment. The architectural intervention of Andreotta Calò in the Italian Pavilion thus transformed materials alchemically, merging solid and liquid in an act of screening space. The solid state of the pavilion architecture, a part of the Arsenale, turned into an alternate state of matter as it became a container for liquidity. An imaginative transduction took place: a shift in the perception of the materials along with an imaginary transformation of the material space.19 Screened in this way, transductively, even the fluctuating state of Venice as a marine city built on a lagoon and threatened with

disappearing under water came alive. As did the flow of historical memories inscribed in the Arsenale, a naval shipyard turned art exhibition space. Here, the marine architectural structure appeared to be flooded as if to revert to its historic materiality, returning to its elemental, fluid state. This mnemonic history emerged in an architectural transformation that also played with transduction as understood in basic physics, that is, as a transformation of matter-­energy. What one experienced was a morphing of solid into liquid. Recall that matter assumes four configurations in everyday life: liquid, solid, gaseous, and plasmatic form. A solid has a fixed volume and shape, with component particles in a stable, nondispersed configuration. A liquid state, in contrast, is characterized by particles that move freely. While it maintains a fixed volume, a liquid can continually change shape and is most adaptable to fitting to other forms and into a container, a quality it shares with matter in the gaseous state. As the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman writes in Liquid Modernity, “Fluids travel easily”; they have the capacity to “‘flow’, ‘spill’, ‘run out’, ‘splash’, ‘pour over’, ‘leak’, ‘flood’, ‘spray’, ‘drip’, ‘seep’, ‘ooze.’”20 Unlike a solid, a liquid undergoes change even when at rest. It does not ever fix space or bind time but always makes them flow. From this material perspective, one can see that a such process of liquefaction reverberated in Andreotta Calò’s Venetian exhibition as it made solid architecture into fluid form. And, as architecture imaginatively liquefied, the processual element of liquefaction became exposed as a transduction. In fact, in the architectural alteration of the Italian Pavilion, we experienced not only a process of physical transformation but a transformation of physics. In this alchemical intervention, the potential effects of turning a solid into a fluid container for liquidity were explored in order to change the perception of architectural and elemental forms by way of projection. Matter-­energies were thus sensed in the very

its ability to morph not only as a space but into place, and then, finally, stilling it, as if to put this element at rest.

A FLOOD OF PROJECTIONS

In a physical way, Andreotta Calò’s architectural intervention in flooding a space retained layers of creative fluidity also because it recalled the history of architectural liquefaction in Italy. First of all, it resonated with the history of Piazza Navona, the Roman square that routinely was flooded, intentionally, during the month of August, from ancient times until the nineteenth century. In terms of more recent history, Andreotta Calò’s act of flooding the Italian Pavilion resonated with a material gesture linked to the genealogy and trajectory of Arte Povera. In 1976, when the Roman gallery L’Attico, which championed artists working with primordial materials and the environment, left its space in the via Beccaria, its director, Fabio Sargentini, famously flooded it. The garage that housed the gallery was inundated with fifty thousand liters of water, creating a sort of Arte Povera installation and thus offering the visitor a physical “projection” in space of the material and environmental vision that the gallery represented.21 One also thinks of Alfredo Jaar’s intervention in the Chilean Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, where the artist emblematically sank architectural models of the Giardini’s pavilions in a large pool of water. But that water was purposely murky and slimy, and its aesthetic texture conveyed a different, symbolic meaning as it questioned the state of nationality in art exhibition. While sharing a material form of thinking, a different kind of matter presented itself in Andreotta Calò’s intervention, for the clear, liquid plane he constructed projected an open field of environmental associations. Here we could encounter a fluid process of perception that is fundamentally about an imaginative act of projection, fabricated as it materializes in a filmic environment. By framing the space with a liquid mirror, the artist essentially put viewers in touch with a

cinematic experience of projection. After all, this fluid mirror that frames and projects space is fundamentally a screen, which reflects even its spectators. In this sense, this architectural intervention, as with Andreotta Calò’s previous acts of flooding, can be more closely associated with Douglas Gordon’s cinematic gesture of flooding the Park Avenue Armory in New York in his 2014 installation tears become . . . streams become . . . , which turned the space into a liquid projection (fig. 10.3). But while Gordon, an artist interested in film, created spectacle by making the water seep in and out as a pianist performed in the immersive space, Andreotta Calò chose to still the fluid element, to a different cinematic effect. In this projective space, the memory of film materialized in its elemental form. It is as if Andreotta Calò had picked up the environmental dream of Robert Smithson, who wished to “build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine,” in which he would stage the memory itself of film.22 In the cavelike space of the Venetian Arsenale, solid morphed in the presence of a screen fundamentally imagined as a medium, a screen that transported the still image of architecture into the motion of water. As it reframed the architecture of the space, it animated and mobilized it. In distilling the space’s form, turning it into a liquid plane, it actually “screened” it. This act of screening space was also a function of the subtle play of light and darkness. When the elaborate structure of the building’s roof was projected into the calm pool of water, a luminous texture appeared in the dark. A light surface that holds shades of darkness—­an elemental screen space—­thus emerged in this process of screening. Surfacing from the stillness of water, a shimmering in black space enfolded the spectators. The intense darkness in the the-

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process of transmutation. Adapting the solidity of architecture to flux, the artist took full advantage of the adaptability and malleability of water, pushing

10.3  Douglas Gordon, tears become . . . streams become . . . , 2014. Installation view, Park Avenue Armory, New York, 2014. Site-­ specific installation and performance. Photo © James Ewing/OTTO. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery.

probed. It was not, however, only the matter of the architectural mass but also the cinematic experience that morphed into liquidity. The actual material state of the screen of projection changed in this process of liquefaction. Here, the flat surface that reflected and projected the space was in real flux. Not only was the texture of this screen no longer solid; its state of matter turned fluid. Ultimately, in this projective act of screening, the screen itself became liquefied.

A N E X PA N S E O F L I Q U I D P R OJ E C T I O N S

The liquid, material play of projection that characterized Andreotta Calò’s intervention finds correspondence in other spaces in which a projective flood has been enacted. And it reverberates with the creative operations of other artists who have exhibited a process of liquefaction at work. Following the modern history of art that used water to dissolve boundaries and limits, and even the art object itself, contemporary artists have turned to this fluid to question the projective flow and even the liquidity of an act of screening. Andreotta Calò’s work, then, is not an isolated case but, rather, part of a direction of processual thinking that associates liquefaction and projection—­a phenomenon that it is core to the investigation of this book. Among the various iterations of this phenomenon of projective liquidity, let us consider a sampling of environmental works that resonate with Andreotta Calò’s and are relevant to the larger questions that concerns us. Significant with respect to elemental acts of projection is the work of Joan Jonas, who having engaged the flow of water and the life of marine creatures in pioneering drawings, installations, and performance art, created Reanimation, exhibited and performed in several variations from 2010 to 2019 (fig. 10.4).23 Reanimation associates a large projection that includes liquidity with a small projective object of her invention, a screen encapsulated in a structure that might recall a televisual apparatus and that reproduces as well

earlier forms of moving-­image display. This framed object, standing on the gallery floor, projects images of marine life. In showing off this fluid configuration, the projective dispositif—­a vitrine of floating images—­ clearly refashions the window-­display of an aquarium. The relation between the aquarium and cine-­ projection is even more prominent in Jonas’s performance Moving Off the Land (2016/2018), a large projection of footage filmed in various aquariums and seawaters around the world.24 Interacting with this liquid projection, Jonas creates a performance in which she positions mirrors and objects, functioning as screens, in front of the main screen of liquid forms. As her body moves through this immersive screening environment as she herself were a marine creature, an oceanic wave of projection is felt. This fluid act of screening, further liquefying the projection while mobilizing it, turns its mode of presentation into a real aquarium setting. Jonas’s liquid architectures of display, like Andreotta Calò’s, resonate with a history that is contained and exposed in the very flow of their form of imaging. In these, as in other environmental practices highlighted in this book, the atmosphere of projection contains a projection of history. In the case of Jonas, layered in the liquid work is the historic emergence of the very idea of display and projection surfacing as forms of liquidity. In the construction of her aquatic projective objects, one senses the moment in time in which precinematic

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atrical space of the installation evoked the pitch black of a movie theater enlightened in projection. Here, then, one became sensitized to the same play of light and shadows that is materialized in cine-­projection, where space itself is reflected in projection, between motion and stillness. Andreotta Calò’s architectural intervention subjected the space to a particular act of screening: a liquid filtering. As solid state was projected onto a liquid plane, the materiality of the screen itself was

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10.4  Joan Jonas, Reanimation, 2010/2012/2013. Detail view, Light Time Tales, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2014–­15. © 2020 Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist.

projection itself arose, along with the kind of vitrine display of marine objects that one finds in the cabinet of curiosity turned museum as well as in the aquarium. Jonas’s performative installation reminds us that the public aquarium is related to the public space of exhibition. The fluid display of the curiosity cabinet, in fact, permeated the atmosphere of the modern museum. Both were born of liquid modernity. The perception of shimmering light, as if reflected on water, was furthermore the mark of iron-­and-­glass structures of modernity such as the arcade and the Crystal Palace. At this very time, and out of the same age of luminiferous, liquid display, cine-­projection too was born. The framed, illuminated vitrine and the display of natural

landscapes in panoramic and dioramic culture were transformed into a projection screen, while the screen itself took the shape of a luminiferous fluid vitrine. Consequently, cinema could not avoid making its own aquarium of light in virtual form. As art historian Philippe-­Alain Michaud reminds us in his essay on the aquarium, Louis Lumière, who collaborated with the scientific journal La Nature, made an aquarium film in 1896, and did so as a metaphor for projection, following Ètienne-­Jules Marey’s 1890’s study of aquatic locomotion as a kinetic, precinematic move.25 The shadow play, enacted in projection, joined the display of the aquarium, as both are, fundamentally, forms of liquid diorama in motion. And thus the study of move-

of cinema in the form of a beach cabin or shack in installations named Cabane du cinéma: rooms made of strips of celluloid from 35mm films that, filtering light, act as screen-­partitions and alter an ambiance as if in projection.29 These shacks genealogically connect the architecture of screening to a particular shimmering luminosity, namely, that which appears in moments when light is reflected on water. The fluid connection of these cabin structures to cine-­projection is furthered when Varda builds a film shack in the form of a boat, as if the screen were a vessel floating at sea. But it is Bord de mer (2009; fig. 10.5), that most poignantly materializes the notion and cultural technique of liquid projection that concerns us in our exploration, for at this seashore, as in Andreotta Calò’s installation, one finds oneself at the “edge” of a liquid process of transformation that is a transduction. As viewers walk into the gallery space, they face a large screen that presents an image of waves that appear to move but are actually “stilled” in a photograph. The projection, however, extends from the vertical screen down to the ground and continues horizontally onto the floor, where the scene shifts from a frozen sea to rolling waves as the still image turns into a moving one. The cinematic waves of this projection continue to glide until they reach the seashore. An actual strip of beach has been transplanted into the art gallery, turned into a sunny shore with grains of sand scattered on the floor. As the motion and sound of water reach this coastline, viewers are lulled into the very atmosphere of a liquid projection. The ambiance is as intimate and interior as it is externally atmospheric. That is because, in this fluid projective landscape, as in Andreotta Calò’s Venetian installation, a real transduction is at work—­a process of transformation of matter-­energy that is both internal and external. What emerges here is the moment in which stillness becomes moving, in many senses. As Varda’s installation provokes a change in the state of matter from solid to liquid, it also references the historic time when photography, the still image, turned into cinema, the motion picture. And so, while

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ment in water appropriately conjured the development of cinema’s own liquid moves. Following the vitrine display of curiosity cabinets displaying marine life, akin to those of the aquariums, early cinema became, as Michaud puts it, a space of “visual movements, of tableaux vivants, one driven by special effects such as colored pulverization, electrical signals, pneumatic and mechanical motions.”26 In contemplating the layers of such diaphanous liquid projections, or Andreotta Calò’s exhibited strata of liquidity, we can observe the process of formation of environmentality materialize. We can see how a composite projection of cultural phenomena that display forms of material imagination takes place. We also can envision how this process of projection becomes sited for fruition in intimate yet public forms of exhibition. And, as we watch the transformation of elements emerge out of the depth of luminiferous fluid surfaces, this phenomenon of projection—­that is, an envisaging—­can take hold of our bodies as they too become immersed in the flow of the projective environment. A relevant aspect of this absorption in liquid screening, which reveals historic layers of fluid display, surfaces as well from the work of the filmmaker Agnès Varda, who began in photography and later in life experimented with moving-­image installations.27 For Le Triptyque de Noirmoutier (2004–­5), she created a fluctuating, triptych-­like screen with two outer portions that fold onto a central panel. This object of projection operated as if it were an actual triptych, whose carved wood panels, as we noted, are an early form of screen and functioned as well as a cabinet of curiosity. Activated by the hands of viewers, the fluid projections on this folding screen take us outdoors, traveling from the inside of a cabinet and an interior space all the way to the seaside. Varda is in her element in the fluid landscape of the sea, as she recounts in The Beaches of Agnès (2008), an autobiographical film where life, aging, and death all flow together while the motion of water resonates with the flow of moving images.28 This point is made even more clear when Varda imagines the architecture

10.5  Agnès Varda, Bord de mer, 2009. Installation view, Blum & Poe, New York, 2017. HD video projection, color, sound; sand. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. © Agnès Varda Estate. Courtesy of the Agnès Varda Estate and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/ New York/Tokyo.

experiencing a technological shift as a process of liquefaction, the viewer is taken into another temporality as well as into a different inner space. Here particles change, states of matter morph, and, as the flow of water takes over the stillness of matter, viewers are finally “transported” into the atmosphere of transduction. As inventive works such as the ones we are considering make screen space into a fluctuating surface that contains a depth of moving particles, one encounters a substantive yet fluid process of projection that is responsive. This projective screen is a “plastic mediator”—­that is, an adaptable object that can fluidly

change. This pliant, plastic medium acts to mediate, project, and modify an experience of the material world. In this process of mediatic liquefaction, an atmospheric transduction occurs that affects our own energies as we engage the transformation of matter-­ energy that occurs in projection. Such liquid acts of projection that activate atmospheres serve to conduct moods, which themselves transform a sense of space, and even its temperature. In liquidity, then, the capacity of the projective medium to transmit a flow of affects becomes materialized in shifting tonalities. In the plasticity of a liquid screen—­an in-­between space

life cycle inexorably flows toward decay and the kind of passing that is stillness. And so the liquid flow of a projection brings the transitory element of this environmental passing to life. After all, as Bachelard showed, water that is as slow and gentle as oil is “a plastic mediator between life and death.”30 If we perceive an expanse of water as a being in flux, it is because part of this substance constantly falls away. As the philosopher poetically put it, “Daily death is the death of water. Water always flows, always falls, always ends in horizontal death.”31

REVISITING A CAMERA OBSCURA

Returning with this in mind to the dark, still water of Andreotta Calò’s Untitled (The End of the World), let us take note of an invisible yet relevant aspect of the work: the fact that the stillness he achieves was actively pursued. The artist labored to “still” the fluid by means of a painstaking underground process that continually changed the water in an attempt to approach “the death of water.” Furthermore, while the installation appeared to liquefy an act of inner projection to the point of stillness, it did so, significantly, in a projectionless environment. Unlike works such as Cécile B. Evans’s What the Heart Wants, where a large-­scale video was projected in a flooded space at the 2016 Berlin Biennale, here no actual film was shown. In the liquid cinematic intervention in Venice, it was rather the experience of cinema that became materialized, liquefied in an act of projection. In this sense, the site-­specific work imagined for the Arsenale’s Italian Pavilion follows other architectural interventions by Andreotta Calò, where a liquescent filmic archaeology materializes in projection. Most prominently, in Prima che sia notte (2012; fig. 10.6), the artist evoked the act of projection as he rendered the luminous transition that occurs, as the title states, “before night falls.” In this site-­specific installation, he transformed the cantilevered gallery space of the MAXXI Museum in Rome, designed by Zaha Hadid,

into an early site of projection, effectively turning it into a camera obscura.32 In particular, he engaged the large window of Gallery 5, which Hadid had conceived as a specific opening: a filmic frame, a type of “screen” through which to see the city. This window offering a grand vista was totally darkened by the artist—­an act of negation of transparency that fundamentally questioned the optical equation of window to screen, commonly circulated in film studies.33 A pinhole opening alone admitted a tiny beam of light to the darkened space, creating an atmospheric screening. As the pinhole projection filtered the light, it projected inward an overturned image of the urban space outside. The floor of the space was covered with a thin layer of water, which itself acted as a screen surface, animating the image of the urban landscape. In this textured environmental projection, the cityscape was thus invited to fluidly stream into the interior. Inside this camera obscura, one can sense yet other layers of the atmosphere of history surfacing as if one were experiencing the generative moment when the projection of moving images upon a surface-­space emerged as an architecture, as a process of ambient change that developed inside an actual camera, that is, a real room. The camera obscura was in fact historically constructed as an interior, ranging greatly in size from a small box to a large space. As it positions viewers in

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that is a milieu—­an “elemental,” fluid form of projection thus comes to be processed in psychic materiality, and sited in concrete environmentality. There are times, as with Varda’s reflective work or Andreotta Calò’s reflective pool, when the projective flow comes to a halt. And then the stillness of the plane of water can feel melancholic. In such instances of immobility, a sense of the mortality of all life on earth becomes inescapable. Here the human and the nonhuman form an elemental seam, in sympathetic liquidity, bonding together as similar species, whose

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10.6  Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Prima che sia notte (Before Night Falls), 2012. Installation view, Gallery 5, MAXXI Museum, Rome, 2012. Photo: Giorgio Andreotta Calò and Simone Settimo. Courtesy of the artist and MAXXI Museum.

this generative habitat, turning a camera into a projective site, Prima che sia notte exhibits the emergence and dissolution of cine-­projection. This gesture evokes the medium’s environmental archaeology: the process of its invention as a technological reinvention of the camera obscura as an atmospheric site.34 While we experience the ambient effects of the pinhole projection, the history of cinematic screening comes into being as an environment, taking shape in the wake of a camera obscura, remodeled, and liquefying in the water. In this tactile, liquid rendering of a habitable dark room filtering an exterior, the act of projection genealogically materializes in dissolved form in a theatrical ambiance, and turns into the collective space of spectatorship. Evoking the actual history of projection without technically employing it, Andreotta Calò thus emphasizes the architectural and environmental component of

the projective process. In this sense, his intervention at the MAXXI Museum is aligned in spirit with the types of camera obscura constructed by the New York artist Zoe Leonard.35 At the Whitney Museum in New York, in 2014, Leonard engaged the museum’s former fourth-­ floor gallery space, with its signature Marcel Breuer–­ designed window, filtering the architectural opening to the outside through a pinhole projection (fig. 10.7). Unlike other uses of this ancient device, favored by painters, in the architectural interventions by these contemporary artists, the camera obscura does not appear as a dematerialized model of the mind and does not project a disembodied interiority.36 In the presence of these works, one is compelled to recognize that this dispositif has a different cultural function, if revisited in environmental terms. Here, the architecture of this spatial device rather expresses a form of atmospheric think-

ing. While making the camera obscura into an actual “room” of projection, Leonard and Calò ask observers to activate it with their movements, traveling through the space to further animate porous projections from the outdoors into the indoors. The camera obscura is not an enclosed space of illusionary, discarnate vision; this projective room, which both artists open to the street, does not separate the act of projection from its environment or its social, communal life. Quite the opposite. As the material world floods in, one senses a permeable unfolding of the urban landscape, an eventful interaction with its forms of life and environmental becoming. It is in this sense significant that in another work, Sunset Boulevard (2010), Andreotta Calò turned the luggage compartment of a car into a camera obscura and

traveled in it through the city of Los Angeles, cinematically capturing the external landscape in motion from within the trunk’s interior. Observing the life of the road in this way, figurative representations become hazy and foggy, their contours blurred, and, in this act of blurring, one can sense the projective modality at work as a form of atmospheric as well as epistemic perturbation. An evanescent, tonal ambiance comes to be registered here, as this camera obscura in constant movement puts projection in focus but blurs the borders of the image. This process ultimately creates a hybrid material space of transmutation, projecting an ambient representation of interiority. In this material way, the projective space itself becomes an actual, shifting environment—­an atmosphere of porous, lively exchange.

10.7  Zoe Leonard, 945 Madison Avenue, 2014. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2014. Lens and darkened room; dimensions variable. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; and Hauser & Wirth.

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In the media archaeology that Andreotta Calò evoked at the MAXXI Museum with his remake of a camera obscura, as in his Venice Biennale project, the medium of this atmospheric sensing is the thin surface of water that acts as a liquid screen. Here, as shades of light and darkness are projected, a sensing of screen texture itself occurs. In the absence of a film, we experience the environmental, material transformation of light into shadow that sensorially materializes on a cinematic screen. At the MAXXI, as the sun shines outside, the space reflects its reverberation on the walls and on the liquid surface, as if on our skin. As the sun sets, the projection turns slowly darker, and the space is finally plunged into total darkness. It is as if, over the course of time, one could see the white, luminous fabric of a screen turning into absolute black texture in this camera obscura.

A specific “black screen” comes to be materialized here, reminding us that in Victorian-­era chronophotography the screen was, in fact, this obscured room: a chamber draped in black velvet that gave the impression of a two-­dimensional surface.37 Andreotta Calò’s architectural intervention speaks of media archaeology by evoking this and other perceptual black rooms, including the darkroom that constitutes the architecture of the photographic condition, the space where images are exposed and developed. This dark space of projection especially embodies the darkness of the film theater as a basic condition for the projection of luminosity. In this shadowy interplay of elements, an atmosphere of projection rises and dissolves. Over time, as the light of the rising sun thins the darkness, the liquid screen texture turns luminous again, as if itself radiating the energy of the sun.

TO N A L AT M O S P H E R I C P R OJ E C T I O N S

For Andreotta Calò, the environmental consistency of light is thus both a photographic and an architectural material. Moreover, light constitutes a connective substance, for in the play of luminosity and darkness a set of environmental relations between the cinematographic and the architectural can be mediated and projected in transformative transduction. Other works by this artist are relevant to our projective discourse, for luminiferous, even colored, projections emerging from dark spaces are part of Andreotta Calò’s artistic environments and architectural vocabulary. In 2005, for IT, the artist reactivated a formerly abandoned building in Naples by projecting light and sound from it and creating a shiny, sonorous beat. Dal tramonto all’alba (From Dusk to Dawn, 2005), in a disused government building in Sarajevo, artificially re-­created the natural phenomenon of the sun setting and rising, making the process into the temporal arc of an act of projection. The city’s Tower of Parliament had been temporarily abandoned, and light shone through the skeleton of its concrete structure, which

effectively acted as a sundial. To draw attention to this ghost of democracy, the artist re-­created this phantamagoric apparition of natural light at night, turning the building into an actual site, even a mechanism, of projection. A projective architecture was also produced in 2010, with a performative intervention at the new venue for the Municipality of Bologna. For Monumento ai caduti/Bologna (Memorial to the Fallen/Bologna; fig. 10.8), Andreotta Calò asked a group of city’s inhabitants to light torches, whose flames, as daylight ebbed, turned the building into a glowing reddish structure, an incandescent body, transforming it into a radiant, fiery, living monument. Another performative intervention, at the Teatro Margherita in Bari in 2011, simulated how this building, which rises over water, had erupted in fire. Andreotta Calò’s transformations of buildings into projective environments, including the interventions at the MAXXI and the Venice Biennale, deeply engage a sense of atmosphere. In the end they expose the architecture of projection in building form, as an

ambiance. In particular, they reconfigure the fluid, temporal element contained in the very atmosphere of cine-­projection. The environmental experience of light shining in the dark, and reflected on water, contains traces of inner time that possess a mnemonic quality, generated by the fluctuation of elements. Out of this process, a specific projective material emerges from the emanation of reddish lights. At an elemental level, these particles even appear to evoke the environmental base of celluloid as extracted from cellulose, a key components of plant cells, which is highly sensitive to light, lives on filtering it, and transforms with the particular radiance of sunlight. The reddish luminous particles also embody a different alchemy: the chemical substance of celluloid. First developed out of research for explosives, celluloid, at its root, is a matter

of both light and fire. A diaphanous veneer, like a “film” that can capture light, this was a highly flammable material. This elemental fact affects the archival memory of the medium, for the majority of early silent films, made of unstable nitrate film, went up in flames. The one element that can destroy the work of fire is water. In this sense, Andreotta Calò’s liquid, radiant environments of projection expose elements of a Bachelardian “material imagination” that are the very matter of film. They exhibit, that is, the actual making of a “projective imagination.” Here, the material conditions of the medium become tangible in truly elemental ways as an ecology. In other words, the condition of projection is exposed, and transformed, as an actual environment. For, after all, film is as fragile as our ecosystem, a substance that can disappear by flood, or dissolve in the dust of fire.

10.8  Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Monumento ai caduti (Memorial to the Fallen/ Bologna), 2010. View of performative intervention, Palazzo del Nuovo Comune di Bologna, Piazza Liber Paradisus, Bologna, Italy, 2010. Photo: Matteo Monti. Courtesy of the artist.

11.1  LRobert Irwin, Excursus: Homage to the Square³, 1998. Installation view, Dia Center for the Arts, New York City, April 12, 1998–­June 18, 2000. © Robert Irwin/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York.

11

Environmental Projection Robert Irwin and Nebular Atmospheres

I All living things require an atmosphere around them, a mysterious misty vapour.—Friedrich Nietzsche1 Atmosphere is like the nebulous primal matter that condenses into individual shapes.—Béla Balázs2

t is the fall of 1998, in Chelsea, a New York City neighborhood that, at this time, is more commercial than residential. The urban atmosphere is gritty, the scene somewhat barren. This is a postindustrial landscape, full of warehouses and gigantic garage spaces. People work in the wide streets, enlivened by the Hudson River light. Upon reaching the west end of 22nd Street, one encounters the multistory former warehouse that has become the Dia Center for the Arts. As you enter the building, you pause: your eyes must adjust to the ambiance if you wish to access the nebular mise-­en-­scène of Robert Irwin’s Excursus: Homage to the Square3 (1998; fig. 11.1).3 There is a rigorous geometry to the architecture of the installation, and yet this seemingly still environment moves, atmospherically activated over time by way of the change of light. The scene one experiences has a meteorological quality. Its appearance depends on the time of day and the state of the weather. The product of decades of work with light and space, originating in Irwin’s particular brand of Southern California minimalism, the installation engages atmosphere, and its forms of projection, in an architectural and sculptural exploration.4 The frame of this inquiry is announced in the title of the installation, which refers to Homage to the Square, the landmark series of paintings that Josef Albers began in 1950 and carried on for twenty-­five years. The large, open space of the third floor of Dia appears transformed, as if the canvases that Albers conceived

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as architectures have materialized in actual architecture. Here Irwin exposes the potential of the square, using scrims to create eighteen similarly constructed rooms. Stretched and invisibly attached to frames, these scrims appear to function as walls, or rather partitions, but also frame openings in the shape of doors. The partitions themselves have a particular character of aperture. Made of diaphanous fabric, they are light and defy the gravity of enclosure. As they dematerialize the tectonics of wall, they materialize a surface of access, creating an environmental “dooring.” The fabric of their lightness fabricates a veiled architecture and a subtly textured, screened space of nebularity. These scrim-­walls are made of a delicate, sheer fabric that is not transparent but rather translucent. The cloth reflects and absorbs the natural and artificial light that constitutes an important element of the installation’s atmospheric architecture. Acting in concert, light and fabric, both used as materials, create a transforming nebular ambiance, in a composite mixture of translucency that comes from different sources. At either end of the space there are large windows, gel-­covered such that they no longer simply frame the light but rather filter it. As another stratum of luminous filter, they act less like windows and more like sheer partitions: they too become scrims. Further illumination comes from fluorescent lights positioned within the space, their tubes wrapped in layers of theatrical gels that contribute an eerie, colored glow to the ambiance.5 This use of transparent plastic film further colors the nebular atmospheric effects of the installation with tinted tonalities, in homage to Albers’s own painterly study of color textures and hues. The further one walks into the space, the more one becomes aware of its layered ambient fabrication. Filtered through scrims that are essentially veils, light itself appears layered, coated, and textured. As the veil of light bathes the room with ambiance, you become fully immersed in the nebular atmospheric effects. If you remain for some time, this atmosphere becomes so palpable that you sense its “weathering.” Like cli-

mate, this stratified environment is anything but static, and it is fundamentally as temporal as any state of weather. As in a landscape, subtle shifts of luminosity and obfuscation occur over time, phenomenologically changing not only the tone but also the mood of the ambient space. Like any atmosphere, which by definition is something pervasive—­a mutual compenetration of body and environment in hybrid mixture—­the work envelops and absorbs.6 Here, a particular form of immersion takes hold because this nebularity, as with actual haze or fog, closes the distance between viewers and the space. The separation between perceiving subjects and the surrounding environment diminishes to the point of dissolving. As perceptual distances shrink, without clear visual distinction between things, they are simply in the midst. In this nebulosity, focus is hazy, contours blur, and everything appears not just close but closer to the touch. And so, as viewers are immersed in the density of these superficial, environmental effects, compenetrated in it, their awareness of surfaces amplifies. They begin to sense the change of light on fabric as if it were affecting their own skin. A conflation of materials, an interpenetration of mediums takes place on the texture of the scrims, which take on a cinematic form. The scrims effectively assume the meaning of pellicule, that is, of “film,” celluloid—­that material “skin” that itself reflects, absorbs, and responds to light and shadow in projection. The more the durational fabric of light is registered on the scrims, the more the force of the cinematic pervades the installation, for, as viewers walk through the layers of ambiance—­it is, after all, an Excursus—­they become fully integrated in the atmospheric exhibition. Appearing and disappearing through the scrims, these viewers, like actors in a film, participate in a play of light and shadow, becoming shadows themselves. As the scrims activate this subtle play of transparency and shadowing, they “mediate” a spectatorial experience in a veiled viewing chamber. And thus, acting atmospherically as luminous partitions and reflective filters,

formation of elements such as light. Their absorbent material is that same fabric that allows a screen to be, in every sense, a projective, environmental medium.

E XC U RS U S , R E FAS H I O N E D

It is now 2015, and the landscape is upstate New York. A train ride along the light-­reflecting waters of the Hudson River takes you to Dia Beacon, through an atmosphere that is pastoral and painterly. As you travel to see Robert Irwin’s new installation of Excursus: Homage to the Square3 (fig. 11.2), you are reminded of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, for those canvases were as atmospheric as Irwin’s scrims. You enter Dia through a metal gate decorated with a mesh screen that was designed by Irwin, as was the grid of the garden outside the old factory building. Lines of trees section and screen the outdoor space, and the grass surfaces through tiny square partitions. This “screened” landscape prepares you for an installation that, two decades after its Chelsea version,

in an apparently projectionless environment, again presents you with scrims that filter the light and atmospherically partition the space, becoming translucent textures that effectively act as fabrics of projection.7 But, as you look closely, you realize that some elements are different in the configuration of these canvas-­walls that are screens. For one thing, the lights are more prominent than in 1998, and the theatrical gels wrapped around the fluorescent tubes are much more colorful. The reference to Albers intensifies here, as if that artist’s dynamic architecture of color needed to be fully explored and mobilized to produce a range of chromatic schemes and variations of ambiance. A pronounced ornamental quality emerges in this installation as your attention is drawn toward decorative

11.2  Robert Irwin, Excursus: Homage to the Square³, 1998/2015. Installation view, Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York, June 1, 2015–­May 31, 2017. Synthetic fabric, paint, wood, fluorescent light, polyester gels, and natural light. © Robert Irwin/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York.

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and changing an ambiance, the scrim-­walls are finally understood to be real projective screens. They are the kind of diaphanous bodies that can enable projection, which is itself a form of transfer, mediation, and trans-

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11.3  Windows designed by Robert Irwin at Dia Beacon, Riggio Galleries, Beacon, New York. © Robert Irwin/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York.

objects in the form of dressed-­up fluorescents. Admiring the vibrant pigmental combinations, one notices how the light, emanating from both the tubes and the outdoors, affects and changes color tonality. As these theatrical effects unfold and affect the ambiance, they create a particularly cinematic atmospheric setting, suggesting that atmosphere itself is to be understood as a form of mise-­en-­scène. Finally, out of this theater

of effects, even a decorative filmic quality surfaces. One is reminded here of a particular theatrical ornament: the glittering marquee, shining with colorful neon lights, decoratively adorning the exterior of an old movie theater.8 The ornamental quality of Irwin’s theatrical lighting enhances the ambient sense of the installation with vibrant multicolored surfaces, shapes, shades, and hues

Beacon installation in these various ways, they also become aware that the architecture of the screen-­ partitions resonates with Irwin’s design for the doors and the windows of the building, which are also partitioned by panels that create a grid. For one side of the building, the artist designed windows that have some gridded panels of transparent glass surrounded by several panels of frosted glass, which contribute to fogging out the space (fig. 11.3). These visual frames are perceptual ambient objects as much as his scrim-­ partitions, with which they are in dialogue. They make one aware of the subtle changes in the texture of light that transpires through a surface, changing an ambiance. In other words, these windows too are screens. As panels that “screen” the light, the Irwin-­designed architectural elements of Dia Beacon convey an act of screening that is not about transparency but translucency. Like the scrims of the gridded installation, the window-­panels filter and reflect light in a hazy, misty, cloudy fashion. The effect is one not of pure visibility but of subtle veiling. It is as if they are there to “curtain” the space. Indeed, the windows effectively screen the light as if they were shades, curtains, or drapes. As they fashion a form of window dressing, these apertures thus take on the fabric quality of Irwin’s scrims. Insofar as they are meteorological filters, the window-­screens, like the scrims, are a permeable architecture that enables an atmospheric passage. Acting as if they were thresholds, even apertures, they resonate with the shaded, gridded doors that Irwin designed to enter and exit the building at Beacon in the same veiled, nebular geometry. In this installation, then, one can clearly sense all the meanings associated with the notion of screen, from frame to window and door, but presented in a way that defies opticality and transparency in favor of translucency and environmental aperture.10 In this intermedial way, that is, one senses the actual composite materiality of the screen, its ambient fabric of passage, which is materially exposed in translucency, in the permeable texture of scrim-­screens that atmospherically filter elements and partition space.

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that fashion an environment of dense textural tones. And in looking carefully through the gauze of the screen-­partitions, the viewer will notice that the lighted double panels produce the perceptual sensation of a particular ornamental surface: moiré. In between the two layers of scrim, a nebular effect is created that evokes the shimmering of this textile and its special effect of overlay. As is the case for moiré fabric, the surface of Irwin’s scrims, as pixelated as a contemporary screen, reflects light in different, atmospheric ways depending on the angle of view. Moreover, the superficial appearance of moiré fabric—­an undulating, watery consistency—­manifests itself to our senses in the interstices as liquescent texture. Irwin’s sartorial use of light makes the interstitial scrims seemingly warp and weft, as if reproducing not only the overlay but the rippled form of moiré. A perturbation of atmospheric proportion thus occurs in this installation. These divergent reflections of light rays through material not only make for wavy fabric but create waves of motion through surface space, “clouding” it. This iteration of Irwin’s Excursus: Homage to the Square3 thus produces an atmosphere of variable ambient perturbations. In a departure from the New York installation, at Dia Beacon each room has a distinctly different tone and temperature. Moreover, one can enter and exit the installation through doors in the front and side panels, and even walk around the entire installation’s perimeter, and in this way experience a sense of both aperture and partition. For the Beacon visitor, then, there is less of a sense of meandering within an embracing atmospheric space, as was the case in New York, where, walking in the single center door of a maze, one was being led and immersed inward, feeling slowly absorbed in a cumulative, enveloping ambient space.9 Here, as one chooses a point of entry and exit and becomes sensitized to the rooms’ dividers and the different atmospheres of each room, one has a more tangible sense of how the surfaces of the scrims, acting to filter the space, create various “airs.” As visitors are free to walk in and out of the Dia

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A N E N V I R O N M E N T O F “A T M O S P H E R I C S C R E E N I N G ”

The open form of Irwin’s screen-­partitions thus takes us back to the “elemental,” environmental function of an act of screening. It reminds us in particular that the screen was atmospherically born in architecture as a framed translucent object for filtering light, partitioning space while partaking of it, even before it became, through technology, a plane for the projection of luminous images.11 Irwin’s installation embodies the genealogic passage that transpired when this translucent membrane became a projective surface, for, then, a new form of atmospheric materiality took shape, as a light-­reflecting medium for the transmission of luminous images contributed to altering the environment we live in. This permeable quality of the act of screening as an atmospheric filtering, manifested in Excursus, is also present in Irwin’s previous works with scrims as environmentally sensitive textures. Excursus refashions in particular the atmospheric screen quality of Scrim veil—­Black rectangle—­Natural light, a work Irwin conceived in 1977 for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (fig. 11.4). This large-­scale installation was “site conditioned.”12 It uniquely engaged the architecture of the Whitney’s iconic former building, designed by Marcel Breuer, responding to it and acting on the site to transform it. The work was reinstalled there in 2013, before the museum left the Brutalist space for its new home. As the work’s title announces, Irwin hung a vertical scrim running the length of the museum’s fourth-­floor gallery and marked the perimeter of the space with a black line drawn across the walls, at the height of the beam at the scrim’s bottom edge. This minimal yet profound gesture of intervention redefined the space architecturally, interacting with the grid of the ceiling and the dark rectangle of the floor titles, and activating the space of light in concert with the window. The work questioned received notions that a frame implies containment and explored instead how the geometry

of a scrim can extend into space, reframing it in expansive ways. The scrim created a subtle partition in a space that otherwise appeared empty although, actually, it was not at all a void. As Irwin asked in “Notes toward a Model,” published for the 1977 exhibition, “How is it that a space could ever come to be considered empty when it is filled with real and tactile events?”13 The scrim did indeed activate real and tactile events in the gallery space. As they walked in, visitors could choose to position themselves in the space in relation to its geometry and the frame of the window. They might stand in front of the scrim on one side or the other, crouch below it, or look in between the partition. They also could walk around the subtle space divider to change their perspectives or view the work in continual motion. Although spectators could participate in the hapticity of space, it is important to emphasize, as Brian Massumi puts it, that Irwin’s work “is not interactive art. There is no interaction. You have to stop acting for the perceptual event to happen. It then wells up of its own volition. It takes you. You are in it.”14 As you ceased any compulsive doing, and rather let yourself be taken outward and inward, into the atmosphere of Scrim veil—­Black rectangle—­Natural light, you became open to an active experience of ambiance. You could feel how the natural light that emanated from the geometrical encasement of Breuer’s large window energetically permeated the space of the gallery. You noticed the passing clouds and perceived even the most minimal changes in the ether outside. Every atmospheric vibration became subtly reflected and processed inside, and resonated through the fabric partition. Light itself was “screened” by the scrim, which was turned, quite literally, into a cinematic projective object. Here, in this projectionless projection, you could again sense the history of the screen and how it changed over time, from architecture to cine-­projection, for materialized fully in the fabrica-

11.4  Robert Irwin, Scrim veil—­Black rectangle—­Natural light, 1977. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 27–­September 1, 2013. Cloth, metal, and wood, 12 × 114 ft. © Robert Irwin/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York. Photo © 2013 Philipp Scholz Rittermann. © 2020. Digital image Whitney Museum of American Art; licensed by Scala Archives/Art Resource, NY.

tion of this installation is a real genealogical screen-­ environment. It is a partition, a divider, a net, a buffer, a curtain that interacts with the ambiance. Most important, it is an atmospheric filter, a protective shield, a material shelter of weather, a place of meteorological passage, and a site of ethereal transmission. Such a scrim is a physical object of environmental transformation—­a surface of transmission that conveys the very energetic transport of light, and of shadows.

As Irwin’s scrim atmospherically filtered the light, it is as if it were actually making shadows. In this ambient way, it re-­created the very atmosphere of the shadow theater out of which the culture of the cinematic was born. This is not a show of transparency but an opaque aesthetics. Suspended between light and shadow, and attuned to the development of natural phenomena, the process of screening itself can act to veil, to cloud, to shadow, to confound spatial contours,

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and palpably so. In this nuanced way, Irwin’s scrim could make the space perceptibly shady, cloudy, foggy, misty, and even hazy. It could create a particular kind of opacity: a fog that, as the philosopher Michel Serres puts it, is “concerned with the continuous or ragged space of touch.”15 Such misty, enveloping, palpable material can transform the features of the world that surrounds us in encountering them. This is a sensitive surface that can actually “screen” phenomena from the world. It can register temporal states and record states of matter. In particular, it can signal on its surface how temporal circumstances affect atmospheric manifestations, including the ever-­changing states of luminosity and cloudiness. In the end, this enveloping sensorial haze, which is a space of nuance, can act to blur separations, defying clear distinctions in favor of atmospheric mixture and ambient interpenetration. In Serres’s words, haze “fills the environment with potential things. Whether they are objects or vapours—­we cannot tell.”16 And so as you stood there in the old Whitney, and ceased compulsive action, you too could become

sensitized to the experience of ambient, environmental transformation, including the creation of a microclimate. This geographic sensation was also a deeply aesthetic one. It is as if you were finally able to inhabit one of those nebular, meteorological landscapes that J. M. W. Turner strove to make as canvas. Stripped completely bare, Irwin’s scrim had the ability to render the pure meteorology of the canvas. As you lingered on, and really stopped acting, another cloud appeared. In your mind, you could see the skies that Constable, on his canvases, rendered as moody sheets of clouds, passing by in the sky as if in your own mind (fig. 11.5).17 And as the clouds passed by in the sky outside the Breuer window and a subtle nebularity was registered on the scrim, something else could happen. Irwin could bring you close to sensing the layers—­the actual “sheets”—­of nebular consistency passing from canvas onto scrim. Here you could finally perceive the fully environmental nature of screen fabric, its very meteorological fabrication. You could sense its own veiling of light. And so, at this point, you would feel the screen itself turning into a cloud.

NEBULAR PROJECTIONS

This is a nebular aesthetics, which reinforces the notion of “atmospheric thinking” and transmutation in the intermedial, projective sense that we articulated at the beginning of this book. This aesthetic gesture reminds us especially of how atmosphere developed as a transformative modern notion, arising in art as in science, as well as in aesthetic and psychic theory, and furthermore became articulated with the rise of the mediums of transmission of luminiferous imaging.18 In this context of the invention of atmosphere, understood as the sensible, resonant vibration and compenetration of elements in the environment, a sensibility developed that favored nebularity, and this was a particular product of modern times. As literary scholar Mary Jacobus shows in her cloud studies, John Ruskin went so far as to suggest, in Modern Painters,

“that if a name were needed to characterize modern (by which he means nineteenth-­century) landscape painting, it would be ‘the service of clouds.’”19 If the modern artist worhips clouds, Irwin develops his own environmental nebularity. His atmospherics is especially in tune with what the literary scholar Steven Connor calls “nebular modernism” when linking culture to weather and emphasizing that “the weather has temporality” and “is pure fluctuation.”20 Connor suggests that there is a real affinity between modernism and the nebular, and shows that “modernist haze was a phenomenon of . . . interference, an accidental mixing of registers and channels. It is a kind of visual noise, which implicates the conditions of perception and registration in its nature.”21 In this reading, the modernist topos of haze has today morphed into a topography,

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turning into an actual environment.22 Irwin’s articulation of an aesthetic of visual fog and sensory haze suits this paradigm, though it transforms the penchant for atmospheric noise into a much more perceptual, environmental vibration. Haze, for Irwin, is a necessary condition for the act of perception. I would go so far as to claim that haze is the manifestation of perception itself, understood as a movement in time and space—­a phenomenal “perturbation.” Let us reflect more, then, on this perturbation. To further articulate this reading of Irwin’s meteorological penchant in terms of a nebular aesthetics, it is useful to turn to the writings of the French philosopher and aesthetician Hubert Damisch, whose book A Theory of /Cloud/ makes a clear connection between the cloud and modern aesthetics. Tracing the history of clouds in painting, Damisch describes a radical shift that occurred in modern culture when the cloud became an important signifier of change, signaling an expansion of limits and the opening up of representational borders. Damisch writes of this shift in art

as a perceptual matter, a clouding of vision itself. In modern art, a meteorological aesthetics was fleshed out in conjunction with a scientific interest in climate. “Modern painters,” he insists, “were interested in the perceptible aspect of clouds, their objective configurations, the effects of mists, the appearance of things seen through the screen of atmospheric formations.”23 When artists assumed this atmospheric attitude and took to “screening” atmospheric formations, a real and profound transformation took place. This represented more than a representational change. The penchant for nebularity constituted a paradigm shift. Damisch makes clear that “whereas the painters of the past had sought for stability, permanence, clarity,” modern art favored nebularity because “the modern spectator was invited to take pleasure in obscurity, the ephemeral, change, and to derive the greatest satisfaction and instruction from that which was the hardest to fix and understand: wind, light, cloud shadows.”24 As viewers of Irwin’s installations, we are indeed invited to participate in changes of space realized

11.5  John Constable, Cloud Study, 1822. Oil on paper laid on panel, 11¼ × 19 in. Collection Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, New Haven, Connecticut.

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through the most unstable of elements: natural light. Sensitized to the passage of luminosity and the clouding up of the sky, we are finally exposed to the shrouding effects of a nonrepresentational “cloudiness.” In other words, we experience an actual form of “screening,” while, in turn, an atmospheric screen comes to manifest itself. In Scrim veil—­Black rectangle—­Natural light, as in Excursus: Homage to the Square3, we perceive nothing but “the appearance of things seen through the screen of atmospheric formations.” This activity of “atmospheric screening” encompasses effects of textural density—­a sartorial cloudiness, of sorts. Here, too, Damisch offers a clue to further our interpretation of Irwin’s work in layered, atmospheric ways, titling an important chapter of his book, concerning an aesthetics of the cloud, “Our Sheet’s White Care.”25 This suggests that the clouds themselves can be visually imagined as a sheet, that is, as a piece of white fabric. Pushing this reading even

further, I would add yet another twist to this story. The act of perceiving a sheet of white clouds in an artwork can aesthetically lead to the sensing of another kind of white sheet: the white textile of a painting’s canvas. The history of the relation of artists to clouds can be understood as being played out on this intricate, shifting relation of white sheets. The representation of an evanescent white cloud expresses a desire for material texture in a play of blank surfaces. Irwin’s environmental work itself can be inscribed in this superficial gesture, that is, in “our sheet’s white care.” Ultimately, his use of scrims refashions a perceptual association between the white cloud and the white canvas, and adds a crucial element to their mediatic mix: the white film screen. Appropriately so, for white is what we see when all wavelengths of light are reflected off an object. And thus, in this white fabric of projection, sheets of nonrepresentational texture can show themselves, manifested in nebular aesthetic projection.

I N T E R M E D I AT I C C O N N E C T I O N S

As they unfold in layers, or rather “sheets,” of mediatic connection, Irwin’s light and space installations thus transmit the passages that occur atmospherically across the material of canvas, wall, and screen in nebular ambiance. In these passages, we can witness how the status of the image has changed across time: in modern times, images have come to be manifested less as representations and more and more environmentally, as superficial nebularities of tones and tonalities. A series of ambient encounters of this kind comes to the fore in Irwin’s installations. His surfaces of diffused light make us especially aware of how screen culture, with its atmospheric origin in ambiance, can alter the environment. The surfaces of Irwin’s scrims are also a shifting repository of perceptual art histories, for they expose sediments of atmospheric perturbations that are manifested in nebular art, with its own history of meteorological passages of textural density. Irwin’s work suggests, in particular, that as we think

of enveloping ambient surfaces—­that is, atmospheric “sheets”—­we must reflect further on the superficial relation between mediums in nonrepresentational ways. This practice signals that a fundamental intersection of forms has taken place, and today we can witness an important change on the surface of mediums, in their material manifestation as environments. Distinctions collapse, and forms of intersection, even conflation between canvas, wall, window, and screen, have taken place in ambient space. Irwin’s work shows in an exemplary way that the very nature of what is traditionally understood as canvas or as wall has changed to incorporate the screen, the projective form that has become not only ever-­present in our culture but pervasive as an environment. As his practice “projects” the canvas into architecture, it also creates a more permeable understanding of the notion of wall, showing that it too has morphed. The architecture of the wall is no longer rigidly tectonic but rather tensile and textured,

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embodying the property of canvas and the configuration of screen, in forms that are more responsive to the environment and atmospheric change. The projective form—­itself a resonant hybrid mixture and connective modality—­thus takes center stage here, and not in its usual framing. As we ponder the architecture of Irwin’s installations, we come to question canonical notions of the screen, which is not a window, in the traditional sense, for it slips away from transparency and from any conceptual framing in terms of pure opticality or of perspectival geometry or ideal. And because of its textural translucency, it also is not a mirror. The screen, as it emerges here, as in other works considered in this book, is dressed as a different cultural surface, reconfigured as an environmental medium, a type of absorbent, shifting atmospheric canvas, a curtain, a nebular sheet.

Irwin’s scrim-­screen is as enveloping and morphing as was the “canvas” of some of his nebular works that took painting into sculpture, while acting as screens, such as a series of untitled works from 1968. Here, white acrylic lacquer on a plastic or metal surface refashions the reflective surface of a white film screen, and even approaches its pearlescent granularity. As he overcomes the limits of the frame, Irwin embraces the expansive space of atmosphere. Ambient partition, shelter, and veil, his screen is a permeable architectural envelope that “performs” an act of screening as it filters elements of the environment and creates atmospheres that are nebular meteorologies. Through layers of interconnected screen-­partitions, then, sheets of nebular representation become manifested in both Excursus: Homage to the Square3 and Scrim veil—­Black rectangle—­Natural light, conflating

11.6  Ho Tzu Nyen, The Cloud of Unknowing, 2011. Installation view, Singapore Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, 2011. HD projection, 13-­channel sound, smoke machines, floodlights, show control system. Collection Singapore Art Museum. Photo: Russell Morton. Courtesy of the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong.

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mediums and transforming them into milieus in atmospheric fashion. In this work sensitive to weather conditions and meteorological passage, light activates matter in a textured, cloudy atmosphere that, though apparently projectionless, unveils the dense, ambient surface of projection. Irwin offers an atmospheric reinterpretation of the surface of screening that engages ornament and texture, with the nebular consistency of veil and the density of haze. In this aesthetic of minimalist simplicity, attention to material defines a condition that is an affirmation of environmental materiality. As a material intersection between inside and outside is played out on the scrims, a layered space of interactions between the exterior world and the space of interiority emerges over time in these nebular installations. Deep layers of projection materialize, for the pliant scrim surface that is a screen appears capable of retaining the inner structure of temporality in the

material substance of an atmosphere, which not only affects but is affected. Furthermore, in his works of atmospheric projection, Irwin uses light and air as a material construction and makes these “light” elements as solid as matter. He not only exhibits material elements but exposes the workings of a material imagination, with a touch of elemental philosophy.26 Air and light are tools for constructing an elemental form of thinking—­that is, a material, conceptual reflection that is carried through actual elements of the environment. A real “theory of clouds” takes place here, for this is a textural reconfiguration of the perceptual framing of space in view of natural phenomena. Resonating across mediums, enveloping sheets of sensitive surfaces take shape through this expansive meteorological aesthetics that is tuned to temporal states of matter.

A R C H I T E C T U R A L A M B I A N C E , AT M O S P H E R I C P R OJ E C T I O N

For some time now it has been clear that intermedia art is trending toward that point at which all the phenomena of life on earth will constitute the artist’s palette.—Gene Youngblood27

In this connective aesthetics of atmosphere, attentive to cloudiness and nebularity, an “environmentality” thus comes to the fore. The attention to the unfolding of natural phenomena produces a form of ecology, understood, in Gene Youngblood’s definition, as the “pattern of relations between organisms and their environment.”28 In such reshaping of material space, a new materiality is being designed, with forms of conceptual construction and actual building that are environmentally sensible. In fact, the ethereal, luminous transformations that Irwin pioneered in architectural art find correspondence today in architecture, as architects themselves become more sensitive to atmospheres and move closer to the nebularity of landscape design.29 Atmosphere, after all, is the very material of architecture, as it is for Irwin’s own architectural art. At the limit, as archi-

tecture theorist Mark Wigley puts it, “Architecture is but a stage set that produces a sensuous atmosphere. . . . To construct architecture is simply to prop up a surface that produces an atmosphere.”30 It is significant, in this sense, that the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, well known as a proponent of an architecture of atmosphere, opens his book Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects with an epigraph from J. M. W. Turner, who in writing to John Ruskin declared,“Atmosphere is my style.”31 Zumthor not only designs but also reflects on atmospheres as actual “architectural environments” and real surroundings (see fig. 10.1). His architecture and writings develop a diffuse sense of nebular matter, for they emphasize the surrounding quality, which is the sound and the temperature of a space, created in intimate tension between the interior and the exterior.

As if echoing Irwin, Zumthor affirms that atmosphere is ultimately “the light on things.”32 The light on things is also the light of things, with their own passing states of cloudiness and haziness. In resonance with Irwin’s spaces, subtle and dense opacity and obfuscation, which are properties of space, have become a nebular aesthetics in architecture. Think of Diller Scofidio + Renfro making a cloud building in 2002, appropriately called Blur: a thing of mist that floats on the banks of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland and makes a performance of atmospheric phenomena (fig. 11.7).33 These are the same architects who can make the walls of a theater blush in New York’s Lincoln Center, as well as combine light and air with technology or redesign an industrial city promenade as a

living and breathing environment.34 When conceiving the cantilevered media room of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, they enacted interconnected projections as they framed the sea view across the frame of computer screens, creating an atmospheric urban screen. In this museum, you can watch the clouds go by and the weather change, while in the midst of Blur you are immersed in its very nebular mist. As we have seen with Irwin, if the meteorology of clouds assumes an architectural manifestation, it is also because it has an art historical meaning. This is pursued today in works such as The Cloud of Unknowing (2011; fig. 11.6), an atmospheric moving-­image installation by the Singapore-­born artist Ho Tzu Nyen, which shares its title with a contemplative, spiritual

11.7  Diller Scofidio + Renfro, architects, Blur Building, 2002. Photo: Beat Widmer. Courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

11.8  Transsolar and Tetsuo Kondo Architects, Cloudscapes, 2010. Installation view, 12th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice 2010. Courtesy of Tetsuo Kondo Architects.

Middle English text.35 Inspired by Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/, this nebular multichannel video installation explores the expansive subject of the representation of the cloud as well as transience and spirituality in the history of art, in a setting that is itself clouded. A set of eight vignettes is presented, each centered on a character who is met by an ethereal cloud that permeates the surroundings. The scenes allude to the cloud’s appearance in historically significant Western European artworks as well as in the Eastern landscapes of Mi Fu and Wen Zhengming. In this nebular, cloudy work of filtered light, the

environmental genealogy of projection as luminous filtering is performatively reenacted not only in but as atmospheric space. To enhance this effect, the artist even used smoke machines when presenting the work originally at the Venice Biennale, making the screen of clouds resonate with the fog of the projection space. In clouding a space, the nebular atmosphere of projection itself became manifested and enhanced as an environment. Nebularity, especially in the form of atmospheric mist, is also a principal material employed by artists such as Olafur Eliasson, who created the installation

sense the way fog forms when water vapor condenses around particles in the air or cold air moves over warm water. In this hazy ambiance, environmentally engineered with the movement of clouds, one could experience the actual “breath” of the atmosphere. As Irwin’s 1997 intervention into the ambiance of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego had showed, an environment is always engineered, and cultivated, even with minimal action. For 1°2°3°4°, he simply cut panes of glass and made apertures out of the existing window panels, creating an environmental “dooring.” Natural breezes came through the squares removed from the windows, and ambient effects were produced by the varying reflection of light through the tinted and missing glass on the white terrazzo floors. One thinks of this breeze, and feels its lasting effect, while immersed in the technologically engineered environment of Cloudscape. At the Venice Biennale, one could sense that breeze that is the upward motion of air caused by colliding winds, and could even inhale the transpiration of plants and trees. Creating a breeze, Irwin had himself reengineered an art space, sending a breath through a museum environment. Here, not only the transpiration of the coastal palm trees but even the sea breeze could positively perturb a traditional museum experience. Clouds are thus floating around in milieus of art and architecture, breathing out ambient experiences of aesthetic spaces, perturbing environments, and blurring the boundaries of mediums with their own nebularity. This atmospheric work that acts on ambient matter perturbs its forms, and even its own form, and can become even more destabilizing when ambiance is acted upon in the sense of social milieu. We are reminded here that, as the philosopher Félix Guattari proposed, the “three ecologies” of environment, social relations, and subjectivity act in concert to produce a diagnosis of our planet’s atmosphere, and, if put in dialogue, can even perturb its state, creating real disturbance.37

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The mediated motion (2001) at Kunsthaus Bregenz, in Austria, a building designed by Zumthor.36 Eliasson collaborated with the landscape architect Günther Vogt to create a space in which temporality and movement engaged the sense of atmosphere in the building. The orthogonal character of a room was modified by inserting a subtly slanting floor, which made visitors more aware of their motion when taking in a variety of atmospheric experiences, as happens in moving through Irwin’s installations. Here, too, these orchestrated sensory experiences involved not only sight but every sensorial texture. Eliasson created a sequence of atmospheric changes using natural materials including water, fog, earth, wood, fungus, and duckweed. The fluidity of wetness, the humidity of vapor, the moisture of mist, the haze and daze of fog filled a site steaming with the sensation of nebularity, which one could even smell. A light suspended bridge was built to allow visitors to navigate such condensations of atmosphere as they walked up in the air, in the very midst of mist. After the haziness of Blur and Eliasson’s nebular bridging of forms, another ramp into the clouds was constructed at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, in an installation called Cloudscape, created by the German climate engineering firm Transsolar and Japanese architecture firm Tetsuo Kondo (fig. 11.8). They engineered an actual cloud, based on a careful study of how clouds are formed in nature, through the stratification of air temperature and levels of humidity. Reproducing that environmental process using the same principles, the team designed multiple microclimates within the space of the Venetian Arsenale. As a spiraling ramp took spectators up into the clouds, they could physically touch and inhale sheets of the ethereal mass, passing from dry to warm and wet air. In this environment, enhancing the effects that Irwin pioneered in his installations, visitors could experience the mutability of the atmosphere, the shifting qualities of light and air, and the changing levels of visibility, tending toward obfuscation, taking the temperature of a cloudy space. In Cloudscape, one could even

11.9  Alfredo Jaar, The Cloud, 2000. Public intervention, Valle del Matador, Tijuana–­ San Diego, US–­Mexican border. Courtesy of the artist.

includes a shift in social affect—­a creation of empathy, of relatedness, and of forms of sympathetic relation—­ that can alter social perceptions of divisions in favor of affirming states of in-­betweenness and hybridity, while using the power of nuances and the force of nebular shades of passage. In this sense, the atmospheric performance that Jaar enacts with The Cloud is in tune with others we have explored in this book, which also carry the relational potential to engage boundaries and create atmospheric mixture and social perturbation. It especially resonates with Chantal Akerman’s A Voice in the Desert, part of the installation From the Other Side, for which she positioned a huge white screen on the border between the United States and Mexico. Responsive to atmospheric conditions, her installation projected potential perturbations of borders, for Akerman used a receptive, environmental projection to change perspectives of division, and to enable the transit of people and the transmission of cultures. Weather was a vehicle to perturb social climate also for Clemens von Wedemeyer, who created the resonant ambient installation Sun Cinema in Turkey, on the border with Syria. While turning cine-­projection into a solar atmospheric condition, this screen perturbed the social climate with its wish to promote a hybrid social mixing. Such a project is also pursued by Rosa Barba in the very landscape of Inside the Outset—­Evoking a Space of Passage, where the atmosphere of outdoor projections in the buffer zone of Cyprus becomes a relational space, promoting the encounter of diverse cultures in public intimacy. Disintegrating boundaries, including the limits of materials, and dispersing elements of mass in particulate, fluid substances can change the materiality of art and the milieu of architecture, bringing them closer to the mobility of atmospheric particles, and this, in turn, can modify our environment. After all, if materials atmospherically respond to a momentary change of light or the motion of the observer’s movement, as happens for Irwin, they too can disperse like clouds or

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This is the case for The Cloud, a public project from 2000 by the Chilean-­born artist Alfredo Jaar (fig. 11.9), who having studied architecture and filmmaking turned to the atmospheric condition to engage the architecture of borders and question their boundaries. In a performative event, Jaar made a nebular space out of a poor, ethereal material. His cloud consisted of a thousand white balloons tethered together and hovering over the border that separates the United States from Mexico, between Tijuana and San Diego. The number corresponded to the lives that had been lost in the attempt to cross the border over the previous decade. On both sides of the border, classical music performances and poetry recitation turned the wall of divide into a site of public commemoration, a place of mourning and relief. Then the cloud was released, its elements dispersed as it flew over the border, the wind taking it toward the Mexican side. In this way, The Cloud turned into a moving, silent meditation on the potential to perturb the status quo, with atmospheric perturbations that can turn walls into ethereal materials, dissolving divides and crossing established boundaries. As pioneered by Robert Irwin, then, atmosphere has expanded as a nebular primal matter of artistic and architectural perturbation of milieu, and as such it now suffuses both art and spatial forms, permeating them and connecting them together.38 What is most important to emphasize here is the latitude of this concept of atmosphere, its range, for the legacy of Irwin’s structural nebularity refers to atmosphere in the largest sense of the term. This is a wide-­ranging, sympathetic “sensing” of environment that, while incorporating the full resonant spectrum of the sensorium, includes an intersubjective, social sense of affect: the kind of tone that is Stimmung.39 It is an atmosphere that changes and transforms over time in space, in shaded tonalities, for taking the temperature of a space or sensing its air also means registering and producing alterations that can become manifest and act psychically, intimately as well as in public form. This kind of atmospheric action

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dissolve like mist. This effect of blurring, shrouding, or clouding a space can be pushed in ways that pulverize material barriers into a space of passage and hazy porosity. And this kind of atmospheric engagement in material space can constitute a permeable landscape of projective transformations, because projection can, indeed, create an ecology: an environment of relationality and interrelational movements. The nuances of an ethereal, hazy, cloudy environment can become a space of morphing dimension when the rhythm of variation, as opposed to globalized sameness, is materially exposed and positively affirmed. In this twilight of passage, one can experience

the real elemental agency of a projective atmosphere as a form of environmental intermediation that affects transformation. For an atmosphere not only reflects or refracts physically but, when cultivated, is a matter that can transform the experience of cultural ambiance. In this sense, an atmosphere of projection reveals a process of transduction at work, for, while bearing the fabric of material relations and conveying their elemental depth, it also can register their subtle perturbations. In other words, with energetic transformations, atmospheric works can create an actual climate: a variable environment, a place of sentient weathering of our being in the world.

Acknowledgments

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his book has been inspired by diverse kinds of atmospheres, was developed in several ambiances, and changed along the way by contact with different environments. And it is thanks to many people that it has come to see the light. I am grateful to Susan Bielstein, executive editor at the University of Chicago Press, for her continued support of my work and for her inspiration, readings, and perceptive guidance. It has been a pleasure to continue our dialogue and to work together with her again. For their contributions to a rewarding publishing experience, thanks are due also to assistant editor James Toftness and graphic designer Michael Brehm. A number of institutions provided public dialogues and productive settings that allowed me to develop the ideas for this book. Although I cannot name every person or place, I sincerely thank them all collectively. A series of invitations to lecture at art museums and to write about specific exhibitions inspired me to think about atmospheres of projection and to reflect on the environments in which they take place. My special appreciation goes to Chrissie Iles for the spirited dialogue we maintained in preparation for her expansive exhibition Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–­2016, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016–­17, for which she invited me to contribute a text and a talk. Special thanks also are owed to Lynne Cooke for thinking of me often for her projects, for which we share aesthetic sympathy. Her invitation to

write on the retrospective exhibition Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination at LACMA in 2015–­16, and to contribute to the catalogue Cristina Iglesias: Metonymy, for the 2013 exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, prompted early reflections on these two wonderful women artists. At the Madrid museum, thanks are due also to Mafalda Rodríguez Rodríguez de Valcárcel and Beatriz Jordana Trisán. I am indebted as well to Cecilia Alemani, who curated the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 and inspired me to write on the work of the talented artist Giorgio Andreotta Calò. Many thanks also to Yasmil Raymond for thinking of me when she was curator at Dia Art Foundation and to Kelly Kivland, its current curator, for inviting me to contribute to a very interesting symposium on Robert Irwin at Dia Beacon in 2015, for which I wrote an early, unpublished version of the text that appears in this book. The late Jytte Jensen played an important role as well in the artistic development of this book. When she was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she introduced me to the Danish artist Jesper Just, who had produced a trilogy in part inspired by my book on affect. A 2008 public conversation with Jesper at MoMA’s “Modern Mondays” series sparked sympathetic resonance and produced a number of other institutional occasions on which to reflect on his work. I wish to thank Julie David at MAC/VAL, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-­de-­Marne, in

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France, for prompting me to write about Just’s work in 2012; François Bovier and Adeena Mey for including this earlier reflection in their book Exhibiting the Moving Image; and Kyung Yong Lim, director of Mediabus publications, for the Korean edition. Thanks also to Oscar Fernández, who curated the 2013 Córdoba Biennial of Photography in Spain; to Claartje Opdam at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam; and to Kinsey Robb at the Perrotin gallery in New York for offering me further occasions to reflect on Jesper’s work and to illustrate it visually, for which I also thank Natacha Polaert and Caitlin Merrell. Going to see his design of the Danish Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 was a particular joy, for it gave me a chance to work closely with the artist, whom I thank for this opportunity, and for the added surprise of seeing a huge stack of printouts of my text exhibited at the entrance of the pavilion, as if it were part of the installation, free for the public to take. Annette Michelson, a mentor who became a lifelong friend, transmitted a passion for art and for the projection of moving images that stays with me even after her passing. I owe her thanks here, especially, for introducing me to the late Chantal Akerman in the early 1980s, initiating a dialogue that offered me deep insight into her extraordinary work. I am grateful to Chantal for her long and meaningful friendship, which is deeply missed and has much enriched both my life and this book. Ideas for this book’s chapter on her work have taken shape over time. Thanks to Dieter Roelstraete, who invited me to write for the first major European solo exhibition of Chantal’s gallery films at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2012, and to Dominique Bax for publishing this piece in French. Thanks to Bérénice Reynaud for asking me to contribute to the special issue of Senses of Cinema devoted to Chantal; to the editors of October for hosting my more personal writing; and to Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson for including that piece in their anthology on her oeuvre, Chantal Akerman: Afterlives. Keynote addresses in 2016, at New

York University’s conference “Displacement” and at the Eleventh Tel Aviv International Colloquium on Cinema and Television in Israel, and an homage at the Harvard Film Archive also enabled me to reflect on Chantal’s work, as did an early invitation to speak of her gallery installations in 2008 at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, for which I thank former curator Bill Arning and former director Jane Farver. In terms of public settings for art, I am grateful to the intrepid Maddalena Fossombroni and Pietro Torrigiani Malaspina for inviting me for a summer residence in 2014 at their Castello in Movimento in Tuscany, where ancient castle stones really do move, and for thinking of hosting Rosa Barba as well, knowing that the elective affinity would spark not only a piece of writing on her inspiring work but a long-­lasting friendship, for which I thank Rosa as well. Thank you also to Roberta Tenconi, curator at Pirelli HangarBicocca, for inviting me to write for Rosa’s extensive retrospective in that impressive, dynamic art space in Milan in 2017, and for her help in the visual research on other artists whose work I write about in this volume. While this public life has honed my thoughts on the artists, my deepest debt of gratitude for the conceptual development of this book goes to my students at Harvard, who constantly engage me and keep me on my feet. The theoretical core of this book developed out of teaching a series of graduate seminars and has grown in scope as I tested materials in the classroom with a responsive audience. While all of my graduate students and advisees have contributed to the articulation and expansion of these ideas, special thanks among them goes to the two who also acted as research assistants, for their presence in the process and their invaluable contribution to my intellectual life. A fellow traveler in the atmosphere, Caufield Schnug is always alert to what’s “in the air”; he has an eagle eye that can grasp big ideas as well as provide incisive edits at a glance. It was a pleasure to share my process of writing with him. Special thanks also to Dan D’Amore, who is sharply attuned to ambiance and especially to

I wish to acknowledge in particular Franco Baldasso, Mary Beard, Erin Besler, Jan Besler, Jim Carter, Judy Chung, Adriana Cuéllar, Dylan Fracareta, Amy Franceschini and Lode Vranken of Future Farmers, Laura Iamurri, Francesco Iovino, Nicolás Leong, Mark Letteney, Sara Levin, Vladimir Logutov, Michelle Lou, Rick Miller, Helen O’Leary, Marcel Sanchez Prieto, Ruth Scurr, Andrew Solomon, Lori Wang, and William West. It was also a pleasure to discuss her art with Karyn Olivier, whom I thank as well for providing me access to her image archive for this book. Thanks as well to the Academy’s former deputy director, Cristina Puglisi, and to Peter Benson Miller, who was Andrew Heiskell Arts Director. The very helpful staff, especially Giampaolo Battaglia, Anne Coulson, Sofia Elkman, Marina Lella, and Monica Testone, made everything easy, enabling me to concentrate on writing. The kitchen staff did more than nourish us all, while the gardeners at Villa Aurelia created a gorgeous green environment that nourished my soul. For the visual imagination that is documented in this volume, I am grateful to all the artists whose work inspires me, and thank them for their generosity in giving me access to their archives and permission to use their illuminating images. The visual research for this book has been a fascinating process of encounters, and closeness, with artists as well as with their work. In addition to Rosa Barba, Jesper Just, and the late Chantal Akerman, I owe special thanks also to Cristina Iglesias, Diana Thater, and Giorgio Andreotta Calò. I would also like to personally thank James Casebere, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ann Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Joan Jonas, Zoe Leonard, Anthony McCall, Josiah McElheny, Cildo Meireles, Antoni Muntadas, Sarah Oppenheimer, Tobias Putrih, Amie Siegel, the Sun & Sea team, Marco Tirelli, Ho Tzu Nyen, Penelope Umbrico, Bill Viola, and Clemens von Wedemeyer. For facilitating the visual research thanks are also due to all artists’ collaborators, including Marie Auvity at Parreno Studio; Júlia Frate Bolliger and Martin Enoch at Studio Olafur Eliasson; Adele Charlebois

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climate, and who intelligently and graciously assisted me in developing relevant aspects of material space for this book. My teaching fellows also have been part of this expansive journey. I have benefited from the perceptive eyes of Emilio Vavarella, to whom I say grazie for his keen grasp of the visual as well as conceptual component of creating an atmosphere. Xavier Nueño has also been a vital intellectual companion, in contexts ranging from Harvard to Mexico City. I acknowledge as well Francisco Alarcon, Carolyn Bailey, Jessica Bardsley, Hannah Coen, Yazmín Crespo, Olivia Crough, Samira Daneshvar, Lindsay Lodhie, Nathan Roberts, Wesley Simon, Becca Voelker, and Mingyi Yu, in intellectual sympathy. Former postdoctoral fellows have also contributed dialogue, especially Francesco Guzzetti, Laura Di Bianco, and Lorenzo Marmo, whom I thank as well for publishing an extensive interview on how I define “atmospheric thinking.” In my writing life, the presence of Janet Jenkins, dear friend and editor of the manuscript, is a special gift. Her insightful readings and thoughtful editing have made this a better book. In working together over the years, I have learned a lot from her, and can almost hear her queries and comments as if resounding inside my brain. I thank her very much for accompanying and supporting me again as I moved through this rather complex new work. The magical setting of the American Academy in Rome helped me draw this book to a close. I thank the Academy’s president and CEO, Mark Robbins, and its former director, John Ochsendorf, for inviting me to do so as the Louis Kahn Scholar in Residence in the History of Art in the spring of 2019. I owe a thank you for this invitation also to Kimberly Bowes, who preceded John as director. This book has benefited enormously from that fantastic opportunity and from the atmosphere of the Academy. Presenting my work in their series of Conversations/Conversazioni, along with fellow Resident Alice Friedman, and engaging in conversations with the Fellows, other Residents, Advisors, and many visitors, has provided food for thought.

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and Marissa Glauberman at Diller Scofidio + Renfro; McLean Fahnestock and Gene Zazzaro at Bill Viola Studio; Francesca Filisetti at Studio Giorgio Andreotta Calò; Kara Gut at Ann Hamilton Studio; Jee Eun Esther Jang at Studio Alfredo Jaar; Lucas Odahara at Studio Rosa Barba; Amaya Ortuondo at Estudio Cristina Iglesias; Frederik Pedersen at Studio lost but found; Sacha Piscuskas at Anthony McCall Studio; and Etsuko Yoshii at Tetsuo Kondo Architects. Many archives, institutions, and museums worldwide, mentioned elsewhere as well, have made possible my visual research, and I am grateful to all the individuals who gave me study access and image permissions. Special thanks to Mollie Bernstein and Matilde Guidelli-­Guidi at Dia Art Foundation; Clotilde Blanc Burri and Marco Bischof, members of the Burri Estate, and to the René Burri Foundation; Michela Campagnolo at Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC), La Biennale di Venezia; Marcella Campitelli at the Estate of Fabio Mauri; Enrico Camporesi at Centre Pompidou; Alessandro Cane at Pirelli HangarBicocca; Ana Doldan at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente; Jean-­Paul Dorchain at the Chantal Akerman Foundation; Jaime Eisen and Nadia Yau at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery; Hanna Hölling at Terra Foundation for American Art; Sarah Montross at deCordova Museum; Giovanni Pirelli at Archivio Marinella Pirelli; Alberto Podio at Archivio Nanda Vigo; Felicia Rappe at Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach; Michael D. Shulman at Magnum Photos; Chelsea Spengemann at Stan VanDerBeek Estate; Ingrid Traschütz at University Hospital Heidelberg; Paolo Vampa for this generous access to the archive of Paolo Gioli; and Clemence White at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Thanks also to Barragán Foundation, and Fondazione Lucio Fontana. Many art galleries also contributed to my image research, and I am grateful to each of them for their courtesy, acknowledged in the captions. I offer special thanks to Leslie Nolen, Catherine Belloy, and Carole

Billy at Marian Goodman Gallery, as well as to Sarah Aiman at Edouard Malingue Gallery; Lindsay Basile, Jacob Daugherty, and Chris Rawson at David Zwirner; Nicoletta Beyer at Blum & Poe; Amy Binding and Julia Séguier at Esther Schipper; Sabrina Blaichman, Amelia Redgrift, and Raphaele Varley at Hauser & Wirth; the staff at Castelli Gallery; Jane Cohan, Kevin Lowenthal, and Annie Stuart at James Cohan; Julia Kozakiewicz at Thomas Dane Gallery; Juliana Monachesi at Galeria Luisa Strina; Tessa Morefield at Paula Cooper Gallery; John Michael Morein and Jake Zellweger at Metro Pictures; and Claudia Staccioli at Gagosian. I extend my thanks as well to all the photographers of the art installations and exhibitions who kindly gave me permission to publish their works, as I acknowledge in the captions. Special thanks to Andrea Rossetti for his courtesy. Although they could not allow me to take photographs, I also wish to thank the nuns who reside in the Capilla de las Capuchinas and their Mother Superior, Sor Mercedes, in Tlalpan, Mexico City, for the inspiring visit that gave me special access to the inner atmosphere of Luis Barragán’s architecture. With respect to realizing the visual component of the book, I am most indebted to Maria Elisa Le Donne, with whom I worked in obtaining the high-­ resolution illustrations and the permissions to publish them. I thank her with all my heart for her crucial contribution; her professional skills and expertise were invaluable in helping me solve the inevitable obstacles, which she surmounted, always graciously, even during a pandemic! During the development of this book, many other friends and colleagues also contributed, in different ways and often with valuable insights. When I presented an early version of my theories of projection at “The Resurfacing of the Screen,” a workshop convened by Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti in 2015, I received valuable feedback from the organizers and other participants, all of whom I thank. I benefited especially from Bernhard Siegert’s

Lambert-­Beatty, Eric Rentschler, Jeffrey Schnapp, Nora Schultz, Sarah Whiting, and Alex Zhalten. In addition to the scholars, I thank my artist colleagues, for working in close proximity to their artistic practices makes me a better scholar and critic of art. This book has been especially sustained by the weekly gatherings organized by my spirited colleague the artist Katarina Burin, who deserves special thanks. At her Stammtisch, artists, writers, and curators from the Boston area mingle with visitors from other places as well as with the wider Harvard community, including graduate students and Radcliffe Fellows. Explaining my work for this volume over a glass of wine to this varied community enormously helped me to define my project as well as sustain its making. Among the members of this community, special thanks are due to my artist colleagues and friends: to Joana Pimenta, especially for her perceptive readings and gestures of support; to Matt Saunders, for his insights on art in general and his work in particular; and also to Annette Lemieux, Ross McElwee, and Steven Prina for engaging conversations and friendship. For the same, thanks are extended also to Pieranna Cavalchini, curator of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Henriette Huldisch, former curator of the MIT List Visual Art Center; and Dan Byers, the director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. I have benefited greatly from the atmosphere in and around Corbusier’s only North American building, where my office is thankfully located. I wish to thank the entire staff of the Carpenter Center, in particular Emily Amendola, Mary Park, and Paula Soares, and especially, for her inspiring conversations, Denise Oberdan. Thanks also to Fausto Dos Santos, Dan Lopez, and Clayton Mattos. I am grateful for all the institutional resources and spaces to which I have had access during my years of research, and to the people who managed them so well. The extensive holdings of the Harvard Art Museums and the university’s many libraries and archives have been particularly essential to the accomplishment

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comments. Special thanks go also to Ruggiero Eugeni for his response, and for championing my work on projection, publishing it first in Italy. A number of exchanges with Jussi Parikka, together with his reflective comments, have improved this manuscript. I would be remiss if I did not also thank the anonymous scholars who undertook the peer review of the book’s manuscript, and whose commentary was most helpful as well as mercifully reassuring. As regards the psychoanalytic side of projection theory, special thanks are owed to the psychoanalyst David Lichtenstein for his sustained friendship and great conversations, in many corners of the world. I benefited especially from our discussions of the psychic implications of projection and from his constructive readings, and I thank him, in his capacity as editor of DIVISION/Review: A Quarterly Psychoanalytic Forum, for publishing my early thoughts on Chantal Akerman’s empathic projections. I am also grateful to psychoanalyst Adrienne Harris for her friendly readings and for encouraging me to further explore the relational aspects of projection. Mark Epstein, whose friendship, writings, and insights on psychic matters I value, offered readings that enriched my projection chapters with his unique perspective. I thank Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies (formerly the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies) and the Graduate School of Design for the rich intellectual and artistic environment they provide. I offer special thanks to my colleagues in Film and Visual Studies; the program on Art, Design, and the Public Domain; the Committee on the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning; and MetaLAB. I have enjoyed sustained exchanges especially with Ewa Lajer-­Burcharth, with whom I share a particular sensibility, in matters of art and of life. I offer thanks as well for dialogues I have had with Homi and Jackie Bhabha, Silvia Benedito, Lucien Castaing-­ Taylor, Tom Conley, Laura Frahm, Maria Gough, Sharon Harper, Michael Hays, David Joselit, Carrie

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of this book. I thank the curators and staff members who were always so helpful. Special thanks go to Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive, and to Amy Sloper, its collections archivist, for their generosity in opening many doors during my research. I am grateful to Dale Stinchcomb, assistant curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection at Houghton Library, for the discovery of an extraordinary uncatalogued drawing in the Frederick Kiesler Fund that enabled me to redefine his view of projection and make it visible by publishing it here. Thanks to Matthew Wittmann, who also curates the extensive theater archive at Houghton, for access to the collection of precinematic objects of projection. My department chair, Robb Moss, has also sustained my endeavors with generosity of spirit. I am grateful at Harvard to Deans Laura Fisher, Robin Kelsey, and Diana Sorensen for their keen understanding of my intellectual goals and for supporting me in pursuing them. The nomadic Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA) is also to be acknowledged. Special thanks are owed to George Smith, founder and president, and Simonetta Moro, director of the school, for sustaining interdisciplinary adventures and supporting me with the wonderful gift of a doctorate honoris causa. I am also grateful to Sylvain Bellanger, director of the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, and Andrea Viliani, former director of the Museo MADRE, for the opportunity to curate a portion of the museum’s Carta Bianca exhibition. This experience deepened my sense of how an aesthetic atmosphere can be created curatorially in a museum. Thanks also in this regard to curators Linda Martino, Patrizia Piscitello, and Maria Tamajo Contarini; architects Rosa Romano and Lucio Turchetta; and photographer Luciano Romano. Thanks for friendly intellectual dialogue in various other settings also are due to a number of individuals. Martino Stierli, thank you for the sympathetic conversations we had when you invited me to speak at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome and the Museum of Modern

Art in New York, where you serve as chief curator of architecture. Thanks to Marquard Smith, editor of the Journal of Visual Culture and cofounder and former director of the International Association for Visual Culture, for continual support of my work. I am grateful to Maria Grazia Mattei, founder and president of MEET, the Italian Center for Digital Culture, for elective affinity and continual invitations to share my work. Thanks in Rome are due to Cristiana Collu, director of the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea; Giorgio De Finis, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO); and Cesare Pietroiusti, president of PALAEXPO, for engaging me to think about the changing ambiance of museum culture. Thanks to Marcela Ramos and Marcela Renteria at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and to the entire dynamic faculty of the School of Architecture at Pontificia Universidad Cátolica de Chile for interesting dialogues. For the same, I thank the following international institutions and individuals: in Russia, the Garage Museum and Viktor Misiano, Editor, Moscow Art Magazine; in Buenos Aires, Irene Depretis, Alejandro Schianchi, and Natalia Taccetta; in Rio de Janeiro, Tadeu Capistrano and Museu de Arte/MAR; and, in Istanbul, the great Feride Çiçekoğlu. In various other places, thanks are offered for inspiring dialogue to Berry Bergdoll, Eulàlia Bosch, Vic Brooks, Jonathan Buchsbaum, Chiara Capodici, Esther Choi, Pippo Ciorra, Martín Cobas, Emanuele Coccia, Joan Copjec, Jonathan Crary, Cynthia Davidson, Georges Didi-­Huberman, Ed Dimendberg, Noam Elcott, Cristina Fiordimela, Freddy Paul Grunert, Margherita Guccione, Bruce Jenkins, Isaac Julien, Karen Kelly, Elisabeth Lebovici, Giacomo Marramao, Philippe-­Alain Michaud, Tommaso Morawski, Laura Mulvey, Mark Nash, Celeste Olalquiaga, Sally Potter, D. N. Rodowick, Allan Shearer, Christopher Sheppard, Stefano Velotti, Riccardo Venturi, Evan Calder Williams, and Sheri Wills. Intellectually as well as emotionally, this book project and its writing owe the most to my closest friends

an earlier volume in Italy as senior editor; I thank her for all her trustworthy advice on my inner process of reflection as well as for current professional counsel, including her suggestion to work with Maria Elisa. I equally rely on Paola Masi’s unfailing friendship and intellectual input, and on her readings. I am especially grateful to her for the profound sense of connection she offers on the most important aspects of work and life. Anne Lovell’s perceptive and sympathetic eye on my writing and subtle understanding of cultural differences over the course of our long friendship are equally precious. As always, I am thankful to Maria Nadotti for sharing so many writing adventures as well as terrains of affective and cultural geographies. The friendship that has grown through the academic collaborations and publishing ventures with Malvina Borgherini always provides excitement and pleasure. Pina de Luca also greatly supports my work, both publicly and privately, and I thank her for this deep and meaningful intellectual friendship and for her philosophy (of life). For similar reasons, I wish to thank Gabriella Bonacchi, Caterina Borelli, Maristella Casciato, Manuela Cattaneo della Volta, Emilia Giorgi, Anna Mattirolo, Mariella Pandolfi, Elisa Rotino, Alessandra Santerini, Gabi Scardi, Antonella Soldaini, and Micaela Acquistapace, my Italian publisher. In writing about atmosphere and environment, the ambiance of Cilento, Italy—­its natural landscape and seascape—­was particularly inspiring. For the growing sense of community and the affective atmosphere around my home in Pollica, I offer special thanks to Fiammetta Russo Cardone, Alessandra Riccio, Valeria Pezza, Pasquale Scialò, Caterina Marmo, Fabrizio Mangoni, Nicandro Siravo, Ippolita di Majo, Mario Martone, Elisabetta Moro, and Marino Niola. The fabric of life around my homes on both sides of the ocean, where I write, has also benefited from close connections with my extended family. Grazie to my brother, Pierluigi Bruno, whose advice on graphic design is always appreciated and whose perceptive cartoons have made me smile, sustaining my efforts to

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and colleagues, whose long-­standing relationships make the atmosphere of daily life flow with new inspiration and warm affects. Special thanks in this respect go to my New York friends Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Emily Apter, Anthony Vidler, Elizabeth Diller, Ric Scofidio, Elisabetta Terragni, Kurt Forster, Carmen Boullosa, and Mike Wallace for sharing vital ideas about all aspects of culture and life, in metropolitan or natural environments—­sometimes even debating them in public contexts, from Yale to MoMA to the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso—­and always having good times together. My long, intimate friendship with the artist Jill Moser is especially precious; she contributed to this manuscript with insightful readings during various travels, and with inspiring conversations about art, especially when visiting Robert Irwin’s installation together at Dia Beacon and when taking me to see the projection of Agnès Varda’s Bord de mer, offering a virtual seashore for my birthday. I was also fortunate to view art in New York and visit several iterations of the Venice Biennale with Luisa Sartori, who has generously hosted me in Venice along with Dino Romeo; her decades-­long friendship has nourished my work in more ways that I can express or thank her for here. Francesca Santovetti’s love for engaging ideas about film and culture, and her frank readings of my work, have also supported me; she even managed to turn the brisk ambiance of Cambridge into a warm home. Salem Mekuria and Margaret Carroll also have kept warm dialogues going in New England; and in Wainscott, as in New York, Nicole Klagsbrun and Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan have done the same; as has Susan Meiselas, who also helped in my search to illustrate Barragán’s architecture in less orthodox ways. Thanks also are due for their nourishing conversation to Judith Barry, Barbara Bloom, Leon Falk, Hamilton Fish, Sandra Harper, Louise Neri, Elaine Reichek, Seton Smith, Betsy Sussler, and, as always, Kristina Boden. My community of close Italian friends and colleagues is equally behind this book. Annalisa Angelini has been supporting my work ever since she published

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finish this book during the pandemic. Thanks also to my in-­laws, Steven Fierberg, Shielu Bharwani Fierberg, and Douglas Fierberg; and to the members of my extended Italian and Spanish family, Angelica Franco, Alessandro and Luca Malerba, Carmen Moreno, and Noelia Zapata. A breath of air, in all senses, is made possible in my writing life because of Sam Berlind, Juan Gamboa, Lucie Mitchell, Bill Polk, and Yamuna Zake, as well as Giorgio del Galdo, Pasquale Petillo, Yolanda Prusaczyk, and Antonietta Ricco.

This book is dedicated to Sally K. Donaldson, who offers warm transfers of empathy; in the atmosphere she creates I experienced how such empathic projections can be life-­changing. It was written with my husband, Andrew Fierberg, unfailingly at my side, even when we were in different places, and is dedicated to him for his unconditional love, deep understanding, and support of my work, with special gratitude for sensing that atmospheres are indeed transformative and for constantly reinventing the atmosphere of home.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1.  Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 33, 49. 2.  Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 366. 3.  Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance” (1942), in Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: Russell & Russell, 1948), 179. 4.  For a condensed history of this story’s lineage, and an extended treatment of the painterly representations it inspired, see Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (December 1957): 279–­ 90. For a treatment of some painterly representations, see also Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-­Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 5.  See Hubert Damisch, Traité du Traite: Tractatus Tractus, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1995); and Michael Newman, “The Marks, Traces, and Gestures of Drawing,” in The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, ed. Catherine de Zegher (London: Tate Publishing; New York: Drawing Center, 2003), 93–­108. 6.  See Ann Bermingham, “The Origin of Painting and the Ends of Art: Wright of Derby’s Corinthian Maid,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art, 1700–­1850, ed. John Barrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 135–­65. 7.  See Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); and Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), which discusses Pliny’s myth as an allegory of loss whose shadows reverberate in the art of the present. See also Frances Muecke, “‘Taught by Love’: The Origin of Painting Again,” Art Bulletin 81, no. 2 ( June 1999): 297–­302. 8.  See Francesco Casetti, “Primal Screens,” in Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, ed. Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 27–­50. A notable exception in that it acknowledges the role of this myth in the origin of projection, Casetti’s essay, however, attributes the credit to “Butades’s wall,” reading the site of projection as a primal scene.

9.  See Robin Evans, “Translations from Drawing to Building,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 153–­93. According to Evans, “In painting, until well into the twentieth century, the subject was always, as in the story of Diboutades, taken from nature. . . . This is not true of architecture, which is brought into existence through drawing. The subject-­matter (the building or space) will exist after the drawing, not before it. . . . Schinkel’s painting is a recognition of this reversal” (165). 10.  See Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 11.  Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion, 1997), esp. 153–­58. 12.  See Hagi Kenaan, “Tracing Shadows: Reflections on the Origin of Painting,” in Pictorial Languages and Their Meanings: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Nurith Kenaan-­Kedar, ed. Christine B. Verzar and Gil Fishhof (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, 2006), 17–­28. 13.  La dama de Corinto, subtitled Un esbozo cinematográfico (The Lady of Corinth: A Film Study), was commissioned by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, Spain, and exhibited there December 15, 2010–­August 28, 2011. 14.  This notion, to be revisited in chapter 1, is introduced by Bernhard Siegert in Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 15.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1809; London: Penguin, 1978). 16.  See Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 23–­24; Rosalind Krauss, “Paul Sharits,” in Paul Sharits: Dream Displacement and Other Projects, exh. cat. (Buffalo, NY: Albright-­Knox Art Gallery, 1976), n.p.; and Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Los: Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 80. CHAPTER ONE

1.  Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: “Visible Man” and “The Spirit of Film,” ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 22.

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2.  László Moholy-­Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Design, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 39. 3.  Dominique Païni, “Should We Put an End to Projection?” October, no. 110 (Fall 2004), 23–­48. This is an abbreviated translation of the essay published in the exhibition catalog Projections: Les transports de l’image (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 1997). 4.  See chapter 2 of this volume for references to Freud’s articulation of projection (including a bibliography in the endnotes) and for an account of the psychic dimension of projection, which continues in chapter 3, ranging from psychoanalysis to mesmerism and empathy to sympathy, emphasizing Stimmung and, especially, energy theories of transduction. See also chapters 5 and 8 for a treatment of the psychic dimensions of projection, including its elemental alchemy, in the contemporary visual arts. 5.  Jean Laplanche and Jean-­Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (New York: Norton, 1974), 349. For a useful history of the development of projection in psychoanalysis, spanning from Freud to Melanie Klein to Wilfred Bion, see André Green, On Private Madness (London: Karnac Books, 2005), esp. chap. 4, “Projection.” I am drawing on the well-­ documented history of projection in psychoanalysis not to provide a survey, which is beyond the scope of this study, but to develop one particular aspect of the subject: the “mediatic” function of projection and its manifestation as psychic expressions in the visual arts. 6.  Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–­), s.v. “projection.” 7.  William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 118. 8.  Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “projection.” 9.  I will return to expand on this notion of transduction, especially in chapters 2 and 3. For a useful overview of the term, see Stefan Helmreich, “Transduction,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 222–­31. See also Adrian Mackenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (London: Continuum, 2002); and Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 10.  Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter, in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 313. 11.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 313. 12.  For an introduction to the influence of the notion of process, as conceived by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and employed in media and cultural theory, see, among others, Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Nicholas Gaskill and A. J. Nocek, eds., The Lure of Whitehead (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 13.  Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-­Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1985), 103–­4.

14.  For a useful survey of how the substantive noun medium, derived from medius (Latin for “middle”), came to be connected with matters of communication in the later nineteenth century, see John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 321–­62. 15.  Alexander R. Galloway, “Love of the Middle,” in Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, ed. Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 25–­76. 16.  See Sybille Krämer, Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy, trans. Anthony Enns (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). 17.  Galloway, “Love of the Middle,” 29. 18.  Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), 80. 19. Serres, Five Senses, 81. 20.  See, among others, W. J. T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” in Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): 257–­66. 21.  Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 118. 22.  Nigel Thrift, “Beyond Mediation: Three New Material Registers and Their Consequences,” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 231. 23. Serres, Five Senses, 81. 24.  Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance” (1942), in Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: Russell & Russell, 1948), 179–­225. 25.  Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 190. 26.  Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 180. 27.  Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 181. 28.  Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 203. 29.  Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 202–­3. 30.  Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 204–­5. 31.  Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 224. 32.  Antonio Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room, no. 62 (Winter 2016), 7. 33.  Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 8. This argument is expanded in Antonio Somaini, “The Atmospheric Screen: Turner, Hazlitt, Ruskin,” in Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, ed. Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 159–­85. 34.  See Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). “Actor-­network theory” (ANT) was developed initially and primarily by Bruno Latour to underscore the idea that, in the social and natural worlds, everything exists in constantly shifting networks of relationship, driven by objects and processes as well as by humans. From an early understanding that the structure of knowledge could be analyzed and interpreted through the interactions of actors and networks, this notion has come to be used in a range of material approaches that analyze heterogeneous relations. 35.  See Bernhard Siegert, “Door Logic; or, the Materiality of the Symbolic: From Cultural Techniques to Cybernetic Machines,” in Cultural Techniques, 192–­205.

in media theory for contemporary art history, see Eric C. H. De Bruyn, “A Proposal: Must We Ecologize?” Grey Room, no. 77 (Fall 2019), 58–­65. De Bruyn addresses the challenge of thinking about “environmentality” rather than environmentalism, or simply reductive ecocriticism, questioning how the arts may respond to an expanded view of media ecology. 47.  Gene Youngblood, “The Artist as Ecologist,” in Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 346. 48.  Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 51. 49.  David Joselit, After Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 55. Joselit uses the term “format,” which however may end up restricting the breadth of the idea of a population of images to the digital realm. For a pioneering discussion of a “post-­medium condition,” see Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000). 50.  The notion of an “architectural promenade” was developed by the architect Le Corbusier. See Le Corbusier [Charles-­Édouard Jeanneret] and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre complète, vol. 2, ed. Willi Boesiger (Zurich: Editions Girsberger, 1964). 51.  See Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002), esp. chap. 2, “A Geography of the Moving Image,” 54–­71; and Bruno, Surface, esp. chap. 6, “Site of Screening, Cinema, Museum, and the Art of Projection,” 143–­63. See also Bruno, “Motion and Emotion: Film and the Urban Fabric,” in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 14–­28. 52.  For a study of experimental practices that moves from medium-­specific to site-­specific works, see Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 53.  I will develop the ambiance of the art of projection more fully especially in chapter 4, which explores hybrid screen forms and traces a history of film architectures, from the theater to the contemporary art gallery, in ways that emphasize atmospherics. 54.  For a survey of apparatus theory, see Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). For a recent reconfiguration of the concept, see Frank Kessler, “The Cinema of Attractions as Dispositif,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 57–­66. 55.  See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 56.  The argument about the relation of cine-­projection to perspective drew largely on Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991). It was also influenced by Jacques Lacan’s concept of the gaze, which has some conceptual parallels to theories of linear perspective. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 11, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998). For a discussion of Lacanian film theory, see Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,” in Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (London: Verso, 1994), 15–­38.

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36.  See Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 37.  Ann Hamilton’s installation the event of a thread took place at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, December 5, 2012–­January 6, 2013. 38.  See Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 39.  Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, trans. Sarah De Sanctis (London: Routledge, 2014), 36. 40.  This notion of mixture will be reprised in chapter 3, with further discussion of Emanuele Coccia’s book The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). 41. Griffero, Atmospheres, 121. 42.  This reading of atmospheres of subjectivity as an unfolding and becoming fabric is inspired, among others, by Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 43.  Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015) turns to geology to account for the technological world we live in, addressing the relation between media and the geophysical environment. Other relevant media theory texts are cited throughout this chapter. For an introduction to elemental ways of thinking, see David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); and Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer, eds., Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). Regarding vital materialism, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). For an overview of different concerns with materialism in contemporary theory, see “A Questionnaire on Materialisms,” October, no. 155 (Winter 2016), to which I contributed a response (pp. 14–­15). 44.  For an introduction to ecocriticism, see Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds., Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Relevant for having produced a growing interest in “elemental media” is John Durham Peters’s exploration of “sky media,” particularly in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), in which he notes, discussing Leo Spitzer, that medium and milieu have traveled in the same critical orbit. While I disagree with his view that media are “agencies of order”—­a position that contradicts my idea of medium as mixed milieu or transport vessel—­I am interested in his proposal to connect the quality and function of medium to environment, atmosphere, climate, and weather, and such things as clouds and air, without, however, considering media ecology a totalizing technosphere. 45.  A call for “mediarology,” understanding media as “an environment for the living,” is issued by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen in the introduction to their edited volume Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), xiv. 46.  For a discussion of the implications of an “ecological turn”

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57.  Concerning the application of perspectival models to the filmic apparatus, and on the myth of Plato’s cave in relation to filmic projection, see in particular Jean-­Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 286–­98; and Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 299–­318. 58.  For a more extended discussion of this point, see Giuliana Bruno, “Streetwalking around Plato’s Cave,” October, no. 60 (Spring 1992), 110–­29. 59.  For a broad philosophical reconsideration of apparatus, in its capacity to capture, orient, model, or redefine the behaviors and discourses of living beings, see Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). For a revision of the cinematic notion of dispositif, see Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 60.  For a less restrictive reading of perspective’s reach in visual media, see Jacob Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as Material Object,” Journal of Visual Culture 14, no. 1 (2015): 40–­60. Gaboury considers that perspective is not only maintained and adopted but can also be transformed in emerging digital technologies. 61.  Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). 62. Kittler, Optical Media, 61. 63. Kittler, Optical Media, 58. 64.  See Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, esp. the sections “Geography,” 131–­203, and “Art of Mapping,” 205–­45, for a media archaeological approach to precinematic spaces of projection. 65.  For the treatment of selected contemporary artists’ use of projective devices that include precinematic forms, see chapter 4 for the projective screen in art; chapter 5 for phantasmagoric projections; chapter 6 for moving panoramas; and chapter 10 for the camera obscura. For reconfiguring other aspects of the (pre)filmic apparatus, see chapter 9. 66.  Marco Tirelli’s site-­specific installation was part of an exhibition titled Observatory, on view at the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro, Italy, June 15–­September 28, 2014. 67.  See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-­Jules Marey (1830–­1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 68. Flusser, Universe of Technical Images, 33. 69. Flusser, Universe of Technical Images, 47. 70. Flusser, Universe of Technical Images, 48. 71.  Vilém Flusser, Vom Subjekt zum Projekt (Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1994), 25. Translated from the German. 72.  See Daniel Irrgang, “To Project/to Draft,” in Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox, ed. Siegfried Zielinski, Peter Weibel, and Daniel Irrgang (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015), 332. 73.  See Miklós Peternák, “Projection,” in Zielinski, Weibel, and Irrgang Flusseriana, 334. 74.  See Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 75.  Rudolf Arnheim, “The Perception of Maps,” American Cartographer 3, no. 1 (April 1976): 5.

76.  Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 9, 12. 77. Arnheim, Film as Art, 58. 78.  Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion, 1997), 62. 79.  Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 80. Cubitt, Practice of Light, 167. 81.  See Leon Battista Alberti, Il nuovo “De Pictura” di Leon Battista Alberti/The New “De Pictura” of Leon Battista Alberti, ed. and trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Rome: Edizioni Kappa, 2006); and Albrecht Dürer, The Painter’s Manual, trans. Walter L. Strauss (New York: Abaris Books, 1977). This subject has been widely discussed; for a specific treatment in relation to technologies of light, see Cubitt, Practice of Light, especially chap. 4.3, “Projection,” 202–­34. 82.  For the role that perspective systems play in architecture, see, among others, Alberto Pérez-­Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). See also Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” in The Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology, ed. Steve Yates (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 157–­71. 83.  Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 108. 84. Evans, Projective Cast, 353. 85. Evans, Projective Cast, 366, 352. 86.  Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 54–­91. 87.  Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 66–­69 88.  Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” 67. 89.  This subject will be further expanded in chapters 2 and 3 with regard to the more technological, magnetic, and energetic side of the transformation. 90. Evans, Projective Cast, 363. 91. Evans, Projective Cast, 354. 92.  James Turrell, quoted in Alison Sarah Jacques, “There never is no light . . . even when all the light is gone, you can still sense light: Interview with James Turrell,” in James Turrell: Perceptual Cells, ed. Jiri Svestka, exh. cat. (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1992), 61–­63. 93.  Boris Groys, “Movies in the Museum,” in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 2002), 103. 94.  See, among others, Robin Clark, ed., Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). For a treatment of Robert Irwin’s atmospheric ambiances, see chapter 11 of this book. On Mary Corse and Helen Pashgian’s screen surfaces, see chapter 4. I have written on James Turrell’s light ambiances in Surface, chap. 3, 54–­71. On Doug Wheeler, see, Germano Celant, Doug Wheeler (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019). 95.  Doug Wheeler’s “infinity environment” SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012) was installed at David Zwirner Gallery January 14–­February 25, 2012. 96. Wheeler’s PSAD Synthetic Desert III was on view at the Guggenheim Museum March 24–­August 2, 2017.

in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 15–­44. 114.  Eva Horn, “Air as Medium,” in Grey Room, no. 73 (Fall 2018), 18 (emphasis mine). 115.  Craig Martin, “The Invention of Atmosphere,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, no. 52 (2015): 44–­54. 116.  Martin, “Invention of Atmosphere,” 52. 117.  Karen Pinkus also interestingly elaborates on the etymology of ambiance, recognizing the implications of Spitzer’s text, in “Ambiguity, Ambience, Ambivalence, and the Environment,” Common Knowledge 19, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 88–­95. She points out that the Latin prefix amb(i) is inscribed in ambiance as it is in ambivalence and ambiguity. While I find this reading intriguing, for the purpose of my argument I prefer to focus on the Latin root ambire, to emphasize the ambulatory side of ambiance. 118.  For an articulation of this notion, see Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 119.  See Macauley, Elemental Philosophy. For a different reading of ambiance and environment, see Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 120.  See Aristotle, De Anima, trans. and ed. C. D. C. Reeve (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2017). 121.  See Gernot Böhme, “Seeing Light” and “The Phenomenology of Light,” in Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: Ambiances, Atmospheres, and Sensory Experiences of Spaces, ed. Jean-­Paul Thibaud (New York: Routledge, 2017), 193–­211. 122.  See Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 59. 123.  Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,” Thesis Eleven 36, no. 1 (1993): 118, 122, reprinted in Böhme, Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 11–­24. 124.  Michel Serres, “Theory of the Quasi-­Object,” in The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 224–­34. See also Serres, with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 125. Griffero, Atmospheres, 120. 126.  Steven Connor, “On Nebular Modernism,” paper given at “Modernism and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Art Theory and Literary Theory,” Trinity College, Oxford, May 12, 2006, accessed March 29, 2017, http://stevenconnor.com/haze.html. See also Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010). 127.  Thomas Forster, Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena (London: Printed by J. Moyes for Thomas Underwood, 1813), 124. 128.  Peter Adey, Air: Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion, 2014), 10. 129. Connor, Matter of Air, 194. 130.  Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Subject Matter of Architecture,” in Herzog & De Meuron: Natural History, ed. Philip Ursprung, exh. cat. (Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 2008), 402–­4, reprinted in Böhme, Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 135–­40; and Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetic of Felt Spaces, ed. and trans. A.-­C. Engels-­Schwarzpaul (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). See also Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere,” Daidalos, no. 68 (1998), 18–­27.

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97.  Jean Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie” (1924), in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907–­ 1939, ed. Richard Abel, vol. 1, 1907–­1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 317. 98.  For a useful survey of the history of light, see Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York: Bantam, 1993). 99.  James Nisbet, “Atmospheric Cameras and Ecological Light in the Landscape Photographs of Eadweard Muybridge,” Photography and Culture 6, no. 2 (2013): 131–­55. 100.  Nisbet, “Atmospheric Cameras,” 135. 101. Zajonc, Catching the Light, 145. 102.  James Clerk Maxwell, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” as cited in Zajonc, Catching the Light, 149 (italics are Zajonc’s). 103. Zajonc, Catching the Light, 149. 104.  Maxwell, “Dynamical Theory,” cited in Zajonc, Catching the Light, 150. 105. Zajonc, Catching the Light, 273. 106. Zajonc, Catching the Light, 273. 107.  Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe, (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1900). Cited in Nisbet, “Atmospheric Cameras,” 138. 108.  Francesco Guzzetti, “The Ambiance of Medardo Rosso: Impressions, Critics and Patrons,” in Medardo Rosso: Two Rare Waxes, exh. cat. (London: Amedeo Porro Fine Arts; New York: Peter Freeman, 2016), 27. 109.  For a useful history of the notion of milieu, see Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” trans. John Savage, Grey Room, no. 3 (Spring 2001), 7–­31. 110.  For a reconsideration of the notion of milieu and its relevance in contemporary theory, including the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and Gilles Deleuze, see Victor Petit, “Le désir du milieu (dans la philosophie française),” La Deleuziana, no. 6 (2017): 10–­25; and Giovanni Carrozzini, “Sulla nozione di atopia a partire da Socrate. Ripensare l’ambiente-­mondo,” La Deleuziana, no. 6 (2017): 26–­39; accessed March 5, 2018, http://www.ladeleuziana. org/2017/12/31/6-­milieux-­of-­desire/. 111.  On this subject and the usefulness of Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt for film theory, see Inga Pollmann, “Invisible Worlds, Visible: Uexküll’s Umwelt, Film, and Film Theory,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 777–­816; reprised in Pollmann, Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the Question of Life (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 97–­161. 112.  See Emily Apter, “The Hatred of Democracy and ‘The Democratic Torrent’: Rancière’s Micropolitics,” in Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism, ed. Patrick M. Bray (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 11–­32. Apter turns to Spitzer in an articulated reading of Rancière’s notion of milieu. In the field of architecture, Michael Hensel acknowledges Spitzer’s contribution in his book Performance-­ Oriented Architecture: Rethinking Architectural Design and the Built Environment (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), which theorizes ambiance and performativity in architecture. 113.  See Katherine Park, “Observation in the Margins, 500–­1500,”

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131.  Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept,” 121. 132.  See Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects (Basel: Birkäuser, 2006). 133.  Juhani Pallasmaa, “Space, Place, and Atmosphere: Peripheral Perception in Existential Experience,” in Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, ed. Christian Borch (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2014), 39. 134.  This aspect of a decentered, even nebular, atmosphere will be reprised in chapter 10. 135.  See Watsuji Tetsurō, A Climate: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas (Tokyo: Ministry of Education and Hokuseido Press, 1961). 136.  For a study that acknowledges the experience of weather in art, see Janine Randerson, Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). Randerson treats 1960s artworks as precursors to contemporary artistic responses to climate change or technology, considering in particular art that creates a “social meteorology.” 137.  Kristi McKim, Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (New York: Routledge, 2013). For a treatment of cinematic and weather phenomena, such as the representation of sunlight in film, see also Sean Cubitt, “The Sound of Sunlight,” Screen 51, no. 2 ( June 2010): 118–­28. 138. McKim, Cinema as Weather, 22. 139. McKim, Cinema as Weather, 9. 140.  Erkki Huhtamo, “The Sky Is (Not) the Limit: Envisioning the Ultimate Public Media Display,” Journal of Visual Culture 8, no. 3 (December 2009): 329–­48. 141.  Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (London: Routledge, 2015), 53. 142.  Wim Wenders himself proposed this reading of his mode of filmmaking in his Norton Lectures, titled “The Visible and the Invisible” and “Poetry in Motion,” delivered at Harvard University, April 2 and April 9, 2018. 143.  See Georges Didi-­Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (December 2003): 275–­89. 144.  Didi-­Huberman, “Imaginary Breeze,” 277. 145.  On the subject of weathering, see Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 146.  See Giuliana Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner,” October, no. 41 (Summer 1987), 63–­64. 147.  See Paul Roquet, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 148.  It also can be argued, in a larger sense, that experimental film and video practices that are haptic in nature display an affect that is an “atmospheric” component. On this hapticity in experimental practices, see Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 149.  See in particular the exhibition On Air: Carte Blanche a Tomás Saraceno, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, October 17, 2018–­January 6, 2019. On this occasion, the artist was also guest editor of a special issue on the subject for the magazine Palais, no. 28

(September 2018). This significantly included, among others, a text by Bruno Latour, whose actor-­network theory (ANT) has been in productive dialogue with the artist’s own concerns. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). On Saraceno’s meteorological practice, see Sasha Engelmann, Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices (New York: Routledge, 2021). 150.  See André Rottmann, “‘The Medium Is Leaking’: Notes on the Work of Pierre Huyghe and the ‘Ecologization’ of Contemporary Art,” Grey Room, no. 77 (Fall 2019), 84–­97. 151.  On the “ecological turn,” see Erich Hörl, “Introduction to General Ecology: The Ecologization of Thinking,” in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, ed. Hörl and James Burton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1–­74. 152.  See Luke Skrebowski, “On Pierre Huyghe’s UUmweltanschauung: Art, Ecosystems Aesthetics, and General Ecology,” Grey Room, no. 77 (Fall 2019), 66–­83. The installation was on view at the Serpentine Gallery, London, October 3, 2018–­February 10, 2019. 153. Griffero, Atmospheres, 36, 108; see also 55–­60 for a discussion of the climatic aspect of atmospheres. 154.  See Bruno, Atlas of Emotion. 155.  Ben Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” Emotion, Space, and Society, no. 2 (2009), 77–­81. On this subject, Anderson refers to, among others, Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Subject Matter of Architecture”; Nigel Thrift, Non-­ Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2008); and Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies (London: Routledge, 1994). 156.  Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” 78. 157.  Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” 78. 158.  Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Rubric, no. 1 (2010), 4. 159.  For a treatment of the history of this concept, see David Wellbery, “Stimmung,” New Formations, no. 93 (Summer 2018): 6–­45; and Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word Stimmung, ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963). For a treatment of this notion in relation to landscape, see Georg Simmel, “The Philosophy of Landscape” (1913), trans. Josef Bleicher, Theory, Culture & Society 24, nos. 7–­8 (2007): 20–­29. For a recent resurgence of this concept, see, among others, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). See chapter 3 for further elaboration of this discourse. 160.  Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” 5. 161.  Many have traced this etymology. See, among others, Griffero, Atmospheres, 1; and Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” 80. 162.  The sphere has indeed assumed prominence and currency in cultural discourse as theorized by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who draws attention to the importance of thinking about atmospheric ecologies. Though sharing many spatial tonalities with this concept, the ambient “atmo-­sphere” for which I advocate departs from the dyadic structure of his sphere, which includes the circle of coupling

CHAPTER TWO

1.  Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Anthony J. Blasi, Anton K. Jacobs, and Mathew Kanjirathinkal (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 578. 2.  On the tactile use of screens in early film, see Wanda Strauven, “Early Cinema’s Touch(able) Screens: From Uncle Josh to Ali Barbouyou,” Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies 1, no. 2 (November 22, 2012), accessed April 26, 2018, https://necsus-­ejms.org/ early-­cinemas-­touchable-­screens-­from-­uncle-­josh-­to-­ali-­barbouyou/; Strauven, “Archaeology of the Touch Screen,” Maske und Kothurn 58, no. 4 (2012): 69–­79; and Strauven, “The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 148–­63. 3.  Sigmund Freud, “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (hereafter SE), vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1957), 223. 4.  The term is Ben Anderson’s, developed in his essay “Affective Atmospheres,” Emotion, Space, and Society, no. 2 (2009), 77–­81. 5.  The expression is borrowed from Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Rubric, no. 1 (2010), 1–­14. 6.  Juhani Pallasmaa, “Space, Place, and Atmosphere: Peripheral Perception in Existential Experience,” in Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, ed. Christian Borch (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2014), 20. 7.  Freud’s articulation of projection spans across several works, including: Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), in SE, 14:109–­40; Freud, “Psycho-­Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” (1911), in SE, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth, 1959), 1–­82; Freud, Beyond the

Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961); Freud, “The Neuro-­Psychoses of Defence” (1894), in SE, vol. 3 (London: Hogarth, 1962), 41–­61; Freud, “Further Remarks on the Neuro-­Psychoses of Defence” (1896), in SE, 3:157–­85; and Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989). 8.  See Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002). 9.  See Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation psychique et collective: À la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité (Paris: Aubier, 1989). 10.  David Scott, Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 42. See also Pascal Chabot, The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 11.  See Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 12. Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 1, 6. 13.  See chapter 1 for the development of this argument, which will be expanded in chapter 3. 14.  Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 33–­34. See chapter 3 for further discussion. 15. Coccia, Life of Plants, 34. 16.  Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2009). 17.  Franz Anton Mesmer, Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F. A. Mesmer, trans. George Bloch (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufman, 1980). This volume contains a translation of Mesmer’s 1779 Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétism animal. 18. Maillet, Claude Glass, 63. 19.  For a treatment of the interrelation of hypnotism and cinema that acknowledges mesmeric discourse, see Stephan Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 20.  James Braid, “Electro-­Biological Phenomena,” Monthly Journal of Medical Science 12 (May–­June 1851): 530. See also Braid, Magic, Witchcraft, Animal Magnetism, Hypnotism and Electro-­Biology (London: John Churchill, 1852). 21.  See Raymond Bellour, Le corps du cinema: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, Trafic, 2009); and Bellour, La querelle des dispositifs: Cinéma, installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, Trafic, 2012). 22.  For a treatment of phantasmagoria in the context of a wide-­ ranging history of darkness in the arts, see Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). On the philosophical morphology of phantasmagoria, see Stephan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013). For further discussion of phantasmagoric forms of projection, see chapter 5 of this book. 23.  See Georges Didi-­Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot

301 N OT ES TO PAG ES 5 8–67

and the bipersonal sphere of mother and fetus, structures that are too enclosed in social terms and problematic in gender terms. For an introduction to this “spherology,” see Sloterdijk, “Foreword to the Theory of Spheres,” in Cosmograms, ed. Melik Ohanian and Jean-­ Christophe Royoux (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005), 223–­40. On “atmospheric explication,” see Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). 163.  For a treatment of elemental envelopment that is inspired by Sloterdijk’s philosophy, among others, but transcends spherical enclosure, see Derek P. McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 164.  As the philosopher Félix Guattari has argued, in building his notion of ecophilosophy, the definition of ecology encompasses social relations and human subjectivity as well as more strictly environmental concerns. See Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 165.  James Ash, “Rethinking Affective Atmospheres: Technology, Perturbation and Space Times of the Non-­Human,” Geoforum, no. 49 (2013), 20–­28. See also Ash, “Technology and Affect: Towards a Theory of Inorganically Organised Objects,” Emotion, Space, and Society, no. 14 (February 2015), 84–­90. 166.  For further definition of a “mediate matter,” a notion that I borrow from Steven Connor, see his Matter of Air, 143, 256.

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and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 24.  Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-­first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 253. 25. Warner, Phantasmagoria, 253. 26.  On this aspect of mesmerism, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 39. 27.  Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 128. 28.  Miss Chandos Leigh Hunt, Private Instructions in the Science and Art of Organic Magnetism, 3rd ed. (London: G. Wilson, 1885), 14–­ 15. Cited in Owen, Darkened Room, 128. 29.  Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles, vol. 1, Spheres: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 223. 30. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 1:240. 31. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 1:238. 32.  Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich Hufeland, Ueber Sympathie (Weimar: Vlg des Landes-­Industrie-­Comptoirs, 1811), 45–­142. As cited in Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 1:341. 33. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 1:231. 34.  Jean Laplanche and Jean-­Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-­Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (New York: Norton, 1974), 349. 35.  While I appreciate and draw on Sloterdijk’s learned account of mesmerism, I do not agree with his conclusions and the overarching structure of his theoretical argument. As I have aimed to show, there is much more to the magnetic process than the dyadic structure he ultimately configures can explain. This kind of fluidity is not a bipersonal affair. It cannot be reduced to the hypnotic power relation between healer and patient or to the inclusive universe of mother and fetus. In other words, it cannot be contained in a “bubble.” 36.  See Steven Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion: 2010). 37.  Mesmer defended his dissertation, De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum, in Vienna in 1766. 38. Mesmer, Mesmerism, 34, as cited in Connor, Matter of Air, 77. 39. Mesmer, Mesmerism, 122, as cited in Connor, Matter of Air, 79. 40. Connor, Matter of Air, 79. 41.  See Paul Roazen, Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk (London: Routledge, 1990). 42.  Victor Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933): 519–­56. The text was originally published in German in 1919. 43.  For a seminal discussion of this device in the psychoanalytic literature and in relation to early theories of the cinematic apparatus, see Joan Copjec, “The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine,” October, no. 23 (Winter 1982; special issue, “Film Books”), 43–­59. 44.  On Tausk, Freud, and Lacan in relation to film theory, see Jeffrey West Kirkwood, “The Cinema of Afflictions,” October, no. 159 (Winter 2017), 37–­54. Kirkwood notes that Tausk knew film also by association with Lou Andreas-­Salomé but, given his complex relation to Freud, both acknowledged and disavowed the cinematic machine.

45.  While appreciating the psychoanalytic readings, I prefer to explore a different avenue within its bounds. I am wary of the consequences of strictly formulating projection as a psychological space of identification invented by schizophrenics. While not denying the link to paranoia as a failure of boundaries exposed by the machine, I prefer to turn to an aspect that appears to be obscured by the pathology and the insistence on projection as identification. I am interested in the psychic machine itself as an object of material imagination, and in exploring its “projective” capability and its genealogy as a technological operation of transmission. 46.  Christopher Turner, “The Influencing Machine,” Cabinet, no. 14 (Summer 2004), accessed August 1, 2018, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/14/turner.php/cabinet-­the-­influencing-­machine, n.p. 47.  Tausk, “Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine,’” 521. 48.  Tausk, “Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine,’” 521. 49.  Hugo Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: A Psychological Study” and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002). The Photoplay was published originally in 1916. 50.  On the subject of Münsterberg’s idea of cinema as a projection of mental processes and affect, see Giuliana Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science: Hugo Münsterberg’s Laboratory of Moving Images,” Grey Room, no. 36 (Summer 2009), 88–­113. 51. Münsterberg, Photoplay, 78. 52. Münsterberg, Photoplay, 96. 53. Münsterberg, Photoplay, 129. Although Münsterberg did not acknowledge the unconscious, his views of cinema as a projection of the mind acknowledged such inner constructions as the work of memory, imagination, and affect. 54. Münsterberg, Photoplay, 102. 55.  Tausk, “Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine,’” 521. 56.  Mary Ann Doane, in “The Location of the Image: Cinematic Projection and Scale in Modernity,” in Art of Projection, ed. Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 161, provides an insightful discussion of the relation of psychoanalysis to cinematic projection. 57.  Doane, “Location of the Image,” 161. 58.  Matthew Noble-­Olson, “Melancholy Projection,” Discourse 38, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 399. Noble-­Olson proposes moving away from the conception of projection as an expulsion of unpleasant excitation from the self by focusing on melancholia and incorporating its dynamic in the process of projection. Melancholia is understood to be an inverse or negative projection: it is a projective process that incorporates the object that had been external back into the ego. Rather than conceiving the object as separate, it causes it to be encrypted within the ego, blurring boundaries. Applying this view to contemporary visual culture, Noble-­Olson, in a close reading of Phil Solomon’s installation American Falls (2010), argues that melancholia is memorialized in contemporary forms of projection in the art gallery. 59.  See Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Casid rethinks the psychoanalytic scene in relation to the apparatuses of vision produced by the Enlightenment, considering as well Tausk’s “influencing machine.” In doing so, she stages a dialogue with works such as Jonathan Crary’s influential Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA:

Empathy Research,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, no. 1 (1984), 38–­59. Works of film theory that acknowledge the impact of Einfühlung include Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); and Inga Pollmann, Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the Question of Life (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). 80.  For a useful collection of essays in English that surveys this period of empathy theory, see Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–­1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). 81.  See Johann Gottfried Herder, “On Cognition and Sensation, the Two Main Forces of the Human Soul” (1775), in Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178–­243; Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Herder, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, ed. and trans. Jason Gaiger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), originally published as Plastik in 1778. 82.  See Jutta Müller-­Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung: zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Ästhetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2005). 83.  Robert Vischer, “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics” (1873), in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 89–­124. 84.  See Adolph von Hildebrandt, “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts” (1893), in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 227–­79. 85.  See Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas: Mnemosyne (1924–­29), in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2.1, ed. Martin Warnke with Claudia Brink (Berlin: Akademie, 2000). For an insightful reading of Warburg’s “moving” pictures, see Philippe-­Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004). 86.  See, among others, Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure”; and Theodor Lipps, “Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-­Feelings,” in A Modern Book of Esthetics: An Anthology, ed. Melvin Miller Rader (New York: H. Holt, 1960), 374–­82. 87.  In this sense, Lipps’s version of Einfühlung shares an affinity with the notion of Stimmung, treated in chapter 3. 88.  Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure,” 405. 89.  See Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), where the author gives empathy consideration as a form of animation of the inorganic for Riegl and Worringer, and discusses Aby Warburg as well in this respect. Papapetros makes a convincing argument that Worringer’s account of ornament undermines his own apparent stance against empathetic identification, leading one to reconsider abstraction and empathy as connected rather than distinct or even antithetical realms. 90.  Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997). 91. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 14. 92. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 14 (italics mine).

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MIT Press, 1990) and political theorist Giorgio Agamben’s What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), a book that reworks Foucault’s notion of a dispositif of power. 60. Casid, Scenes of Projection, 30. 61. Casid, Scenes of Projection, 199. 62. Casid, Scenes of Projection, 1, 7. 63. Casid, Scenes of Projection, 200. 64.  An aspect of materiality, as regards the relation of projection to alchemy, will be treated in chapter 5 with a discussion of the psychoanalytic view of Carl Gustav Jung. 65.  See, among other works, Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, no. 27 (1946), 99–­110. 66.  Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (London: Karnac Books, 1973), 126. 67.  See Wilfred Bion, Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1984). 68.  See Giuseppe Civitarese, The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-­Bionian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2012); Civatarese, Soggetti sublimi: Esperienza estetica e intersoggetività in psicoanalisi (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2018); and Civitarese, “Bion’s O and His Mystical Path,” unpublished paper. 69.  For a survey of apparatus theory, see Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). For a discussion of Lacanian film theory, see Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,” in Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (London: Verso, 1994), 15–­38. 70.  Lisa Cartwright, “The Hands of the Projectionist,” Science in Context 24, no. 3 (September 2011): 443–­64. 71.  Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 33–­34. 72. Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship, 24. 73.  See Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), esp. 219–­22. 74.  André Green, On Private Madness (London: Karnac Books, 1997), 89. Green also recalls that Freud called the ego the body’s surface of projection. 75. Green, On Private Madness, 94. 76. Green, On Private Madness, 90. 77.  Theodor Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure” (1906), in Aesthetic Theories: Studies in the Philosophy of Art, ed. Karl Aschenbrenner and Arnold Isenberg (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1965), 403–­4. 78.  See Andrea Pinotti, Empatia: Storia di un’idea da Platone al postumano (Bari: Laterza, 2011). 79.  The literature on this subject is extensive. For a useful overview of the history of Einfühlung, see Juliet Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (March 2006): 139–­57; Robin Curtis and Gertrud Koch, eds., Einfühlung: Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart eines ästhetischen Konzepts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008); Art in Translation 6, no. 4 (December 2014), special issue on Einfühlung; and Gerald A. Gladstein, “The Historical Roots of Contemporary

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93.  I first took this up in my essay “Surface Encounters: Materiality and Empathy,” in Mirror-­Touch Synaesthesia: Thresholds of Empathy with Art, ed. Daria Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 107–­22. The book offers a substantial discussion of the relation of empathy and art. 94.  See Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (London: Routledge, 2015). 95.  Laura Marks, “I Feel Like an Abstract Line,” in Martin, Mirror-­ Touch Synaesthesia, 151–­76. Marks expands the discourse of empathy toward abstract forms, including Islamic art, in light of the work of Gilles Deleuze, among others. 96.  Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure,” 408. 97.  Heinrich Wölfflin, Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1999). This was Wölfflin’s dissertation, completed in 1886. See Rainer Schützeichel, “Architecture as Bodily and Spatial Art: The Idea of Einfühlung in Early Theoretical Contributions by Heinrich Wölfflin and August Schmarsow,” Architectural Theory Review 18, no. 3 (2013): 293–­309. 98.  Schmarsow followed the visual ideas of tactile spatial perception and bodily movement put forth by German philosopher Hermann Lotze (1817–­81), who was interested in physical space as well in Lipps’s principles of Einfühlung. See in particular August Schmarsow, “The Essence of Architectural Creation” (1893), in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 281–­97. On Schmarsow’s theory of space, see Mitchell W. Schwarzer, “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of Raumgestaltung,” Assemblage, no. 15 (August 1991), 48–­61. On the emergence of space as a modern concept, see Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 99.  Schmarsow, “Essence of Architectural Creation,” 289. 100.  Robin Curtis, “An Introduction to Einfühlung,” Art in Translation 6, no. 4 (December 2014): 353–­76. 101. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 4–­5. 102. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 5. 103.  Walter Benjamin, “The Flâneur,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 448. 104.  Benjamin began his theorization of innervation in “One-­ Way Street” (1925–­26), in One-­Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1985), 45–­104. This includes the section on the planetarium and technology (103–­4) discussed in chapter 1 as part of the articulation of medium as ambiance and electrical environment. 105.  Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), esp. 132–­46. 106.  See Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, 213. 107.  Sergei Eisenstein, “Methods of Montage,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 73. 108.  See Ana Olenina, “The Doubly Wired Spectator: Marston’s Theory of Emotions and Psychophysiological Research on Cinematic Pleasure in the 1920s,” Film History: An International Journal 27, no. 1 ( January 2015): 29–­57; and Ana Hedberg Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

109.  See Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Tretyakov, “Expressive Movement” (1923), trans. Alma H. Law, Millennium Film Journal, no. 3 (Winter–­Spring 1979): 36–­37. 110.  As cited in Oksana Bulgakowa, “From Expressive Movement to the ‘Basic Problem’: The Vygotsky-­Luria-­Eisensteinian Theory of Art,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-­Historical Psychology, ed. Anton Yasnitsky, René van der Veer, and Michel Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 438. 111.  Bulgakowa, “From Expressive Movement,” 438. 112.  For a concise explanation, see David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Mirror and Canonical Neurons Are Crucial Elements in Esthetic Response,” in Trends in Cognitive Science 11, no. 10 (October 1, 2007): 411. 113.  See Robin Curtis, “Expanded Empathy: Movement, Mirror Neurons and Einfühlung,” in Narration and Spectatorship in Moving Images: Perception, Imagination, Emotion, ed. Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 49–­62. 114.  Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, Lo schermo empatico: Cinema e neuroscienze (Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2015). 115.  In speaking of film language, Gallese and Guerra tend to concentrate on narrative film and on their techniques of montage, close-­ up, and camera movement, producing a somewhat literal discourse on how filmic motion moves the viewer. This, however, can be usefully expanded, further exploring suggestions made in chapter 5 of their book, in the direction of receptive material hapticity that I take here. 116.  Although this neurological view of empathic projection has its limitations, its neuroscientific paradigm is more open than the one offered by the more functional and literal cognitive theory of film, which tends to overlook the interaction of the subjective and the atmospheric and fails to consider it a product of historical and aesthetic variables. On the latter explanation of mood, see, among others, Carl Plantinga, “Art Moods and Human Moods in Narrative Cinema,” New Literary History 43, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 455–­75; Noël Carroll, “Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures,” Monist 84, no. 4 (October 2003): 521–­55; and Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 117.  See Michael Fried, Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), in particular the chapter “The Laying Bare of Empathic Projection,” 205–­15. For a different interpretation of empathy in art, grounded in the political force of trauma and sensitive to its cultural memory, see Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 118. Fried, Four Honest Outlaws, 208. Cited from his book The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 76–­77. 119. Fried, Four Honest Outlaws, 208. 120. Fried, Four Honest Outlaws, 215. 121.  Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 425. 122.  Ken Wilder, “Projective Art and the ‘Staging’ of Empathic Projection,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 5, nos. 1–­2 (December 2016): 125–­40. Wilder analyzes in particular the experimental landscape films of Chris Welsby.

CHAPTER THREE

1.  Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 48–­49. 2. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things: De Rerum Natura, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 60. 3.  For a historical survey and interpretation of this subject as diffuse atmosphere, see David Wellbery, “Stimmung,” New Formations, no. 93 (Summer 2018): 6–­45. 4.  Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (Leipzig: Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung, 1852), 514. As cited in Wellbery, “Stimmung,” 6. 5.  See Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmos: Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit [Microcosmus: Ideas on Natural History and the History of Humanity] (1858; Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1885). 6.  Moritz Geiger, “Zum Problem der Stimmungseinfühlung” [On the Problem of Empathetic Stimmung], Zeitschrift fiir Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, no. 6 (1911): 1–­42. 7.  See chapter 2. 8.  On Riegl and the animation of space and inorganic life, see Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture,

and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), which considers as well the positions of Aby Warburg and Wilhelm Worringer. 9.  Alois Riegl, “Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen Kunst” [Stimmung as the Content of Modern Art] (1899), in Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Karl M. Swoboda (Augsburg: Filser, 1929). 10.  See, among other of his writings, Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324–­39. 11.  Georg Simmel, “The Philosophy of Landscape” (1913), trans. Josef Bleicher, Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 7–­8 (2007): 20–­29. 12.  Simmel, “Philosophy of Landscape,” 29. 13.  On the sense of smell in Simmel’s theory, see Barbara Carnevali, “Social Sensibility: Simmel, the Senses, and the Aesthetics of Recognition,” Simmel Studies 21, no. 2 ( January 2017): 9–­39. 14.  Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word Stimmung, ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963). Spitzer’s account includes a discussion of Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s uses of the concept. 15.  Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Rubric, no. 1 (2010), 5. 16.  See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 17. Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung, 5. 18.  Inga Pollmann, “Kalte Stimmung, or the Mode of Mood: Ice and Snow in Melodrama,” Colloquia Germanica 43, nos. 1–­2 (2010): 89. See also Pollmann, Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the Question of Life (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), for a discussion of vitalism in film theory that includes consideration of Stimmung. 19.  See chapter 1, and for a psychic articulation of mediality and relationality, chapter 2. 20.  Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), 61–­62, 65–­66. 21.  On the influence of Stimmung in the work of Béla Balázs, see Antonio Somaini, “Il volto delle cose: Physiognomie, Stimmung e Atmosphäre nella teoria del cinema di Béla Balázs,” Rivista di estetica 46, no. 33 (2006): 143–­62. On Balázs’s physiognomic materialism, see also Gertrud Koch, “Béla Balàzs: The Physiognomy of Things,” trans. Miriam Hansen, New German Critique, no. 4 (Winter 1987), 167–­77. For a discussion of vitalism in film theory that includes consideration of Balázs as well as Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin, see also Pollmann, Cinematic Vitalism. 22. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 54. 23. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 60, 64. 24. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 55. 25.  Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: “Visible Man” and “The Spirit of Film,” ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 22. 26. Balázs, Early Film Theory, 22. 27.  For a reading of Epstein’s film theory, see Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Malcolm Turvey,

305 N OT ES TO PAG ES 8 6–93

123.  D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-­Me Possession,” International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis 34, no. 2 (1953): 89–­97. This text was based on a paper given at a scientific meeting of the British Psycho-­Analytical Society on May 30, 1951. In 1971 Winnicott reprinted the text, deleting the subtitle and adding an application of his original theory, with two clinical examples; here, I reference this latter expanded version, the first chapter in Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), 1–­31. 124.  Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 19. 125.  Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 25. 126.  Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 2. 127.  This, as programmatically put in Winnicott’s title, defines the road taken in the essay. 128.  Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 18. 129.  Annette Kuhn, “Little Madnesses: An Introduction,” in Little Madnesses: Winnicott, Transitional Phenomena and Cultural Experience, ed. Kuhn (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 7, 3. See also Andrea Sabbadini, “Cameras, Mirrors, and the Bridge Space: A Winnicottian Lens on Cinema,” Projections 5, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 17–­30, which also claims that film analysis using Winnicottian methods remains scanty. 130.  Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 3. 131.  Victor Burgin, “The Location of Virtual Experience,” in Kuhn, Little Madnesses, 26. 132.  D. W. Winnicott, “The Location of Cultural Experience,” in Playing and Reality, 138. For an application of Winnicott’s ideas to aesthetic theories, see Kenneth Wright, Mirroring and Attunement: Self-­Realization in Psychoanalysis and Art (London: Free Association Books, 1991). 133.  We will devote more attention to screen space in following chapters, as we discuss its projective function in contemporary art and especially focus on the screen’s objecthood in chapter 4.

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“Jean Epstein’s Cinema of Immanence: The Rehabilitation of the Corporeal Eye,” October, no. 83 (Winter 1998), 25–­50; Annette Michelson, “Epstein Revealed: A Review of Jean Epstein,” October, no. 148 (Spring 2014), 39–­52; Rachel O. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Stuart Liebman, “Jean Epstein’s Early Film Theory, 1920–­22” (PhD diss., New York University, 1980). 28.  Jean Epstein, “Fragments of Sky” (1928), in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–­1939, ed. Richard Abel, vol. 1, 1907–­1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 422. 29.  Jean Epstein, “Le monde fluide de l’écran” (1950), in Écrits sur le cinema 1921–­1953, vol. 2, 1946–­1953 (Paris: Seghers, 1975), 145–­58. 30.  Jean Epstein, “The Senses” (1921), in Abel, French Film Theory, 1:244. 31.  Epstein, “Senses,” 1:243. 32.  Such is the tendency of a cognitivist approach to cinematic emotion, which is critiqued by Robert Sinnerbrink in “Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood,” Screen 53, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 148–­53. 33.  Epstein, “Senses,” 1:246. 34.  Jean Epstein, “Magnification” (1921), in Abel, French Film Theory, 1:237. 35.  Epstein, “Senses,” 1:246. 36.  Epstein, “Senses,” 1:242. 37.  Jean Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie” (1924), in Abel, French Film Theory, 1:317. 38.  Epstein, “Senses,” 1:243. 39.  Germaine Dulac, “The Avant-­Garde Cinema,” in The Avant-­ Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 32, 44. 40.  Dulac, “Avant-­Garde Cinema,” 46. 41.  Dulac, “Avant-­Garde Cinema,” 47. 42.  Dulac, “Avant-­Garde Cinema,” 47. 43.  See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The articulation of sympathy is mostly to be found in book 2, “Of the Passions.” 44.  See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982). 45.  Lauren Wispé, The Psychology of Sympathy (New York: Plenum Press, 1991), 9 (emphasis mine). On the history of sympathy, see also Seth Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-­Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 46.  See Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871). 47.  Andrea Pinotti, “Stimmung and Einfühlung: Hydraulic Model and Analogic Model in the Theories of Empathy,” Axiomathes, nos. 1–­2 (April 1998), 253. 48.  On the subject of sympathy and pharmacology, see Andrea Pinotti, Empatia: Storia di un’idea da Platone al postumano (Bari: Laterza, 2011), 81–­82. 49.  Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 1, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (1621; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). See Stephanie Shirilan, “Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, and the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, and the Imaginary Early Modern Skin,” ECS 34, no. 1 (March 2008): 59–­83.

50.  See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 51.  Jane Bennett, “Whitman’s Sympathies,” Political Research Quarterly 69, no. 3 (September 2016): 610. 52.  Bennett, “Whitman’s Sympathies,” 612. 53.  Bennett, “Whitman’s Sympathies,” 614. 54.  Jane Bennett, “Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 241. 55.  Bennett, “Whitman’s Sympathies,” 614. 56.  Bennett, “Of Material Sympathies,” 239–­40. 57.  See D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-­Me Possession,” International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis 34, no. 2 (1953): 89–­97. On this subject, and for the “projective screen,” see chapter 2. 58.  On the “projective screen,” see André Green, On Private Madness (London: Karnac Books, 1997), esp. 94. 59.  McQueen first shot the footage of Ashes, the film’s namesake, traveling on his boat in 2012. He later learned that the young fisherman had been killed two months after the shoot and buried in a common grave. The artist returned to Grenada to complete the work, and had the tomb built to give his subject the dignity of a burial on film. 60.  For a useful overview of the term, see Stefan Helmreich, “Transduction,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 222–­31. See also Adrian Mackenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (London: Continuum, 2002). 61.  The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), s.v. “transduction.” 62.  Shorter OED, s.v. “transducer.” 63.  Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 54. 64. Kahn, Earth Sound, 54. 65. Kahn, Earth Sound, 17. 66.  For a short history of electricity and its impact on the cultural imagination, see Siegfried Zielinski, “Electrification, Tele-­Writing, Seeing Close Up: Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Joseph Chudy, and Jan Evangelista Purkyně,” in Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 159–­203. 67.  Bill Viola, “Artist to Artist: Peter Campus—­Image and Self,” Art in America, February 5, 2010, accessed September 15, 2019, https:// www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-­features/magazines/peter-­ campusimage-­and-­self/. 68.  Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light (New York: Dover, 1952), 160. Originally published in 1730. 69.  See chapter 1. 70.  Jimena Canales, “Desired Machines: Cinema and the World in Its Own Image,” Science in Context 24, no. 3 (2011), 334. 71.  See Jimena Canales, “Captured by Cinematography,” in A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 117–­55. 72.  Canales, “Desired Machines,” 334.

97.  Eliasson, in “Atmospheres, Art, Architecture,” 95. 98.  Eliasson, in “Atmospheres, Art, Architecture,” 95. 99.  Eliasson, in “Atmospheres, Art, Architecture,” 95. 100. See Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project, ed. Susan May, exh. cat. (London: Tate Modern, 2003), with essays by the artist, Bruno Latour, Israel Rosenfield, and Doreen Massey. 101.  On this installation and other works, see Clemens von Wedemeyer, Orte Unter Einfluss/Affected Places (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2016), with interviews and programmatic texts by the artist as well as informative essays by art critics. The project Sun Cinema was realized at the invitation of the British Council in the framework of “My City.” The design was discussed with participants of a workshop, led by Yüksel Demir, head of the Fine Arts Department at Istanbul Technical University, which included Zeynep Ata, Ekin Aytaç, Sevince Bayrak, Elif Çelik, Işik Gülkaynak, Gürden Gür, Avşar Karababa, Zelal Zülfiye Rahmanali, Ali Taptık, Gökan Uzun, and Birge Yıldırım. The project assistant was Bilge Kalfa; the executive architect, Gürden Gür; the representative of Mardin Sinema Association, Mehmet Baran. 102.  See chapter 8 for a discussion of this work by Chantal Akerman. 103.  See Clemens von Wedemeyer, “Notizen zum Kinokomplex,” in Transversale: Erkundungen in Kunst und Wissenschaft, Ein europäisches Jahrbuch, vol. 1, ed. Kerstin Hausbei et al. (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2005), 163. See also Von Wedemeyer, Screenplay (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2010). 104.  Clemens von Wedemeyer, “Sun Cinema, Mardin, Turkey, 2010,” in Orte Unter Einfluss/Affected Places, 53. 105.  Von Wedemeyer, “Sun Cinema,” 53. 106.  Von Wedemeyer, “Sun Cinema,” 53. Von Wedemeyer mentions as inspiration Alexander Kluge’s Geschichten vom Kino (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007). 107.  See Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). CHAPTER FOUR

1.  Interview with Fabio Mauri, Alfabeta2, no. 2 (September 2010), cited by Umberto Eco in his preface, “A Convinced Bewilderment,” in Fabio Mauri, Ideology and Memory, ed. Studio Fabio Mauri (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2012), xiv. 2.  The literature on this phenomenon is growing. See, among others, Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Tamara Trodd, ed., Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013); Andrew Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Raymond Bellour, La querelle des dispositifs: Cinéma, installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, Trafic, 2012); Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For my own earlier formulation of this phenomenon, see Giuliana Bruno, “On Collection and Recollection: Film Itineraries and Museum Walks,” in Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 3–­41.

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73.  See Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York: Bantam Books, 1993). For the relation of wave theory to photography, see James Nisbet, “Atmospheric Cameras and Ecological Light in the Landscape Photographs of Eadweard Muybridge,” Photography and Culture 6, no. 2 (2013): 131–­55. 74. Zajonc, Catching the Light, 301. 75. Zajonc, Catching the Light, 302–­3. 76. Zajonc, Catching the Light, 315. 77. Zajonc, Catching the Light, 343. 78.  See chapter 1. 79.  See Karen Pinkus, “Ambiguity, Ambience, Ambivalence, and the Environment,” Common Knowledge 19, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 88–­95; and Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance” (1942), in Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: Russell & Russell, 1948), 179–­225. 80.  Steven Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010), 191. 81. Coccia, Life of Plants, 27. 82. Coccia, Life of Plants, 27. 83. Coccia, Life of Plants, 34. 84. Coccia, Life of Plants, 34. 85. Coccia, Life of Plants, 34. 86. Coccia, Life of Plants, 68. 87. Coccia, Life of Plants, 32. 88. Coccia, Life of Plants, 32. 89.  Derek P. McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 5. 90. Coccia, Life of Plants, 37. 91. Coccia, Life of Plants, 37–­38. 92.  See Seth Kim-­Cohen, Against Ambience and Other Essays (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 93.  On this oceanic form of immersion, see Erika Balsom, An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea, exh. cat. (New Plymouth, Aotearoa New Zealand: Govett-­Brewster Art Gallery, 2018). 94.  Turrell’s work has been the subject of much investigation. See, among others, Georges Didi-­Huberman, The Man Who Walked in Color, trans. Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017); Michael Govan and Christine Y. Kim, James Turrell: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: LACMA; New York: Prestel, 2013); Rebecca Peabody et al., eds., Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945–­1980, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute/J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011); Robin Clark, ed., Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Peter Noever, ed., James Turrell: The Other Horizon, exh. cat. (Vienna: MAK; Ostfildern-­ Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), with texts by Georges Didi-­Huberman, Daniel Birnbaum, Paul Virilio, et al.; and James Turrell: Spirit and Light, exh. cat. (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1998). I have written on Turrell’s work in the context of light ambiance in my book Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), chap. 3, 54–­71. 95.  Olafur Eliasson, quoted in “Atmospheres, Art, Architecture: A Conversation between Gernot Böhme, Christian Borch, Olafur Eliasson and Juhani Pallasmaa,” in Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, ed. Christian Borch (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2014), 93. 96.  Eliasson, in “Atmospheres, Art, Architecture,” 93.

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3.  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 190. 4.  For a previous extended treatment of the role of the screen in art, architecture, and film, see Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). I continued that investigation in more atmospheric and ambient terms in a previous version of the present chapter, much expanded here, which was conceived as a contribution to Dreamlands, an exhibition on art and film curated by Chrissie Iles at the Whitney Museum of American Art, October 28, 2016–­February 5, 2017. See Bruno, “The Screen as Object: Art and the Atmospheres of Projection,” in Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–­2016, ed. Iles, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016), 156–­67. Some of the contemporary artists discussed in this text were represented in the exhibition. 5.  For a review of film theory’s association of the screen primarily with visual metaphors, including mirror and window, see Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 157–­60. The optical history of the screen is further treated, along with more environmental aspects, in Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti, eds., Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019). For an introduction to screen history, see Dominique Chateau and José Moure, eds., Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016). 6.  See chapters 1 and 3. On the cultural genealogy of the screen as a window, see Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and W. J. T. Mitchell, “Screening Nature (and the Nature of the Screen),” New Review of Film and Television Studies 13, no. 3 (2015): 231–­46. For the screen’s new optical configuration as a frame for image circulation or a transit point, see Francesco Casetti, “What Is a Screen Nowadays?” in Public Space, Media Space, ed. Chris Berry, Janet Harbord, and Rachel Moore (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 16–­40. On the notion of cultural technique, see Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­ Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 7.  For an introduction to this field of study, see Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016). 8.  Erkki Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen,” ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image 7 (2004): 35. 9.  Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology,” 31. Huhtamo cites the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia definition here. 10.  On Mauri’s oeuvre, see Carolyn Christov-­Bakargiev and Marcella Cossu, eds., Fabio Mauri: Opere e azioni 1954–­1994, exh. cat. (Rome: Carte Segrete; Milan: Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori, 1994); Valérie da Costa, Fabio Mauri: Le passé en actes (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2018); and Giacomo Marramao, L’esperimento del mondo: Mistica e filosofia nell’arte di Fabio Mauri (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2018). 11.  This is articulated in Mauri, Ideology and Memory. 12.  This point was made clear in an extensive retrospective of

Mauri’s work, interestingly titled Retrospective in Solid Light, curated by Laura Cherubini and Andrea Viliani at the Museo Madre in Naples, Italy, December 26, 2016–­March 6, 2017. See also Riccardo Venturi, “Fabio Mauri: Cinema a Luce Solida,” Flash Art (May–­June 2015), 44–­48, which relates this work to the Italian design of the time as well as to changes in theories of light. 13.  This installation was interestingly paired with Antoni Muntadas’s La siesta (1995) in the exhibition Mauri Muntadas, at Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice, May 9–­August 31, 2019. Muntadas’s video installation projects scenes from the early work of Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens onto a large armchair, whose white canvas effectively turns into a screen. At times, a video of the hand of the artist napping appears as well on the armchair, suggesting, along with the title, that the screening might be a dream or a memory. 14.  Fabio Mauri, “Note su ‘zeichen-­ung’,” Proposta: Rivista di cultura contemporanea, nos. 2–­3 ( July–­October 1972), as cited in Anni 70: Arte a Roma, ed. Daniela Lancioni (Rome: Iacobelli, 2013), 315. 15.  See Germano Celant, Giosetta Fioroni (Milan: Skira, 2013). 16.  On this aspect of Rotella’s artwork, see Germano Celant, ed., Mimmo Rotella: Catalogo ragionato, vol. 1, 1944–­1961 (Milan: Skira, 2016), and Mimmo Rotella: Catalogo ragionato, vol. 2, 1961–­1973 (Milan: Skira, forthcoming); Antonella Soldaini and Veronica Locatelli, eds., Mimmo Rotella: Selected Early Works, exh. cat. (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2017); and Germano Celant and Antonella Soldaini, eds., Mimmo Rotella: Manifesto, exh. cat. (Milan: Silvana Editoriale 2019). 17.  On the screen and the blanks, see Celant and Soldaini, Rotella: Manifesto. 18.  For a survey of experimental film in Italy, including the work of Paolo Gioli, see Giuliana Bruno, “From Public Virtue to Public Vice: Notes on Italian Independent Cinema,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 13 (Fall 1983–­Winter 1984), 36–­45. Gioli’s work, too long obscured in the critical literature, has recently received substantial attention. See Philippe Dubois and Antonio Somaini, eds., Paolo Gioli: Impressions Sauvages (Dijion: Les presses du reel, 2018); Alessandro Bordina and Antonio Somaini, eds., Paolo Gioli: The Man without a Movie Camera (Milan: Mimesis, 2014); Annamaria Licciardello and Sergio Toffetti, eds., Paolo Gioli: Imprint Cinema (Rome: Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 2009); Patrick Rumble, “Free Films Made Freely: Paolo Gioli and Experimental Filmmaking in Italy,” CineAction, no. 78 (March 2009), 10–­16. On the photographic work, see Peter Benson Miller, ed., Paolo Gioli: Anthropolaroid, exh. cat. (New York and Rome: American Academy, 2018). An extensive retrospective of Gioli’s films was held at the Harvard Film Archive in Spring 2016. His filmic works have been collected by Bruno di Marino and Patrick Rumble in the DVD box set Paolo Gioli: The Complete Filmworks (Rome: Raro Video; Minneapolis: Minerva, 2015). 19.  Francesco Lo Savio, cited by Riccardo Venturi, “Thoughts Made Matter: The Metalli of Francesco Lo Savio,” in Francesco Lo Savio, ed. Silvia Lucchesi, Alberto Salvadori, and Venturi, exh. cat. (Trento: Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto [MART]), 2018), 26. On Lo Savio’s oeuvre, see also Venturi, Passione dell’indifferenza: Francesco Lo Savio (Milan: Humboldt Books, 2018). 20.  See the catalogue of the exhibition held in June 1961 at Galleria La Salita in Rome, titled Mack+ Klein + Piene + Uecker + Lo Savio = 0 (Rome: Istituto Grafico Tiberino, 1961).

accompanied the reconstruction of Fontana’s Ambienti spaziali for the exhibition curated by Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, and Vicente Todolí at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca, September 21, 2017–­February 25, 2018. 37.  I am thinking about Eliasson’s various ambient room installations, such as Room for one colour (1997), 360° room for all colours (2002), Your colour memory (2004), Rainbow Assembly (2016), and in particular his large-­scale installation for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, The Weather Project (2003), mentioned in chapter 3. See Susan May, ed., Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project, exh. cat. (London: Tate Modern, 2003). An argument about Fontana as precursor of the ambiance of relational aesthetics is made by Maria Villa, “Spaces as a Physical Entity to Experience: Notes for a Comparison of Ideas between Lucio Fontana and Contemporary Art,” in Pugliese, Ferriani, and Todolí, Fontana, Ambienti/Environments, 91–­94. 38.  Lucio Fontana, Letter no. 261, July 30, 1951, addressed to Gio Ponti, in Lucio Fontana: Lettere 1919–­1968, ed. Paolo Campiglio (Milan: Skira, 1999), 217–­18 (translation mine). 39.  See Paolo Campiglio, “Environmental Research in Architecture,” in Pugliese, Ferriani, and Todolí, Fontana: Ambienti/Environments, 55–­59. 40.  On Vigo’s oeuvre, see Dominique Stella, ed., Nanda Vigo: Light Is Life, exh. cat. (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2006). For some of Vigo’s manifestos and documents, see also http://www.nandavigo.com, accessed March 8, 2019. 41.  Interview with Nanda Vigo, Milan, November 2004, cited by Dominique Stella in “Nanda Vigo: ‘Light Is life,’” in Stella, Nanda Vigo, 19. 42.  These included various collaborative interior designs: the preparation of his 1961 solo exhibition Lucio Fontana: Opere 1949–­61, at the International Center of Aesthetic Research in Turin; the exhibition Fontana + Vigo, at Galleria La Polena in Genoa in 1968; and the cinematic space discussed for the 1964 Milan Triennale. 43.  Nanda Vigo, “Manifesto Cronotopico,” written on the occasion of the exhibition at Galleria La Salita, Rome, 1964. 44.  See Germano Celant, Laura Grisi (New York: Rizzoli, 1990). 45.  See Nicholas Cullinan, ed., Tacita Dean: Film, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011). 46.  Synchronicity was exhibited in the Arsenale at the 58th Venice Biennale, May 11–­November 24, 2019. 47.  Sigmund Freud, “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1957), 223. 48.  André Green, On Private Madness (London: Karnac Books, 1997), 94. 49.  See Louise Neri and Josiah McElheny, eds., Josiah McElheny: A Prism (New York: Skira/Rizzoli, 2010); and Daniel F. Herrmann, ed., Josiah McElheny: The Past Was a Mirage I’d Left Far Behind (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012). 50.  Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), chap. 4. 51.  Tobias Putrih’s description of this piece appears in Thom Collins and Stuart Krimko, eds., Tobias Putrih 99 07 (Zurich: JRP/ Ringier, 2008), 32. This catalog, produced in conjunction with the

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21.  Francesco Lo Savio, Spazio-­Luce, vol. 1 (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1962), 14 (translation mine). See also Lo Savio, Spazio e luce, ed. Germano Celant (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). 22.  Lo Savio expressed this idea in his contribution to Monocrhome Malerei, exh. cat. (Leverkusen: Städtisches Museum Leverkusen Schloss Morsbroich, 1960). 23.  See Cristina Fiordimela and Freddy Paul Grunert, “Maison au soleil, Matrix of Living Matter,” in Lucchesi, Salvadori, and Venturi, Francesco Lo Savio (note 19), 77–­89. 24.  Lo Savio, cited by Silvia Lucchesi, in “Anatomy and Architecture in Francesco Lo Savio,” in Lucchesi, Salvadori, and Venturi, Francesco Lo Savio, 57. 25.  Venturi, “Thoughts Made Matter,” 40. 26.  For a treatment of Robert Irwin’s atmospheric ambiances, see chapter 11. On Doug Wheeler, see chapter 1. I have written on James Turrell’s light ambiances in Bruno, Surface, chap. 3, 54–­71, and expand on the immersive aspect of this work in chapter 3 of this book. 27. See Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018). 28. See Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–­60s, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2014). 29.  On the Shroud of Turin, see Georges Didi-­Huberman, “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain),” October, no. 29 (Summer 1984), 63–­81. 30.  See Andrea Cortellessa, Monsieur Zero: 26 lettere su Manzoni, quello vero (Rome: Gaffi, 2018). 31.  See Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, and Vincente Todolí, eds., in collaboration with Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Lucio Fontana: Ambienti/Environments, exh. cat. (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2018); Germano Celant, ed., Lucio Fontana: Ambienti spaziali; Architecture, Art, Environments, exh. cat. (Milan: Skira, 2012); and Anthony White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 32.  Keith Sonnier, who pioneered important work with electric light, specifically neon, until recently has had less exposure than Dan Flavin or his contemporaries. For a comprehensive survey of his work, see Jeffrey Grove and Terrie Sultan, eds., Keith Sonnier: Until Today, exh. cat. (New York: Prestel, 2018). One should also, of course, recall the influence of Bruce Nauman, whose neon signage works present ambient force. See, among others, Kathy Halbreich, Isabel Friedli, Heidi Naef, Magnus Schaefer, and Taylor Walsh, eds., Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018). 33.  Carla Lonzi, “15 opere di Fontana dal 1946 al 1962,” in Carla Lonzi: Scritti sull’arte, ed. Lara Conte, Laura Iamurri, and Vanessa Martini (Milan: Et al./Edizioni, 2012), 299–­301. See also Laura Iamurri, Un margine che sfugge: Carla Lonzi e l’arte in Italia 1955–­1970 (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 2016). 34.  Among the notable works that modified spatial perception is Neon Structure for the IX Milan Triennial, conceived in 1951. 35.  See Marina Pugliese, “Lucio Fontana: Ambienti/Environments,” in Pugliese, Ferriani, and Todolí, Fontana: Ambienti/Environments, 19–­42. 36.  Nanda Vigo, as cited in Pugliese, Ferriani, and Todolí, Fontana: Ambienti/Environments, 19. This was a pamphlet that

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exhibition Tobias Putrih: Quasi-­Random at the Neuberger Museum of Art, is devoted to the first decade of the artist’s work, from 1999 to 2007. 52.  Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 33. 53.  See, among others, Cildo Meireles, Installations, ed. Vicente Todoli, exh. cat. (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2014). 54.  Viewing these two installations together in the same space at Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan made this point even more evident. They were on view there from October 18, 2018, to January 12, 2019. 55.  My critical reading of Wodiczko’s work here and in Surface, where it is treated extensively, owes much to private and public conversations with the artist. For the latter, see in particular Giuliana Bruno, “Krzysztof Wodiczko,” an interview for “In the Open Air: Art in Public Spaces,” a project of Bomb magazine and PBS’s Art 21, Sculpture Center, New York, October 29, 2007, accessed April 29, 2015, http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3592. 56.  In theorizing the post-­medium condition, art historian Rosalind Krauss elaborated on Walter Benjamin’s notion that a medium can express its utopian potentials at the very moment of its obsolescence, in A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 41. See also Krauss, “. . . And Then Turn Away? An Essay on James Coleman,” October, no. 81 (Summer 1997), 5–­33; and consider as well her appreciation of William Kentridge’s projections and Jeff Wall’s light boxes in this conceptual light. 57. Saunder’s Two Worlds, first shown at Blum & Poe in Tokyo, was included in the exhibition Screens: Virtual Material, curated by Sarah Montross at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA, October 16, 2017–­March 18, 2018. See Sarah Montross, Screens: Virtual Material, ed. Kristin Swan, exh. cat. (Lincoln, MA: deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2017). 58. Umbrico’s Out of Order: Bad Display (100717) was also included in the deCordova’s exhibition Screens: Virtual Material. 59.  Umbrico’s installation Sun/Screen/Scan was shown in a two-­part exhibition at the New York Public Library. Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins, October 19, 2018–­February 17, 2019, was accompanied by the exhibition Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works, September 28, 2018—­January 6, 2019, which traced the resonance of Atkins’s legacy in the works of artists today, including Umbrico’s installation. 60. Ho’s Pythagoras, which was shown in 2013 at Gallery Michael Janssen Singapore, was presented at the Kochi-­Muziris Biennale in India, December 12, 2014–­March 29, 2015. 61. See Timekeeper: Sarah Sze, exh. cat. (New York: Gregory R. Miller; Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum, 2017). The incarnation of Timekeeper described here was on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Rome, October 13, 2018–­January 26, 2019. 62.  For a study of the representational mode of the magic lantern as a precinematic device, see, among others, Artemis Willis, “The Lantern Image between Stage and Screen,” in The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material, ed. Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning, and Joshua Yumibe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 237–­46; Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of

Exeter Press, 2000); Mannoni, Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, and David Robinson, Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture, 1420–­1896 (Gemona, Italy: Le giornate del cinema muto, 1995); and C. W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Winston (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965). 63.  For a history of the magic lantern in the context of the visual culture of Enlightenment, see Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 64.  Susan Hiller’s installation, comprising a three-­channel 35mm slide projection, with sound, presented a more optical version of the lantern’s impact, providing an almost scientific presentation of pure form and color projection. The sound consisted of the artist’s vocal improvisations, together with bits of recordings by Latvian scientist Konstantine Raudive (1909–­74), who claimed to have captured ghostly voices in his recordings of the silence in empty rooms. 65.  The art historian Arthur Danto suggests that the model of Sarah Sze’s work is, in general, more scientific than architectural. Here, I would argue that both models are at work in the display of the materiality of projection. See Danto, “Scientific and Artistic Models in the New Work of Sarah Sze,” in Sarah Sze at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, ed. Marion Boulton Stroud, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2014). See also Okwui Enwezor, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Laura Hoptman, Sarah Sze (London: Phaidon, 2016). 66.  This was the effect of the Marquee series when twenty-­seven of these works were exhibited in the exhibition h {n)y p n(y} osis, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, June 11–­August 2, 2015, and when a series was also shown at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, October 22, 2015–­February 14, 2016. See Andrea Lissoni, ed., Philippe Parreno: h {n)y p n(y} osis, Hypothesis, exh. cat. (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2017). 67. On Grosse Fatigue, see Pamela Lee, “The Whole Earth Is Heavy,” Artforum 52, no. 1 (September 2103), accessed July 3, 2014, http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201307&id=42626&pagenum=1. 68. Schultz’s River project took place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, October 21 and 22, 2017. 69.  Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Modern Library, 2000), chaps. 8–­11. 70.  See, among others, Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 71.  See P. Morton Shand, Modern Picture-­Houses and Theaters (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1930). 72.  Eberson built more than forty atmospheric movie palaces, the majority of which have been destroyed, and altogether about three hundred movie theaters, including streamlined, Art Deco versions. In the 1920s his wife and collaborator, Beatrice Lamb, directed the firm Michael Angelo Studios, which designed the theater interiors. For useful information on Eberson’s atmospheric career, see Richard Stapleford, Temples of Illusion: The Atmospheric Theaters of John Eberson, exh. cat. (New York: Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery of Hunter College, 1988). 73.  John Eberson, “A Description of the Capitol Theater, Chicago (1925),” in Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition, ed. Gregory A. Waller (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 106.

88.  Walter Gropius, “Theaterbau” (1934), cited in Siegfried Giedion, Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork (New York: Reinhold, 1954), 64. 89.  Moholy-­Nagy envisioned cinema as a “light-­space modulator” in his sculpture of that title (1922–­1930), and in 1930 turned this kinetic work, which looked like a film projector, into the film A Light Play: Black, White, Gray. On Moholy-­Nagy’s experiments with light in exhibition, see Noam Elcott, “Rooms of Our Time: László Moholy-­Nagy and the Stillbirth of Multi-­Media Museums,” in Trodd, Screen/Space, 25–­52. 90.  László Moholy-­Nagy, Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 11. Antonio Somaini provides a useful commentary in “Fotografia, cinema, montaggio: La ‘nuova visione’ di László Moholy-­Nagy,” his introduction to the Italian edition, Pittura Fotografia Film, trans. Bruno Reichlin (Turin: Einaudi, 2010), ix–­lxi. 91.  Moholy-­Nagy, Painting Photography Film, 41. 92.  Moholy-­Nagy, Painting Photography Film, 43. 93.  Moholy-­Nagy, Painting Photography Film, 43. 94.  Moholy-­Nagy, Painting Photography Film, 12. 95.  Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 323. 96.  See, among others, Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-­first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 97.  See chapter 1 and 3. On the question of the return of projection, see also Dominique Païni, “Should We Put an End to Projection?” October, no. 110 (Fall 2004), 23–­48. On elemental electric projections, see Electric Nights: Art and Pyrotechnics, exh. cat. (Gijón, Spain: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial; Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2011), which accompanied an exhibition curated by Philippe-­Alain Michaud. 98.  See chapter 5 for a specific treatment of contemporary phantasmagoric projection. See also Noam Elcott, “The Phantasmagoric Dispositif: An Assembly of Bodies and Images in Real Time and Space,” Grey Room, no. 62 (Winter 2016), 42–­71. 99.  Anthony McCall, “Two Statements,” in The Avant-­garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 250. On McCall’s practice see, among others, Christopher Eamon, ed., Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), with essays by Branden W. Joseph and Jonathan Walley; Philippe-­Alain Michaud, “The Geometric Cinema of Anthony McCall,” October, no. 137 (Summer 2011), 3–­22; McCall, Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture, exh. cat. (Cologne: Walther König, 2012), including an essay by Noam Elcott; Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works, exh. cat. (Lugano: Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, 2015), including an essay by Antonio Somaini; and George Baker, “Film beyond Its Limits,” Grey Room, no. 25 (Fall 2006), 92–­125. 100.  For a treatment of the “projective cast” in architecture, see Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries

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74.  The Loew’s Paradise Theatre, located at 2403 Grand Concourse in Bronx, New York, was subdivided and stripped of features in the 1970s and then closed in 1994. It was renovated and reopened in 2005 as a live theater, and then became a church. 75.  On Kiesler, see, among others, Stephen Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); Laura M. McGuire, “A Movie House in Space and Time: Frederick Kiesler’s Film Arts Guild Cinema, New York, 1929,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 14, no. 2 (Spring–­Summer 2007): 45–­78; and Frederick Kiesler, Artiste-­ architecte, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996). 76.  Valuable research material on Kiesler’s designs also has been drawn from the Kiesler Fund at the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA. 77.  In 2016, the web artist Jeremy Rotsztain developed a real-­time VR audiovisual artwork that simulates even the unrealized features of the Film Guild Cinema, and appropriately called it The House of Shadow Silence. The project was part of the “Web Residencies” program initiated by Akademie Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgard, Germany. See https:// schloss-­post.com/house-­shadow-­silence/, accessed November 5, 2020. 78.  Frederick Kiesler, “Building a Cinema Theater,” New York Evening Post, February 2, 1929. The Film Guild Cinema, located at 52–­54 West Eighth Street in New York, was short-­lived. In 1930 it was renamed, and although it remained open until 1992, it was stripped of Kiesler’s screen-­o-­scope. 79.  The Invisible Cinema was a part of Joseph Papp’s Public Theater at 425 Lafayette Street in New York City. For an oral history of this experimental theater, see Sky Sitney, “The Search for the Invisible Cinema,” Grey Room, no. 19 (Spring 2005), 102–­13. 80.  See Kristen Alfaro, “Access and the Experimental Film: New Technologies and Anthology Film Archives’ Institutionalization of the Avant-­Garde,” Moving Image 12, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 44–­64; and P. Adams Sitney, introduction to The Essential Cinema: Essays on the Films in the Collection of Anthology Film Archives, ed. Sitney with Caroline Sergeant Angell (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1975), vii–­x. 81.  Annette Michelson, “Gnosis and Iconoclasm: A Case Study of Cinephilia,” October, no. 83 (Winter 1998), 5. 82.  Peter Kubelka, “The Invisible Cinema,” Design Quarterly, no. 93 (1974): 32, 34. 83.  Kubelka, “Invisible Cinema,” 36. 84.  Kubelka, “Invisible Cinema,” 34. 85.  Kubelka, “Invisible Cinema,” 34. 86.  On “panoramic vision” in modernity, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). For a history of the panorama, see Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 87.  I offer a more extensive treatment of this subject, considering the cultural archaeology of the film medium in relation to the mobilization of visual space, in Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002). For a media archaeology of the panoramic form, see Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

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(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 108. This aspect is discussed in chapter 1. 101.  Split Second (Mirror) was on view, along with another recent as well as older configurations of McCall’s solid light film installations, at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, December 14, 2018–­January 26, 2019. 102.  See McCall’s own description of the ambient experience in “Line Describing a Cone and Related Films,” in Anthony McCall: Film Installations, ed. Helen Legg, exh. cat. (Coventry, UK: Mead Gallery and University of Warwick, 2004), 44. 103.  See, among others, Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970); Andrew Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); and A. L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds., Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 2011). On the intersection of early experimental practices with the postcinematic, see among others, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 104.  For an extensive treatment of this subject, see Gloria Sutton, The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-­Drome and Expanded Cinema (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 105.  Joan Brigham, statement accompanying the installation/ performance of Stan VanDerBeek and Brigham’s Steam Screens, 1979. John G. Hanhardt Film and Video Archive, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 106.  See, among others, Julia Bryan-­Wilson, ed., Robert Morris, October Files 15 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); and Jack W. Burnham, Hans Haacke: Wind and Water Sculpture, Tri-­Quarterly Supplement, no. 1 (Spring 1967): 1–­24. 107.  Brigham, statement (1979). 108.  Brigham, statement (1979). 109.  Brigham, statement (1979). 110.  Brigham, statement (1979). 111.  See Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “The Intertwining—­The Kiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 136. 112.  See Colin Williamson, Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 113.  László Moholy-­Nagy, cited in Erkki Huhtamo, “The Sky Is (Not) the Limit: Envisioning the Ultimate Public Media Display,” Journal of Visual Culture 8, no. 3 (December 2009): 242. 114.  Joan Brigham, “Steam,” in Centerbeam, ed. Otto Piene and Elizabeth Goldring (Cambridge, MA: Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1980), 69. 115.  Sun & Sea (Marina) represented the national participation of Lithuania at the Biennale and was curated by Laura Pietroiusti. 116.  Hito Steyerl addresses digital space in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013). CHAPTER FIVE

1.  Carl Gustav Jung, “The Psychic Nature of Alchemical Work” (1952), in Psychology and Alchemy, vol. 12 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 245.

2.  See Diana Thater in conversation with Carol Reese, in Diana Thater: Delphine, exh. cat. (Vienna: Secession, 2000), esp. 25. 3.  See chapter 11 for a discussion of Irwin’s work. 4.  For a cultural history of phantasmagoria, see Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-­ first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). For a treatment of phantasmagoria within a history of darkness in the arts, see Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). On the relevance of phantasmagoria to contemporary art practices, see Elcott, “The Phantasmagoric Dispositif: An Assembly of Bodies and Images in Real Time and Space,” Grey Room, no. 62 (Winter 2016), 42–­71. 5.  For a history of phantasmagoria as a filmic archaeology, see, among others, Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadows: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000). For a philosophical treatment of the magic lantern’s phantasmagoria, see Stephan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013). 6.  Thater’s statement is cited in Timothy Martin’s informed essay on her work, “What Cyan Said to Magenta about Yellow,” in Diana Thater: China, exh. cat. (Chicago: Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago; Thiers: Le Creux de l’enfer, Centre d’art contemporaine, 1994–­95), 56. 7.  The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), s.v. “projection.” 8.  Shorter OED, s.v. “projection.” 9.  See Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 108. 10.  Lynne Cooke, “knots + surfaces: A Gnosis,” in Diana Thater: knots + surfaces, exh. cat. (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 2002), 33 and 45. See also Cooke, “Diana Thater: On Location,” Parkett, no. 56 (1999), 177–­82. 11.  Liz Kotz, “Video Projection: The Space between Screens,” in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 101–­15. 12.  For an overview, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-­Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (New York: Norton, 1974), esp. 349–­57. This subject is explored in chapter 2 of the present book. 13.  For a useful history of the development of projection in psychoanalysis, see André Green, On Private Madness (London: Karnac Book, 2007). 14.  Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, 349. 15.  See Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (London: Karnac Books, 1973). 16.  On the “projective screen,” see Green, On Private Madness, esp. 84–­103. 17.  Jung, “Psychic Nature,” 245. 18.  Jung, “Psychic Nature,” 245. 19.  Jung, “Psychic Nature,” 245. 20.  See in particular chapters 2 and 3. 21.  Jung, “Psychic Nature,” 245. 22.  Karen Pinkus, Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 16. Pinkus includes

and Expression in the Arts,” in The Language of Art History, ed. Salim Kernal and Ivan Gaskell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 51–­66. For a helpful discussion of this notion of projection, see Ken Wilder, “Projective Art and the ‘Staging’ of Empathic Projection,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 5, nos. 1–­2 (2016): 125–­40. 37.  Wollheim, “Correspondence,” 56. 38.  Wollheim, “Correspondence,” 59. 39.  On Fisher, see, among others, Scott MacDonald, “Morgan Fisher: Film on Film,” Cinema Journal 28, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 13–­27; Thom Andersen: “Pebbles Left on a Beach: The Films of Morgan Fisher,” Cinema Scope (Spring 1989): 37–­43; Sabine Folie and Susanne Titz, eds., Morgan Fisher: Two Exhibitions/Writings, 2 vols., exh. cat. (Vienna: Generali Foundation; Mönchengladbach: Museum Abteiberg; Cologne: Walther König, 2012); and Joana Pimenta, “Serial Chance: Inserts and Intruders,” Millenium Film Journal, no. 60 (Fall 2014): 72–­79. 40.  Laura Mulvey, “Morgan Fisher: Films on Projection and the Projectors,” in Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (London: Reaktion, 2019), 180–­93. 41.  Diana Thater, “Hey—­Survey This,” in Diana Thater: Keep the Faith, ed. Barbara Engelbach and Wulf Herzogenrath, exh. cat. (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen; Siegen: Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, 2004), 35. 42.  See, among others, Wulf Herzogenrath, “The Viewer in Infinite Space: Comments on Diana Thater’s Notion of Space,” in Engelbach and Herzogenrath, Thater: Keep the Faith, 8–­17. 43. Warner, Phantasmagoria, 142. 44.  Martin, “What Cyan Said,” 47. 45.  See Cooke, “knots + surfaces,” esp. 48–­50. 46.  For a treatment of the depth of surface and of materiality in art, see Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 47.  I have treated this aspect of the genealogy of cinema in Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2003). CHAPTER SIX

1.  August Schmarsow, “The Essence of Architectural Creation” (1893), in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–­1893, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 289. 2.  The Nameless Spectacle was conceived and exhibited with these dimensions as part of the monographic exhibition This Unknown Spectacle, devoted to the work of Jesper Just, on view October 21, 2011—­February 5, 2012, at MAC/VAL, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-­de-­Marne, France. 3.  See chapter 2 for a treatment of Einfühlung as a form of empathy with space and also of “empathic projection,” a term that art historian Michael Fried borrows from the philosopher Stanley Cavell. See Fried, Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), in particular the chapter “The Laying Bare of Empathic Projection,” 205–­15. In this view of empathic projection, the process is most evident in works that lay bare their own projective mechanism.

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art in her cultural history of alchemy and, ambivalently debating dematerialization, points to modern representations of its paradigm, particularly in the Italian movement of Arte Povera or the processes of flux and sedimentation in the work of Robert Smithson. Here, in making a move away from dematerialization, I am proposing to extend the discourse of material transmutation to the art of projection. 23. Pinkus, Alchemical Mercury, 65. 24.  William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 118. 25.  For an introduction to a political philosophy of things, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 26.  On this subject, discussed earlier in the book, see, among others, Mary Ann Doane, “The Location of the Image: Cinematic Projection and Scale in Modernity,” in Art of Projection, ed. Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 151–­66; and Matthew Noble-­Olsen, “Melancholy Projection,” Discourse 38, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 390–­413. 27.  I am synthesizing aspects of projection discussed in chapters 1, 2, and 3 that can be useful in the case studies that follow, concerning artistic uses of the projective mode. On the notion of “cultural technique,” see Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 28.  Psychoanalytic film theory is a vast field of study, shaped in particular by the meeting of psychoanalysis with poststructuralist critical theory, Marxism, and feminist theory. For a survey regarding apparatus theory in the specific, see Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). For a discussion of Lacanian film theory, see Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,” in Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (London: Verso, 1994), 15–­38. 29.  Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14. 30.  See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 31.  Laplanche and Pontalis acknowledge in The Language of Psychoanalysis that analytic projection contains “a sense comparable to the cinematographic one: the subject sends out into the external world an image of something that exists in him in unconscious ways” (354). 32.  See Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 8. 33.  See, among other works, Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, no. 27 (1946), 99–­110. 34.  Victor Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933): 519–­57. 35.  D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-­Me Possession,” International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis 34, no. 2 (1953): 89–­97. 36.  Richard Wollheim, “Correspondence, Projective Properties,

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4.  On the different meanings of air, and for an atmospheric reading of painting, see Georges Didi-­Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (December 2003): 275–­89. 5.  Robert Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 119. 6.  Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 7.  For a more extensive treatment of the history of modern, mobilized space, see, among others, Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002); Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museum, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). 8.  Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), 4. 9.  John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 4. 10.  Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 6. 11.  See, among other works, Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All-­Embracing” View, exh. cat. (London: Trefoil/Barbican Art Gallery, 1988); and Silvia Bordini, Storia del panorama: La visione totale nella pittura del XIX secolo (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1984). 12.  Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), esp. 46–­54. 13.  “Die neuesten Panoramen,” De Natuur (1900), 257–­58, as cited in Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 177. 14.  See Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, esp. 6–­13. 15.  In arguing that the screen performs an environmental operation, and challenging a narrow interpretation of its geometry, I specifically respond to claims put forth in Lev Manovich, “The Screen and the User,” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 94–­115. 16.  See Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, 40–­46. 17.  The topic of the moving panorama was discussed in an interview with the artist in New York on September 16, 2011. Just has generously shared his artistic process with me on several occasions. 18.  “Die neuesten Panoramen,” as cited in Oettermann, Panorama, 179. 19.  For a treatment of scale in film theory, see Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-­up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” Differences 14, no. 3 (2003): 89–­111. 20.  Just’s gesture in some ways also recalls an iconic scene in Ross

McElwee’s documentary film Bright Leaves (2003), in which the film historian Vlada Petric demands that the filmmaker get into a wheelchair. Petric then wheels him around, in order to make him experience cinematic motion. 21.  Kaja Silverman, “Suture” (excerpts), in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 220. 22.  See Patrick Amsellem, “Geographies of Tenderness,” in Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions, exh. cat. (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2008), 27–­50. 23.  Jesper Just explains the cultural references that transpire in these works in Caroline Corbetta, “Cose d’artista: Jesper Just,” an article based on an interview with the artist in the magazine Il Sole 24 Ore, November 27, 2010, 18–­19. 24.  Although conceived in the extremely large format discussed, the screens have been adapted to the architecture of the gallery site for subsequent exhibitions. A reduced scale, for instance, at James Cohan in New York in 2012, created a more intimate feeling for the spectator, who was sandwiched between the still-­large screens of the mareoramic display. 25.  On the urban screen, see, among others, Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer, eds., Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009); Nanna Verhoeff, “Screens in the City,” in Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship, ed. Dominique Chateau and José Moure (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 125–­39; and Chris Berry, Janet Harbord, and Rachel Moore, eds., Public Space, Media Space (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 26.  See Swagato Chakravorty’s introduction to “Spaces of Spectatorship: Architectures of the Projected Image,” in Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 1, no. 2 (March 2016), accessed April 25, 2018, http://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2016/03/spaces-­of-­ spectatorship-­architectures-­of-­the-­projected-­image/. 27.  For a critical reading of the ambient, see Paul Roquet, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and Seth Kim-­Cohen, Against Ambience and Other Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 28.  When this work was commissioned by Paris’s Palais de Tokyo for their expansive subterranean gallery space, Just began to research the exhibition hall, which dates from Paris’s 1937 world’s fair. The 2015 projection of Servitudes in New York’s Times Square was part of Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance. Servitudes was installed on semitransparent screen fabric in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 15–­August 11, 2019. 29.  Corporealités was on view at Perrotin, New York, January14–­ February 15, 2020. 30.  We should also recall here that, following the bioelectromagnetic experiments of Luigi Galvani (1737–­98), the French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–­75) did electrophysiological research that also resonates with Just’s installation. He stimulated the faces of his patients with electrical probes in order to trigger muscular response and demonstrate the role that muscles play in conveying different emotional states. Using a camera to describe his findings and build his theory of affect, he recorded the resulting facial expressions acted out by his subjects and enacted upon them. Duchenne’s method

CHAPTER SEVEN

1.  Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), 32. 2.  For the inception of this extended theoretical treatment of the screen, especially concerned with surface materiality, see Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 3.  Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995), 10–­11. 4.  “The Sense of Space: Gloria Moure in conversation with Cristina Iglesias,” in Cristina Iglesias, ed. Gloria Moure, exh. cat. (Milan: Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro; Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009), 126. 5.  On the topophilic imagination of Iglesias’s work, see Richard A. Etlin, “‘Lost in the Chaos’: On the Poetics of Becoming,” in Cristina Iglesias, ed. Iwona Blazwick, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 20_21 Collection, 2002), 201–­50. 6.  See, among others, Barragán: The Complete Works (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003). The luminous environments created by Barragán inspired the artist James Casebere to build table-­ size models of his works of architecture and to photograph them in close-­up compositions that closely “project” their atmospheres. The exhibition of these photographs at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, January 27–­March 11, 2017, was significantly titled Emotional Architecture. The term references how Barragán and the artist Mathias Goéritz defined their style of modernism in a manifesto published in 1954. 7.  Nancy Princenthal, “Screen Memories,” in Cristina Iglesias, ed. Carmen Giménez, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 20. 8.  To enhance this sense of visual and spectatorial mobility, Iglesias makes films, significantly titled Guided Tour, that create moving records of the motion inherent in her work. This quality of movement also emerges in the film Memoria desordenada (Disorderly Memory, 1993), produced by Iglesias and Caterina Borelli, and directed by Borelli. 9.  Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 91 (translation modified slightly, from the original French).

10.  This has been changing rapidly as film theory expands its range toward art and media, as shown in this study and as reflected in the scholarly references cited throughout the book, especially in chapter 4. For a recent work of film studies that acknowledges screen format, see Ariel Rogers, On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926–­1942 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 11.  Moure and Iglesias, “Sense of Space,” 153. 12.  Ulrich Loock, “Places of Transition,” in Cristina Iglesias, exh. cat. (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1991), 10–­11. 13.  On this subject, discussed in chapter 4, see Erkki Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archeology of the Screen,” ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image 7 (2004): 31–­82. 14.  See Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), esp. 46–­54. 15.  For an interesting architectural reading of the function of mashrabiy’ya, see Bechir Kenzari and Yasser Elsheshtawy, “The Ambiguous Veil: On Transparency, the Mashrabiy’ya, and Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 56, no. 4 (2003): 17–­25. 16.  This issue is culturally complex, for creating a curtained space is a subtle phenomenon, which contains the aspects outlined but can also fall into gender segregation. A full discussion of this complexity, which I wish to acknowledge, would, however, go beyond the scope of this chapter. For the purpose of the argument made here against transparency and in favor of an atmosphere of screening, it is important to illuminate a model of the screen that is not fully Western, not entirely associated with the window or a transparent glass surface but rather with the kind of atmospheric filtering and protective ambiance provided by the Moorish screen. 17.  I borrow the term from Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 18.  On the subject of the use of the screen in sacred spaces, see Sarah Montross, Screens: Virtual Material, ed. Kristin Swan, exh. cat. (Lincoln, MA: deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2017). I am indebted to her for this topic of discussion. 19.  Sharon E. J. Gerstel, ed., Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical, Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives on Religious Screens, East and West (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2006), 2. 20.  Jacqueline E. Jung, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–­1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2. See also Jung, “Beyond the Barrier: The Unifying Role of the Choir Screen in Gothic Churches,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (December 2000): 622–­57. 21.  See Cristina Iglesias, Tres Aguas (London: Artangel; Madrid: Turner, 2015), with an introduction by James Lingwood and essays by Beatriz Colomina and Marina Warner. 22.  This was part of Iglesias’s exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, January 9–­February 10, 2018. 23.  On this aspect, see Michael Newman, “Imprint and Rhizome in the Work of Cristina Iglesias,” in Blazwick, Cristina Iglesias, 121–­69. 24.  In 1988 Helen Frankenthaler made a three-­panel, two-­sided folding screen titled Gateway 8/12, using bronze and intaglio prints. In 1986 Ed Ruscha made the five-­panel folding screen Remember and For-

315 N OT ES TO PAG ES 19 4–210

was transformed by Charcot, his most famous student, and his photographic archive was used in turn by Charles Darwin to illustrate his groundbreaking work The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animal (1872). In an effort to locate the actual place of an emotion—­in muscular tissue and the apparatus of its movement—­this kind of scientific research engineered a mechanics of affect that, by way of photography, accessed the terrain of the visual arts. 31.  On scale in film, see Mary Ann Doane, “Scale and the Negotiation of ‘Real’ and ‘Unreal’ Space in the Cinema,” in Realism and the Audiovisual Media, ed. Lúcia Nagib and Cecília Mello (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 68–­81. 32.  For a treatment of immersive viewing that traces its different historical paths, see Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine. 33.  See Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

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get, with lacquered wood in relief. See Ursula Helman, “The Folding Screen,” Bomb, no. 32 (Summer 1990): 88–­93. 25.  See Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004). 26.  Kenzari and Elsheshtawy, “Ambiguous Veil,” 18. 27.  See, for example, Carrie Asman, “Ornament and Motion: Science and Art in Gottfried Semper’s Theory of Adornment,” in Herzog & De Meuron: Natural History, ed. Philip Ursprung, exh. cat. (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2002), 385–­97. 28.  For a history of the genealogy of ornament, which recasts its function in modern architecture, see Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 29.  Moure and Iglesias, “Sense of Space,” 150. 30.  Patricia Falguières, “The Figure in the Carpet,” in Cristina Iglesias, exh. cat. (Nîmes: Carré d’Art/Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes; Arles: Actes Sud, 2000), 29–­48. CHAPTER EIGHT

1.  Theodor Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure” (1905), in Aesthetic Theories: Studies in the Philosophy of Art, ed. Karl Aschenbrenner and Arnold Isenberg (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1965), 405. 2.  Chantal Akerman, unpublished text for an unrealized work titled Of the Middle East (1998), 4. I am grateful to Chantal for offering me this text, and for the numerous conversations that enlightened her work for me over the many years of our friendship. 3.  In conjunction with the first major European solo exhibition of her gallery films, a publication was produced, Chantal Akerman: Too Far, Too Close, ed. Dieter Roelstraete, exh. cat. (Antwerp: Ludion/M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, 2012), in which a previous version of this text appears, titled “Projection: On Akerman’s Screen, from Cinema to the Art Gallery,” 15–­27. See also Griselda Pollock, “Chantal Akerman: Moving between Cinema and Installation,” in Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film, ed. Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 227–­48. 4.  For an introduction to the world of her films, see Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts, eds., Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook (London: A Nos Amours, 2019). See also Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Veronica Pravadelli, Performance, Rewriting, Identity: Chantal Akerman’s Postmodern Cinema (Turin: Otto, 2000); Marion Schmid, Chantal Akerman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); “On Chantal Akerman,” special 100th issue, ed. Patricia White, Camera Obscura 34, no. 1 (Spring 2019); and Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson, eds., Chantal Akerman: Afterlives (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019), to which I contributed the essay “In Memory of Chantal Akerman: Passages of Time and Space,” 7–­10. 5.  See, among others, Chantal Akerman: Autoportrait en cineaste, exh. cat. (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma and Centre Pompidou, 2004); and Terrie Sultan, ed., Chantal Akerman: Moving through Time and Space,

exh. cat. (Houston, TX: Blaffer Gallery/Art Museum of the University of Houston, 2008). 6.  Both of these films were shot by Akerman’s longtime collaborator Babette Mangolte, who was also the cinematographer of the celebrated Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). 7.  See Dominique Païni, “On Les Rendez-­vous d’Anna and Jeanne Dielmann,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 8, nos. 1–­2 (September 2019): 119–­22. This special issue of MIRA was entirely devoted to Akerman, and edited by Michael Mazière and Lucy Reynolds. 8.  This observation on the relation of panoramic painting to the cinematic screen reprises and expands upon a topic discussed in chapter 6, as well as in Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002). 9.  See chapter 2 for a treatment of Einfühlung as a form of empathy with space, originating in Theodor Lipps’s work, and of “empathic projection,” a term that art historian Michael Fried borrows from the philosopher Stanley Cavell. See Fried, Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), in particular the chapter “The Laying Bare of Empathic Projection,” 205–­15. 10.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 170. 11.  Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 172. 12.  Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 172. 13.  For an extended treatment of surface materiality, see Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 14.  The term “slow cinema” has come to characterize an observational, durational mode of filmmaking that enhances nonaction in minimalist terms. On Akerman’s cinephilia, see Dominique Païni, “Chantal Akerman,” in Chantal Akerman, file note # 32, published to accompany the exhibition of her work at the Camden Arts Centre, London, 2008. 15.  Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952); Balázs, Early Film Theory: “Visible Man” and “The Spirit of Film,” ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010). On the close-­up, see Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-­up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” Differences 14, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 89–­111. 16.  See chapter 3 for more treatment of the work of Balázs and Epstein as well as a discussion of Stimmung. 17.  Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907–­1939, vol. 1, 1907–­1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 237, 239. See also Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, eds., Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). 18.  See Erkki Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archeology of the Screen,” ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image 7 (2004): 31–­82. 19.  For a reading of Akerman’s work in terms of its revisitation of Jewish sites and forms of wandering, see in particular Janet Bergstrom, “Invented Memories,” and Ivone Margulies, “Echo and Voice in Meetings with Anna,” in Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman, ed. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 94–­116 and 59–­76, respectively.

CHAPTER NINE

1.  Robert Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (September 1971): 55, reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 2.  See chapter 1 for a treatment of ambiance and projection, and chapter 3 for a discussion of sympathy theory. These topics, discussed in other artists’ work, are here reprised for exploring the apparatus of cine-­projection in its materiality as an environment. 3.  For a survey of the debates on materiality, see “A Questionnaire

on Materialisms: 41 Responses,” special issue, October, no. 155 (Winter 2016), to which I contributed an entry. 4.  For an introduction to Rosa Barba’s work, see Chiara Parisi and Andrea Villani, eds., Rosa Barba: White Is an Image, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011); Mirjam Varadinis and Solveig Øvstebø, eds., Rosa Barba: Time as Perspective, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013); and Sergio Edelsztein and Hilke Wagner, eds., Rosa Barba: In Conversation With (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2011). 5.  On this aspect of Barba’s work, see Adeena Mey, “Art contemporain et paracinéma: Rosa Barba, Juliana Borinski et David Maljkovic,” in Décadrages, nos. 21–­22 (Winter 2012), 108–­21. 6.  Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Modern Library, 2000). The citations are the titles of chaps. 8, 9, 10, and 11 of Lindsay’s book. 7.  Screen-­based art, treated extensively in this book, is also addressed in, among others, Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013); Andrew Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Tamara Trodd, ed., Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); and Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 8.  See Bruno, Surface, esp. chaps. 3, 4, and 5. 9.  See especially chapter 4 of this book. 10.  See László Moholy-­Nagy, Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), as discussed in chapter 4. Antonio Somaini provides a useful commentary in “Fotografia, cinema, montaggio: La ‘nuova visione’ di László Moholy-­ Nagy,” his introduction to the Italian edition, Pittura Fotografia Film, trans. Bruno Reichlin (Turin: Einaudi, 2010), ix–­lxi. 11.  See Sara Buoso, “A Material Discursivity of Light: An Investigation in Light of Rosa Barba’s Practice,” International Journal of Arts Theory and History 14, no. 1 (March 2019): 17–­25; and “Mirjam Varadinis and Solveig Øvstebø in Conversation with Rosa Barba,” in Varadinis and Øvstebø, Barba: Time as Perspective, 5–­36. 12.  Moholy-­Nagy’s kinetic sculpture Light-­Space Modulator, which was made into a film in 1930 (Ein Lichtspiel schwarz weiss grau), brought this idea to the fore by exploring the architecture of light in moving, projected form. As mentioned in chapter 1, light here is not the object of dematerialization but rather transforms—­modulates—­ sites in material experiments of projection. 13.  On the performance of projection, see Scott MacDonald, “Morgan Fisher: Film on Film,” Cinema Journal 28, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 13–­27; and Laura Mulvey, “Morgan Fisher: Films on Projection and the Projector” in After Images: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (London: Reaktion, 2019), 180–­93. On Fisher’s practice in general, see also Sabine Folie and Susanne Titz, eds., Morgan Fisher: Two Exhibitions/Writings, 2 vols., exh. cat. (Vienna: Generali Foundation; Mönchengladbach: Museum Abteiberg; Cologne: Walther König, 2012); Thom Andersen, “Pebbles Left on the Beach: The Films of Morgan Fisher,” Cinema Scope, no. 38 (Spring 1989), 37–­43; and Joana Pimenta, “Serial Chance: Inserts and Intruders,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 60 (Fall 2014), 72–­79.

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20.  The text was displayed on the wall of the exhibition and is published in Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est,” exh. cat (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1995), 17–­18. This compelling exhibition originated at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and was on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, January 18–­April 30, 1995; the Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 10–­November 26, 1995; and the Jewish Museum, New York, February 23–­May 27, 1997. 21.  The term, discussed earlier in the book, is borrowed from Ben Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” Emotion, Space, and Society, no. 2 (2009), 77–­81. 22.  As discussed earlier in the book, I borrow this term from Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Rubric, no. 1 (2010), 2–­14. 23.  See Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 117–­26. 24.  See chapters 2 and 3 for an articulation of this subject. 25.  See, among other works, Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, no. 27 (1946), 99–­110. See Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (London: Karnac Books, 1973). For a development of projective identification, see Wilfred Bion, Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1984). 26.  See D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-­Me Possession,” International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis 34, no. 2 (1953): 89–­97. 27.  André Green, On Private Madness (London: Karnac Books, 1997), 94. 28.  See Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–­1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). For an overview of the history of Einfühlung, see, among others, Juliet Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (March 2006): 139–­57; and Andrea Pinotti, Empatia: Storia di un’idea da Platone al postumano (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 2011). 29.  See Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure.” See also Theodor Lipps, “Aesthetische Einfühlung,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 22 (1900). 30.  See Ewa Lajer-­Burcharth, “Unbelonging Interior: Chantal Akerman’s Là-­bas,” in Interiors and Interiority, ed. Lajer-­Burcharth and Beate Söntgen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 435–­55. 31. Akerman, My Mother Laughs, trans. Corina Copp (Brooklyn, NY: Song Cave, 2019). 32.  Akerman, unpublished text for Of the Middle East, 4. 33.  Now, her last installation, was shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

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14.  This work originated in a live performance of the same title presented by Barba in collaboration with the percussionist Chad Taylor at MoMA PS1, in New York, in the spring of 2016. It is a continuation of the White Museum series, introduced in 2010, which I analyze later in this text. Blind Volumes was later installed in an adapted indoor version at Mälmo Konstall in Sweden, on view February 18–­May 14, 2017. 15.  Chad Taylor returned as percussionist, joining Barba performing on cello, in In a Perpetual Now of Instantaneous Visibility at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, September 16 and 17, 2019. 16.  See Michael Fried, “The Laying Bare of Empathic Projection,” in Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 205–­15. See chapter 2 for further discussion of empathy theory. 17.  On vibrant materialism, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 18.  See Barba’s The Hidden Conference: About the Discontinuous History of Things We See and Don’t See (2010), filmed in 35mm at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin; The Hidden Conference: A Fractured Play (2011), filmed at the Capitoline Museum in Rome; and The Hidden Conference: About the Shelf and Mantel (2015), filmed at the Tate Modern in London. 19.  On this aspect of Barba’s work, see Gloria Sutton, “The Principle of Self-­Organization,” in Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space, ed. Henriette Huldisch, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schroeder, exh. cat. (Brooklyn, NY: Dancing Foxes Press; Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center; Troy, NY: EMPAC, 2016), 69–­89. 20.  Gilles Deleuze uses the expression “sheets of the past” in Cinema 2: The Time-­Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 99. 21.  Aggregate States of Matter was commissioned by V-­A-­C Foundation and Proyecto Amil, and shown in the exhibition Time, Forward!, curated by Omar Kholeif at V-­A-­C Foundation in Venice, Italy, May 11–­October 20, 2019. 22.  This installation was part of Ouvert la nuit—­Festival des lumières, a group show curated by Chiara Parisi at Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, December 16, 2017–­January 28, 2018. 23.  Solar Flux Recordings was on view at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía’s Palacio de Cristal, Parque del Retiro, Madrid, Spain, May 17–­August 27, 2017. 24.  See Erkki Huhtamo, “The Sky Is (Not) the Limit: Envisioning the Ultimate Public Media Display,” Journal of Visual Culture 8, no. 3 (December 2009): 329–­48. 25.  On the notion of “sky media,” see John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 26.  This version of the piece was shown in the exhibition The Color Out of Space, curated by Henriette Huldisch at the List Visual Arts Center of MIT, October 23, 2015–­January 3, 2016. Victoria Brook, who was the project curator at EMPAC, chronicles the work’s creation in “In the Imaginary Spaces,” in Huldisch, Kelly, and Schroeder, Barba: The Color Out of Space, 9–­24. 27.  See Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “The Intertwining—­The Kiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 136.

28.  On the painterly significance of this expression, see Georges Didi-­Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (December 2003): 280. 29.  On phantasmagoria and precinema, see Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 30.  For a notion of “airy films” in relation to spirit visions in art, see Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-­First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 31.  See James Nisbet, “Atmospheric Cameras and Ecological Light in the Landscape Photographs of Eadweard Muybridge,” Photography and Culture 6, no. 2 (2013): 131–­55; and Kenneth White, “Muybridge’s Enthalpy,” in “On Expanding Our Field of Vision: 3D Cinema and Beyond,” ed. Dan Adler, Janine Marchessault, and Sanja Obradovic, special issue, Public 24, no. 47 (Spring 2013): 95–­109. 32.  See Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Zone Books, 2008). 33.  Barba has been pursuing this project in the United Nations Buffer Zone of Cyprus since 2013. She encountered various obstacles and engaged in complex negotiations, and was able to finally achieve her goals with the help of DGAAP, the Directorate General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries at the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities. CHAPTER TEN

1.  Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Pegasus Foundation, 1983), 145. 2.  Il mondo magico (The Magical World) was the theme of the exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani for the Italian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. 3.  Along with Bachelard’s Water and Dreams, see his books on the other elements: The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 1988); and Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 2011). 4.  Recent philosophical tendencies have proposed rethinking materiality and materialism in many different ways, including reimagining an animate materiality and adopting a geological perspective. For an introduction to these discourses, see “A Questionnaire on Materialisms: 41 Responses,” special issue, October, no. 155 (Winter 2016): 3–­110, to which I contributed an entry. 5.  For an introduction to this field of contemporary material thinking, see David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); and Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer, eds., Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). On ecocriticism, see Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds., Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire (Minneapolis:

22.  Robert Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (September 1971): 55, reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 142. 23.  Reanimation was first performed in 2010 at MIT, where Jonas is professor emerita, and included in Documenta 13 in 2012 as an installation. It has been performed as part of Performa 13 in Brooklyn in 2013, at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan in 2014, at the US Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2015, at Tate Modern in 2018, and on the occasion of receiving the Kyoto Prize in 2019, among other venues. It was exhibited in installation form at the Museum of Modern Art in 2017–­18, and at the Tate Modern in 2018. On Joan Jonas’s work, see, among others, Joan Jonas: They Come to Us without a Word (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2015); Joan Simon, ed., In the Shadow of a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas (New York: Gregory R. Miller, 2015); and Johann-­Karl Schmidt and Andrea Jahn, eds., Joan Jonas: Performance Video Installation, 1968–­2000 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2001). 24.  The first iteration of Moving Off the Land was presented as the Kochi Biennale in India in 2016, then performed at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2018. A further iteration, Moving Off the Land II, was performed at Ocean Space, Chiesa di San Lorenzo, in Venice, Italy, in 2019. 25.  Philippe-­Alain Michaud, “Aquarium, ou le cinéma liquide,” in Exhibited Cinema: Exhibiting Artists’ Films, Video Art and Moving Image, ed. François Bovier and Adeena Mey (Dijon, France: Les Presses du reél, 2015), 57–­72. 26.  Michaud, “Aquarium,” 64 (translation mine). Going beyond early cinema, Michaud shows that many other aquatic projections ensued in film, furthering the relation between the screen of moving images and liquidity, including László Moholy-­Nagy’s Life of the Lobster (1935) and Roberto Rossellini’s Fantasia sottomarina (1940). 27.  For an introduction to Varda’s work, see Rebecca J. DeRoo, Agnès Varda between Film, Photography, and Art (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2017). 28.  In this film, Varda offers reflections in first-­person narration, telling the audience that if one cut deeply through a person one would find a landscape, and if one cut through her own body, one would find a seashore. 29.  Versions of Varda’s beach shacks, all made using composite prints of various of her films, were shown at Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris in 2006, the Lyon Biennale in 2009, and LACMA in Los Angeles in 2013, among other venues. See Agnès Varda, L’Île et Elle, exh. cat. (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain; Arles: Éditions Actes Sud, 2006). 30. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 12. 31. Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 6. 32.  On this site-­specific work in the context of the artist’s overall oeuvre, see Prima che sia notte: Giorgio Andreotta Calò (Berlin: Archive Books; Rome: MAXXI, 2014). MAXXI, Italy’s National Museum of 21st Century Arts, dedicated the book to Calò as the 2012 recipient of the Premio Italia Arte Contemporanea. 33.  In focusing on the “elements” of the act of screening by highlighting the “environ-­mental” architecture of these matters and proposing a liquid screen, this chapter continues to construct a haptic,

319 N OT ES TO PAG ES 2 52–263

University of Minnesota Press, 2015). On the environment and media, see John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For a geological approach, see Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 6.  For a contemporary reinterpretation of the vibrant entanglements and vital forces of things, including the dimension of affects, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 7.  For a summary treatment of this subject, explored in chapter 2, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-­Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (New York: Norton, 1974), esp. 349–­57. 8.  See C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, vol. 12 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1953), as discussed in chapter 5. 9.  An implicit reference is made here to Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 10.  David James Clarke, Water and Art (London: Reaktion, 2012). 11.  Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), part 4, “Water Flows and Flux.” 12.  See Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (London: Reaktion, 2016). 13.  Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 31. 14. Coccia, Life of Plants, 34. 15. Coccia, Life of Plants, 31. 16.  For an overview of the elemental qualities of water, see Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, esp. 43–­50. See also Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, eds., Thinking with Water (Montreal: McGill–­Queen’s University Press, 2013). 17.  See Bachelard, Water and Dreams. 18.  In emphasizing architectural and environmental elements of the act of screening, here as elsewhere in this book, I wish to question aspects of the long-­standing metaphorical association of the screen with the mirror and the window, which in film theory have produced an optical, restrictive perspectival vision of screen form. While positing the screen as an environmental medium, I wish to emphasize the kind of perspective that creates volumetric expansion, elemental “perturbation,” and perspectival breakthrough. For a summary of film theory’s definitions of screen as mirror and window, see Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 157–­60. 19.  For a treatment of the process of transduction and its relation to projection, see chapter 3. For a useful overview of the term, see Stefan Helmreich, “Transduction,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 222–­31. 20.  Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 2. 21.  See, among others, Luca Cerizza, “The Gallerist: Fabio Sargentini of L’Attico, Rome,” accessed November 11, 2016, http://www. art-­agenda.com/reviews/the-­gallerist-­fabio-­sargentini-­of-­l-­attico-­ rome/; and http://www.fabiosargentini.it.

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material basis for the act of projection, understood as an environment, and, more specifically, moves away from the opticality and transparency usually inherent in the association of window to screen in film theory. The exploration conducted here as it regards the latter point continues the trajectory of my previous book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 34.  For a technical history of precinema, see, among others, Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000); and Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), esp. chap. 2. 35.  Zoe Leonard has created a variety of architectural camera obscuras that play with different urban effects, depending on the outward space projected inward, at venues such as Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne in 2011, the Camden Arts Center in London in 2012, and Venice’s Palazzo Grassi in 2012. On her use of the camera obscura, see Karen Kelly and Barbara Schröder, eds., Zoe Leonard: Available Light (Brooklyn, NY: Dancing Foxes Press, 2014); and Elisabeth Lebovici, “From There to Back Again,” a text written on the occasion of an exhibition of Leonard’s work, including a camera obscura, at Murray Guy Gallery in New York in 2012. See also Bennett Simpson, ed., Zoe Leonard: Survey, exh. cat. (New York: Prestel, 2018). 36.  On the camera obscura as a mode of observation, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). In this landmark book, Crary argues that the camera obscura represented a metaphysics of interiority, inducing a categorical distinction between inside and outside, and that in the nineteenth century this optical model of vision collapsed as a new type of observer emerged in modernity. On the camera obscura as discarnate vision, see Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). For a critique of Crary’s perspective on the camera obscura, see Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 65–­71. I am arguing to revisit and revise this history, and to affirm a different material, environmental genealogy for the camera obscura, linking it to other forms of “atmospheric thinking” that I have explored in this book. 37.  On the nineteenth century’s black-­screen photographic techniques, in the context of a history of darkness in the arts, see Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), chap. 1. CHAPTER ELEVEN

1.  Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 97. 2.  Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: “Visible Man” and “The Spirit of Film,” ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 22. 3.  The first site-­determined installation Robert Irwin made at Dia was called Prologue: ×18³, April 12–­June 14, 1998. Excursus: Homage to the Square³ evolved from this first presentation and was installed September 13, 1998–­June 13, 1999.

4.  For an introduction to Irwin’s work, see Lawrence Weschler, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Robert Irwin: A Selection of Works 1958 to 1970, exh. cat. (New York: PaceWildenstein, 1998); Russell Ferguson, ed., Robert Irwin, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; New York: Rizzoli, 1993); Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries, exh. cat. (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2008); and Robert Irwin: Projects and Exhibitions 2012–­2013 (La Jolla, CA: Quint Gallery, 2014). On the perceptual effects of Irwin’s work in the context of Light and Space art, see Robin Clark, ed., Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 5.  Lynne Cooke, who was curator at Dia at the time, explains in the brochure that accompanied the two exhibitions of Irwin’s installations that in Prologue: ×18³ a “grid of fluorescent lights [was] positioned on the fabric walls on the north-­south axis,” creating a diffused bluish tone, while in Excursus: Homage to the Square³ “Irwin placed a pair of fluorescent lights on every scrim, illuminating each bay differently by means of a singular tonal and color combination. He also imprinted a barely discernible band of a slightly darker tone on every scrim at eye-­height and correspondingly modified the gels on the windows. In addition, he moved the point of entry to the center of the room by introducing a door midway along the west wall of the installation.” Dia Center for the Arts, brochure, accessed November 15, 2019, https://www.diaart.org/ media/_file/brochures/irwin-­robert-­1998-­99-­2.pdf. 6.  For an introduction to the notion of atmosphere, articulated more fully in chapters 1 and 3, see Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, trans. Sarah De Sanctis (London: Routledge, 2014); and Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: Ambiances, Atmospheres, and Sensory Experiences of Space, ed. Jean-­Paul Thibaud (New York: Routledge, 2017). 7.  Excursus: Homage to the Square3 was on view at Dia Beacon June 1, 2015–­November 26, 2018. 8.  In an interview with Irwin in The Beauty of Questions (1997), a documentary on his work directed by Leonard Feinstein, we learn that, in his youth, the artist worked for a few years as an assistant manager of the Leimert Theatre, an ornate film theater built in Los Angeles in 1932, where one of his tasks was to change the marquee. 9.  In the Chelsea installation, the light coming from the windows made one’s perception of light and darkness subject to moving toward or away from these apertures, while in Beacon the installation was top-­lit from skylights, which distributed the natural light more evenly within the partitioned spaces, each of which was differently colored by the fluorescents. 10.  Here, as elsewhere in this study, I argue for conceiving screen space as an environment, in contrast to a reductive view that considers the screen an optical device. On screen surface as an expansive site of passage, see Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 11.  For further treatment of the architecture of the screen, understood as an environmental medium, see chapter 4. On screen genealogy, in a media-­archeological sense, see Erkki Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archeology of the Screen,” ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image 7 (2004): 31–­82.

David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); and Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sapahvand, Christopher Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer, eds., Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 27.  Gene Youngblood, “The Artist as Ecologist,” in Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 348. 28.  Youngblood, “Artist as Ecologist,” 346. 29.  See, among others, Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere,” Daidalos 68 (1998), 18–­27; Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Subject Matter of Architecture,” in Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History, ed. Philip Ursprung, exh. cat. (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2002), 402–­4, reprinted in Böhme, Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 135–­40; Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, ed. and trans. A.-­C. Engels-­Schwarzpaul (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); and Christian Borch, ed., Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2014). 30.  Wigley, “Architecture of Atmosphere,” 20. 31.  Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects (Basel: Birkäuser, 2006), 4. In the epigraph to the book, Zumthor cites J. M. W. Turner writing to John Ruskin in 1844. 32. Zumthor, Atmospheres, 57. 33.  See Hubert Damisch, “Blotting Out Architecture? A Fable in Seven Parts,” Log, no. 1 (Fall 2003), 9–­26, a text that enlightens the pneumatic aspect of this architecture in relation to the use of clouds in art history. See also Mark B. N. Hansen, “Wearable Space,” Configurations 10, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 321–­70. 34.  For a reading of the multiform practice of this architectural studio, see Edward Dimendberg, Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 35.  Ho Tzu Nyen’s installation The Cloud of Unknowing was created to represent Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale, in 2011, and was shown at the Museo Diocesano in Venice. The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the latter half of the fourteenth century. 36.  See Eckard Schneider, ed., Olafur Eliasson: The Mediated Motion (Cologne: Walther König, 2002). Eliasson also discusses this work in “Atmospheres, Art, Architecture: A Conversation between Gernot Böhme, Christian Borch, Olafur Eliasson and Juhani Pallasmaa,” in Borch, Architectural Atmospheres, 90–­107. 37.  For this notion of ecophilosophy, see Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 38.  For further treatment of the nebular with respect to immersive art, see Burcu Dogramaci, “Water, Steam, Light: Artistic Materials of Immersion,” in Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media, ed. Dogramaci and Fabienne Liptay (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 21–­35. 39.  On the notion of Stimmung, treated in chapter 3, see, among others, David Wellbery, “Stimmung,” in New Formations, no. 93 (Summer 2018): 6–­45; Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word Stimmung, ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963); and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

321 N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 74 –2 8 5

12.  See Robert Irwin, Notes toward a Conditional Art, ed. Matthew Simms (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011). 13.  Robert Irwin, “Notes toward a Model,” in Robert Irwin, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977), 25. 14.  Brian Massumi, “The Thinking-­Feeling of What Happens: A Semblance of a Conversation,” in “How Is Research-­Creation?,” special issue, Inflexions 1, no. 1 (May 2008): 30, accessed March 7, 2016, www.inflexions.org. 15.  Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), 69. 16. Serres, Five Senses, 70. 17.  On Constable, Turner, and the representation of clouds in Romanticism, see Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), esp. chap. 1, “Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible,” 10–­35. For the elemental aspect of Turner’s paintings, see Jonathan Crary and Mark Francis, J. M. W. Turner: The Sun Is God, exh. cat. (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2000); and Inés Richter-­Musso and Ortrud Westheider, Turner and the Elements, exh. cat. (Munich: Hirmer, 2011). For a treatment of Turner in a reading that positions screen genealogy within the kind of atmospherics that pervades Romantic literature, landscape painting, and philosophy, see Antonio Somaini, “The Atmospheric Screen: Turner, Hazlitt, Ruskin,” in Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, ed. Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 159–­85. 18.  For a conceptual treatment of the atmospheric subject, see chapters 1, 2 and 3. For an introduction to atmosphere as a modern aesthetic notion, see Griffero, Atmospheres; and Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,” Thesis Eleven 36, no. 1 (1993), reprinted in Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 12–­ 24. On atmosphere as a modern scientific notion, see Craig Martin, “The Invention of Atmosphere,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, no. 52 (2015): 44–­54. On atmosphere and early photography, see James Nisbet, “Atmospheric Cameras and Ecological Light in the Landscape Photographs of Eadweard Muybridge,” Photography and Culture 6, no. 2 (2013): 131–­55. For a reading of atmosphere that resonates most closely with mine, in terms of the experience of ambient mixture, see Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). 19. Jacobus, Romantic Things, 20. 20.  Steven Connor, “On Nebular Modernism,” paper given at “Modernism and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Art Theory and Literary Theory,” Trinity College, Oxford, May 12, 2006, 2, accessed March 17, 2016, http://stevenconnor.com/haze.html. 21.  Connor, “On Nebular Modernism,” 4. 22.  Connor extends this reading of nebularity in The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion: 2010). 23.  Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 187. 24. Damisch, Theory of /Cloud/, 187. 25.  Damisch, “Our Sheet’s White Care,” chap. 5 of Theory of / Cloud/, 182–­231. The phrase is a translation of a line from the poem “Salut,” by Stéphane Mallarmé. 26.  For an introduction to this field of study, see, among others,

Index

Abajur (Meireles), 137 absorption, 20, 49, 51, 162, 261; contemplative, 194; critical and receptive, 77; empathetic, 184; of light, 128; magic of, 85; projection of light, 117; in self-­reflection, 221; spectator’s, 144–­45; of visual space, 174, 180 Abyss of Light (Thater), 161, 163–­64, 169, 172 Achromes (Fontana and Manzoni), 131; pleated textures of, 129 Adey, Peter, 50 admixture, 13, 50, 163 aesthetics, 8, 49, 64, 90, 212; of atmosphere, 11–­12, 280; of the cloud, 277–­78; of discontinuities, 180; ecosystems, 56; of Einfühlung, 84; exchange and communication, 31; German, 12, 79, 229; meteorological, 277, 280; and modernity, 82; nebular, 276–­77, 281; as opaque, 275; physiological, 82; political, reshaping of, 253–­54; tonal atmospherics, 57 aesthetic theory, 276 affective atmospheres, 57, 62, 145, 168, 228 affects, 186, 188; ambiance, 74, 114; as atmospheres, 79, 229; between and through bodies, 63, 102, 170; cultivated, 180; as form of projection, 62, 201; intermediated, 78; “in the air,” 63; as lived experience, 105; materialized, 262; mobilized, 180; negative, 63; as permeable, receptive, 78, 171; reflective, 102; as screen, 201; screening, 194; spatialized, 78, 91; as surrounding us, 90; transformative, 181, 228, 286; transitive, 66; transmission of, 11, 78, 102, 171, 229 affect theory, 76. See also affects After ALife Ahead (Huyghe), 55–­56 Agamben, Giorgio, 169 agential realism, 169

Aggregate States of Matter (Barba), 243, 318n21 air, 12, 19, 23, 34, 44–­47, 49, 58, 61, 67, 73, 82, 104, 106, 110, 135, 178, 181, 245, 252–­53, 285, 297n44; ambiance, 64, 206; clouding of, 247; connections, as vehicle to, 55; as ecosystem, 55; Greek atomists, 25; haptic qualities, 24; imaginary breeze, 53; and light, 152, 280–­81, 283; as medium, 25–­27, 30, 50, 57, 92–­93, 105; and Newton, 25; and perturbations, 247; projective space, 154; quality and character of medium, 24; as situational mix, of live forms, 30; and rain, 53; spatialized feelings, diffuse tonality of, 51; as temporality, rhythm of, 53; works of art, pervading of, 93. See also “in the air” aisthesis, 9, 11, 84, 106 Akerman, Chantal, 115, 285, 316n2, 316n6; affect quality of, 226; ambiance, 226, 231; ambient cinema of, 16, 218, 220; analytic detachment, distant intimacy, 229–­30; architecture of atmosphere, 221–­22; architecture of displacement, 220; boundaries, transgressing of, 222; “dooring,” 218, 222; Einfühlung (empathy theory), 229; empathetic atmosphere, 222, 224, 229–­30; environmentality of projection, 222–­23; fabric of screen as porous, 218; face as transformative landscape, 220–­21; film-­based installation art, 217; “in the air,” 222; Jewish diasporic geography, 224; Kleinian projection, object relations, 228; live performance, 217; pneumatic atmosphere, 221; projection and relational environment, 222–­25; projective movements of diaspora and migration, 222, 224, 230; projective screen, 228; screen as boundary, 224, 227; screen as transitional

site of passage, 218–­19, 222, 226, 229–­30; scrims, use of, 227–­28; siting, 226; surface of things, 221 Alaya (Dorsky), 54 Albers, Josef, 269–­71 Alberti, Leon Battista, 1, 37 alchemy, 21, 93–­94, 173; alchemic thinking, 167; and projection, 164–­71, 175; psychic projection, 166, 252; variants, problem of, 167–­68 Alemani, Cecilia, 318n2 Alhambra, 213 Allan, David, 3 Alÿs, Francis, 29 ambiance, 11, 19, 23, 32, 37, 41, 54, 56, 62, 73–­ 74, 85, 111, 116, 129, 200, 226, 231; affective transmission, 65; as ambulatory concept, 109; and atmosphere, 46, 51; atmospheric thinking, 58; as ecology of interrelationality, 16; filmic projection, 26, 133; genealogy, and atmospheres of projection, 49; and immersion, 112–­13; and materiality, 49; mediation, as form of, 58; and medium, 25–­26, 31, 58, 93; and milieu, 25, 45, 58; of modernity, 26, 47; of projection, 47, 53, 59, 63–­64, 82; as projective “air,” 64; and screen, 124; semantics of, 44, 46–­47; as term, 25, 44, 50, 299n117; transmission, energies of, 89–­90 ambient art, as portals, 197 ambient cinema, 16, 130, 220; cultural memory, relation to, 218 Ambiente cronotopico (Vigo), 131 Ambiente labirinto (Vigo), 132 ambient media, 54 ambient medium, 46; in lived space, 25; of projection, 87 ambient screens, 178, 201 ambient space, 25, 29, 50, 68–­69, 90, 130,

323

INDEX

324

ambient space (continued) 140, 150, 157, 165, 180, 199, 270, 273, 278; of projection, 131, 133; of screening, 135 Ambiente spaziale (Fontana and Scarpa), 130 Ambiente spaziale a luce nera (Fontana), 130 Ambiente spaziale: “Utopie” (Vigo and Fontana), 130 Ambienti spaziali (Spatial Environments) Fontana), 130 ambient transmission, 12–­13, 66, 70, 78, 89 Amerikka (Meireles), 136 Ampère, André-­Marie, 104–­5 Amsterdam (Netherlands), 253 Anderson, Ben, 57, 301n4 Andreotta Calò, Giorgio, 16, 251–­52, 261; act of projection, ambient, 263; acts of screening, of environmental nature, 257, 259, 264, 267; camera obscura, 263–­65; fluidity and flooding, 257, 259; light, environmental consistency of, 266; liquefaction and projection, association of, 259; liquidity, morphing into, 259; “poetics of space,” 253; projective process, emphasizing of, 264; screening space and elemental matters, 257; transformation of buildings into projective environments, 266–­67; water, use of, 253–­57 animal magnetism, 65–­68, 70, 98, 100. See also magnetism; mesmerism; nonhuman and human forms animate matter, 166, 252 animism, 65 Anthology/Courthouse (Putrih), 136 Anthology Film Archives, 136, 146 Anthology/Maya Deren (Putrih), 136 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 221 apparatus theory, 76, 169; Plato’s cave, 32 Arabic architecture, latticed screen as cultural technique, 207 archaeology: of contemporary, 23; cultural, 8, 10, 23, 25, 31, 41, 43–­44, 64, 167; environmental, 93, 235, 264; and environmentality, 106; filmic, 263; and geology, 56; of media, 15, 52, 64, 122–­23, 135–­37, 144, 174, 234, 246–­47, 266; screen’s invention, 15 architecture, 15, 28, 79, 164, 212, 215; architectural projection, 5, 22, 37, 150; and cinema, 126; film theatre architecture, history of, 144–­47; and hinges, 38–­39; milieu of, 285; and passageways, 38; and perspective, origin of, 5; and projection, 8, 20, 22, 32, 36, 38; psychology of, 81; and screen, 206. See also “dooring”; doors Architecture of Light (Mauri), 125 Área de Ilum 56m2 (Femenía), 156

Arendt, Hannah, 138 Aristotle, 26, 47 Arnheim, Rudolf, 36 Arp, Jean, 147 Arte Povera, 257, 312–­13n22 art galleries, 8, 14, 106, 133, 139, 144, 150, 157, 174, 185; as biotic sites, 56–­57; as haptic space, 188; melancholia, 302n58; moving images in, 47; as place of transport, 188 art history, 8, 31, 85, 124, 134, 270 art of projection, 27, 42; cartographic representation of, 36; to “envision,” 36; imagination, 36; light waves, 24 Ashes (McQueen), 102, 306n59 Ash, James, 58 Ata, Zeynep, 307n101 Atkins, Anna, 141 atmosphere, 31, 63, 67–­68, 89, 91, 108, 279; absorption, 51; as affect, 30, 57; agency of, 12; and ambiance, 46; in architecture, 50, 280; atmospheric attunements, 57, 62, 92; atmospheric environments, 117, 152, 172, 197; atmospheric imagination, 11, 44, 109; atmospheric landscape, 95, 180; atmospheric materiality, 198, 233–­35, 245–­ 46, 274; atmospheric permeability, 46, 112; as concept, 30, 46; and dooring, 49; as encounter, enveloping, 30; etymology of, 30; fluidity and hybridity, 50; as haptic, 57; medial nature of, 30; as “mixed body,” 109; modernity, as product of, 49–­50; as nebulous, 93; peripheral perception, 51; perturbations, 58; as processual medium, 49, 58; and projection, 19, 51, 58, 286; as quasi-­object or -­thing, 49–­50, 57, 95; relational modality, 30, 57; screening space, 51; as site of mediation, 50; spatial corporeality, shift in, 49–­50; spatialized feelings, 30, 57; state of becoming, 30; as term, 46, 58; and transduction, 286; as transformative modern notion, 276. See also Stimmung Atmospheres (Zumthor), 280 atmospheres of projection, 3, 13, 30, 41, 46, 49, 78, 87, 92, 106, 111, 287; sensory landscape of, 52 atmospheric cameras, 42–­43, 50, 52, 121–­22, 247 atmospherics, 8, 10, 15, 22, 26, 64, 101, 109, 123, 132, 145, 154, 172, 180, 183, 234, 246–­47, 276, 321n17; architectural, 30, 128; art of projection, 50, 93; in Blade Runner, 53–­54; as haptic, 181; photographic, 43; projective screen, 135; textural, 54; tonal, 57. See also Stimmung

atmospheric screening, 10, 15, 122–­23, 128, 135, 139, 152, 157, 162, 172, 205, 211, 234, 244–­46, 249–­50, 263; as actual environment, 160; cloudiness, 278; perceptive veil of, 205; as widespread in gallery installations, 150 atmospheric theaters, 145, 154; as immersive spaces, 144 atmospheric thinking, 10, 15, 19, 23, 27, 30–­31, 43–­44, 50, 52, 82, 276; ambiance, as perturbation, 58; camera obscura, 320n36; dispositif, 264–­65; floodabilities, 74; of fluidity, 70; of luminous transport, 109; nebular aesthetics, 276; projective imagination, 73–­74, 79, 89, 172–­73 atmospherology, 30, 49 Através (Meireles), 137 attunement, 12, 78, 87, 90, 92; atmospheric, 57, 62, 226; elemental, 58; and resonance, vibration, 79 avant-­garde cinema, 172 Aytac, Ekin, 307n101 Bachelard, Gaston, 252–­54, 263; material imagination, 251, 267 Baga, Trisha, 15, 143 Balázs, Béla, 19, 93, 221, 269 Ballad of a Soldier (Chukhrai), 126 Balsom, Erika, 113 Barad, Karen, agential realism, 169 Baran, Mehmet, 307n101 Barba, Rosa, 16, 238, 244, 247–­48, 285, 318n14, 318n33; architecture-­in-­motion, 239; art objects in dialogue, 240–­41; atmospheric materiality, 245–­46; atmospheric screening, 234, 249; celluloid film, qualities of, 233; cinema en plein air, 249; cine-­projection, understanding of, 236–­37, 239–­40; cultural memory, 242; genealogy of art history, 240; haptic use of screen, 235, 241; light, sculpting with, 234–­36; object-­related materialism, 240; performative form of projection, 237; projection, atmospheric materiality of, 233–­34; projection, as landscape, 243; projective imagination, 241–­42; projective materiality, 249; projective screen, as “white material,” 234; “sky media,” 245; surface space, as stretched and pushed, 241; surface tension of media, 235; temporality, unfolding of, 243; terrains and landscapes, attraction to, 243; white film screen, 237 Bardot, Brigitte, 112 Baroque art, 174 Barragán, Luis, 200, 205, 315n6

Cabane du cinéma (Varda), 261 cabinet of curiosities, 259–­61

Café de l’Aubette, 147 CaixaForum, 213 camera obscura, 33–­34, 74, 117, 170, 263, 266; as atmospheric site, 264, 320n36; and projection, 265 Canales, Jimena, 108 Canguilhem, Georges, 45 Capitoline Museum, 240 Capitol Theater, 145 Capri (Italy), 112 Caravaggio, 85 Carotaggio (Andreotta Calò), 253 Carrogis de Carmontelle, Louis, 183 cartography, 8, 20, 22, 164; cartographic projection, 36 Cartwright, Lisa, 76 Casebere, James, 200, 315n6 Casetti, Francesco, 295n8, 319n18 Casid, Jill, 74–­75, 170, 302n59 Cassettiera (Drawers) (Mauri), 126 Cavell, Stanley, 85–­86 Çelik, Elif, 307n101 celluloid, 52, 125, 133, 154, 221, 233–­35, 246, 248, 261, 270; as alchemic material, 168–­ 69; cellulose, as plant base, 267; indexical quality of, 247; material condition of medium, as light and fire, 267 celosías, 201, 205–­6, 213; jalousie screen, 200; as transitive structures, 207. See also mashrabiy’ya Cepheids, 247 Cessidra (Andreotta Calò), 253 Chapel for the Capuchinas Sacramentarias del Purismo, 205 Chaplin, Geraldine, 187 Charcot, Jean-­Martin, 66–­67, 314–­15n30 Charleton, Walter, 46 Chernobyl (Thater), 161, 163 Cherubini, Laura, 308n12 China, 190 China (Thater), 161, 163 chronophotography, 34, 45 Chukhari, Grigori, 126 cinema, 32, 94, 162, 180, 204, 206, 260; and architecture, 126; architecture of cinemas, 144–­47; as art of projection, 149–­50; as atmosphere of wonder, 173–­74; as atmospheric, 117; as black box, 146; cinematic ambiance, and atmospheric agency, 125; cinematic suture, and editing, 188; environmental archaeology, 264; environment-­cinema, 156; facial close-­ups, 194; as house of silence, 146; as an instrument, 72–­73; and modernity, 149; open-­air, 115–­17; and painting, 2;

pinhole projection, 263–­64; precinema, 16, 117, 122, 194, 246; postcinema, 122, 194; projective aspect of, 36; and psychoanalysis, 170–­71; public intimacy, 5, 157; rise of, 20–­21; and science, 96; slow cinema, 221, 316n14; sun, connection between, 116; and water, 260–­61; and weather, 52; “weather cinema,” 54; as “white museum,” 249. See also expanded cinema, film, projection Cinema a luce solida (Mauri), 125 Cinema Arlecchino, 130 Cinéma de L’Aubette, 147 cinematic projection: dispositif of, 32; and light, 36; shadows, casting of, 36 cinematography, 43; as milieu, 41 cine-­projection, 5, 19, 34, 38, 42, 50, 70, 73, 77, 83, 106, 108, 116–­17, 151, 154, 156, 172, 174, 178, 233, 236, 239–­40, 257, 259; ambiance of, and transduction, 39; architectural, as atmospheric surface space, 146; black box, 130; cartographic mapping, as origin of, 37; as cultural technique, 169; dispostif of, 237; and dooring, 39; as environment, 44; as form of passage, 39; haptic spaces of movement, 33; and hinging, 39; and hypnosis, 66; and light, 41; luminous passage, 205–­6; pervasive and transmitted light, as medium of, 39; projective materiality, 96–­97; and relationality, 72; solar atmospheric condition, 285; visual design of, 37. See also projection circumfusa, 46 Clarke, David, 253 Cleopatra’s Dream (Schifano), 126 climate, 11, 14, 25, 55, 92, 96, 115–­17, 223, 245, 288–­89, 297n44; as actual environment, 56; as “an air,” 46; in architecture, 58; art, collective formation of, 51; atmospheric works, 286; climate change, 300n136; cosmic fluidity, essence of, 110; cultural, 16, 110; melancholic, 246; perturbations, 118; political, 222; scientific interest in, 277; social, 285; of space, 41, 52, 57; sphere of affect, 57; and Stimmung, 95; transformation of an environment, 52; and weather, 51, 270. See also weather Clock, The (Marclay), 142 Cloud, The ( Jaar), 285 Cloudscape (Transsolar and Tetsuo Kondo Architects), 283 Cloud of Unknowing, The (Ho), 281–­82, 321n35 clouds, 4, 43, 47, 50, 79, 97, 154, 173, 276, 280, 286; art history, 3, 26, 49, 152, 281;

325 INDEX

Barzdžiukaité, Rugilé, 157 Battle Is Joined, The (Olivier), 34 Bauhaus, 147 Bauman, Zygmunt, 256 Bausch, Pina, 217 Bayrak, Sevince, 307n101 Beaches of Agnès, The (Varda), 261 Beauty (Eliasson), 114–­15 Beauty of Questions, The (Feinstein), 320n8 Bellour, Raymond, 66 Belting, Hans, 117 Bending to Earth (Barba), 239 Benjamin, Walter, 22–­23, 42, 181, 310n56; innervation, 82, 84, 304n104; flâneur, and empathy, 82; medium, concept of, 26; and modernity, 84 Bennett, Jane, 47, 100 Berlin Biennale, 263 Bernardi, Michele, 138 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 253 Between Science and Magic (Thater), 173–­74 biomechanics, 82 Bion, Wilfred, 76 black mirror: Claude glass, 64–­66; hypnotic capacity, 66; and mesmerism, 65; and unconscious, 66 Black Spiral (Split Screen) (Tambellini), 154 Blade Runner (Scott), rain as atmospheric agent in, 53 Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve), 53–­54 Blind Volumes (Barba), 238, 318n14 Blur Building (Diller Scofidio + Renfro), 281, 283 Boeri, Stefano, 212 Böhme, Gernot, 49–­50 Bord de mer (Varda), 261 Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) (Boeri), 212 Boulogne, Duchenne de, 314–­15n30 bounden (Hamilton), 136 Boyle, Robert, 46 Braid, James, vibratory theory, 66 Brennan, Teresa, 63 Breuer, Marcel, 264, 274, 276 Brigham, Joan, 15, 152 Bright Leaves (McElwee), 314n20 Broken Circle (Thater), 162 Brussels (Belgium), 219, 231 Brutalist architecture, 212, 274 Burgin, Victor, 87 Burri, Alberto, 129 Burton, Robert, 100 Buster’s Bedroom (Horn), 187

INDEX

326

clouds (continued) ectoplasmic, 174; projection, nebular atmosphere of, 282–­83, 285; screen of, 282; as signifier of change, 277; watching films, comparison to, 52 Coccia, Emanuele, 30, 63, 89, 110–­12, 254 Color Out of Space, The (Barba), 245–­46 Color Studies (Barba), 240 Coney Island at Night (Porter), 149–­50 connectivity, 12–­13, 64, 234 Connor, Steven, 49–­50, 70, 109, 276 Cono di luce (Cone of Light) (Gioli), 126 Conrad, Tony, 248 Constable, John, 276 contemporary art, 10, 14–­16, 19, 23, 25, 32, 106, 122, 147, 150, 253; ecologization of, 56 Contempt (Godard), 112 Continual Light Cylinder (Le Parc), 150 Cooke, Lynne, 165, 320n5 Copjec, Joan, 77–­78 Corporealités ( Just), 192–­95 Corse, Mary, 15, 39–­40, 128–­29 cosmology, 46, 68, 106, 111, 113, 154 Crary, Jonathan, 302n59, 320n36 creative geographies, 14 Cross Fade (Echakhch), 49 Crystal Palace, 260 Cubitt, Sean, 36–­37 cultural ambiance, 8, 11, 22, 64, 122, 178, 223, 286 cultural archaeology, 8, 10, 25, 31, 41, 64, 106, 167; energy movement, 43–­44; environmental aspect of, 23 cultural genealogy, 66, 118, 164 cultural vitalism, 89 Curated Conference, A (exhibition), 240–­41 Curtis, Robin, 81 Cyprus, 249, 285, 318n33 Dal tramonto all’alba (From Dusk to Dawn) (Andreotta Calò), 266 Damisch, Hubert, 32, 277–­78, 282 Danto, Arthur, 310n65 Darwin, Charles, 97, 314–­15n30 David Zwirner Gallery, 41, 298n95 De Anima (Aristotle), 47 Dean, Tacita, 133 De Bruyn, Eric C. H., 297n46 De Consolatione ad Marciam (Seneca), 138 Deleuze, Gilles, 220, 304n95, 318n20; transduction, 21 Delphine (Thater), 161, 163, 169, 174; animal life, exploration of, 162 Demain on déménage (Akerman), 231 Demir, Yüksel, 307n101 Depero, Fortunato, 125

Deren, Maya, 136 Descartes, René, 25 D’Est (From the East) (Akerman), 224 D’Est, au bord de la fiction (From the East, Bordering on Fiction) (Akerman), 225–­26 De Stijl, 147 de Young Museum, 213 Dia Beacon, 271, 273 Dia Center for the Arts, 269–­70 diaspora, 218; Jewish, 224 Dibutades, 1–­5, 7–­9, 14, 33–­34, 133, 135, 295n9; legacy of, 6 Didi-­Huberman, Georges, 53 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, 281 disegno, 2–­3, 5, 8–­9, 16 displacement, 178, 218, 220; projection, as elemental form of, 74, 169; psychological projection, as form of, 69; of sound, 68; spectatorial, 102 dispositif, 6, 14, 61, 63, 71, 73, 85, 138–­39, 142, 162, 171, 240, 259, 264; apparatus theory, 32–­33, 169; of empathic projection, 86; paranoid side of, 75; as processual, 74; of projection, 169, 233; projective, 183, 185; psychic projection, 170 Doane, Mary Ann, 74, 186 Documenta 11, 222 “dooring,” 29, 35, 39, 49, 199–­200, 218, 222, 270, 283; and objecthood, 101; and screening, 122 doors: as cultural techniques, 29, 38; folding space, 28–­29, 38; function of, 27–­28 Dorsky, Nathaniel, 54 Drawn by the Pulse (Barba), 247 Dreamlands (exhibition), 308n4 Dulac, Germaine, 95–­96; haptic visual theory, 97 Duras, Marguerite, 187 Dürer, Albrecht, 37 Dutch Golden Age, 128 DW 68 VEN MCASD 11 (Wheeler), 40–­41 Eastern Bloc, 225 Eberson, John, 145, 310n72 Eberty, Felix, 108, 117 Echakhch, Latifa, 49 ecocriticism, 31, 252 ecology, 11, 19, 58, 215, 267, 280, 301n164; of art, 31; ecological turn, 56; of the image, 190, 267; interactive, 31; as interrelated milieus, 11; of interrelationality, 16; of natural forms, 210; perceptual, 198; of projection, 251; of relationality, 286; technological, 27, visual culture, 31. See also environmentality

ecomaterialism, 8, 101 Edison, Thomas, 42 Einfühlung (empathy theory), 12, 16, 72, 80, 82, 97, 229, 304n98; aesthetics of, 84; as mimicry, 79; and reciprocity, 81; as spatial empathy, 90. See also empathy Eisenstein, Sergei, 125–­26; affect and spectatorial engagement, 84; Expressive Movement, 84 Elcott, Noam, 67, 162 electromagnetism, 13, 43–­44, 109, 194; as lived, 104–­5. See also energy elemental philosophy, 8, 31, 47, 252, 280 El Greco, 174 Eliasson, Olafur, 114–­15, 309n37; and nebularity, 282–­83; weather cinema of, 130 Elsheshtawy, Yasser, 211 EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center), 245 empathic projection, 16, 177, 180, 185, 193, 229, 240, 304n116; seam with the nonhuman, 85; with space, 183; transitional objects, 86–­87, 230 empathy, 59, 78, 186, 285; as atmospheric matter, 80; empathic transfer, 102; empathy theory, 72, 79; Expressive Movement, 84; film audience, as “pulsating” in unison, 84; kinesthetic idea of, 84; neural, 84–­85; mirror-­neurons, 84; nonhumans and humans, relational, 85–­86; openness, 82; projective, 85; and projection, 80, 82, 89; and screen, 139; as something that moves and resonates, 82; with space, 90, 180, 201; spatial construction, 81; and sympathy, 97; transport, as form of, 79–­80; as vitalist projection, 80. See also Einfühlung (empathy theory) encounter, 29, 30, 80, 82, 99, 117, 130, 201, 218, 249, 285; resonant experiences of, 87 energy, 11–­12, 50, 74, 97, 166, 194, 247, 252, 266; and ambiance, 68, 105; ambient light, 47; cultural, 10, 63; cultural archaeology, 43–­ 44; dynamism, as form of, 133; electrical, 39, 106; energy fields, 103, 105; energy flow, as theatrical, 67; energy transfers, 13, 66; energy waves, 43–­44; of felt space, 59; haptic transmission of, 68; life energy, 81–­82; light, as form of, 42, 64, 106, 108–­9; of light space, 149; magnetic, 24; matter-­ energy, 107, 167, 256, 261–­62; mechanical, 104; movement of, 43, 47, 90, 104, 106–­7; and ornament, 80; of potentiality, 190; of projection, 22, 41–­42, 47, 84, 106, 118, 128, 133, 145–­46, 154, 169; psychic, 72; receptive, 116; as relational medium, 15; solar energy,

Factory of the Sun (Steyerl), 157 Falguières, Patricia, 213 Fantasia sottomarina (Rossellini), 319n26 Faraday, Michael, 43 Feinstein, Leonard, 320n8 Femenía, Inma, 156 Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre (Akerman), 219–­21

film, 8, 185; and ambiance, 93; exhibition, birth of, 52; “expression of things,” 95; face and surface, textural history of, 221; “face of things,” 93, 221; filmic materiality, in zoological forms, 96; film theatre architecture, 144–­47; as flammable, fragile matter, 267; luminosity, 24; memory of, 257; montage, 32; as projection of the mind, 72; as projective space, 95; “shooting” as metaphor, 96. See also cinema Film (Dean), 133 Film Ambiente (Pirelli), 133 film and visual theory, 64, 89, 204, 221; and identification, 77; and spectatorship, 32 Film Guild Cinema, 145, 311n77, 311n78 filmic projection, 26, 32–­33, 66, 96, 133, 150, 226, 245; architectural and cartographic dimensions of, 36. See also cine-­projection filmic screen, 27, 93, 125, 129, 144, 147, 180, 220, 241, 243 filmic viewership, “architectural promenade,” 47 film noir, 221 film studies, apparatus theory, 32 Fisher, Morgan, 172, 237–­38 Filtri (Lo Savio), 128 Fioroni, Giosetta, 126 flaneur, and empathy, 82 flâneuse, 220 Flashlight Film Strip Projections (West), 154, 156 Flash Point (Timekeeper) (Sze), 141–­42 Flatlands 3D (Baga), 143 Flavin, Dan, 130, 134, 172, 309n32 Flicker, The (Conrad), 248 fluidity, 50, 127, 183, 235, 255, 257; as act of projection, 107; atmospheric, 10; cosmic, 110; and environmentality, 70; hybridity, 24; immersive, 110; of matter, 254; metaphor of, 65; of milieu, 78, 110; pliability, 46; processual, 253; relational connection, 25; sympathy, as form of, 70; transformative potential of, 110, 253–­54; of wetness, 283. See also liquidity Flusser, Vilém, 1, 31, 35, 136 Fontana, Lucio, 15, 129–­32, 309n37 Fontana + Vigo (exhibition), 131–­32 Forster, Thomas, 50 48 War Movies (Marclay), 142 foundational psychology, 84 Frampton, Hollis, 172, 217 Frankenthaler, Helen, 210, 315–­16n24 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 62, 69–­70, 80, 84, 165, 170; dream, as projection, 135; projection, theory of, 63, 74; screen memories, 228; unconscious phenomena, 66

Fried, Michael, 86, 240; empathic projection, 85; invention of absorption, 85 From the Other Side (Akerman), 115, 117, 222, 224, 285 Fu, Mi, 282 Fuga a 6 voces (Diptych) (Iglesias), 210 Galleria Michela Rizzo, 308n13 Gallese, Vittorio, 84–­85, 304n115 Galloway, Alexander R., 23–­24 Galvani, Luigi, 104–­5, 194, 314–­15n30 Gance, Abel, 185–­86 Garcia, Marie-­France, 186–­87 garden space, aesthetics of discontinuities, 180 Gassendi, Pierre, 46 Gateway 8/12 (Frankenthaler), 315–­16n24 Geiger, Moritz, 90 Germania (Haacke), 56 Gerstel, Sharon, 207 Gewand, and Wand, 211–­12 Gioli, Paolo, 127, 308n18; pinhole films, 126 Girodet-­Trioson, Anne-­Louis, 3 Giverny (France), 160 Godard, Jean-­Luc, 112 Goéritz, Mathias, 315n6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, elective affinities, 13 Gordon, Douglas, 85, 257 gorillagorillagorilla (Thater), 162 Graham, Dan, 172 Grainyté, Vaiva, 157 Grande bianco plastica (Large White Plastic) (Burri), 129 Green, André, 78, 135, 228 Griffero, Tonino, 30, 49 Grisi, Laura, 132–­33 Gropius, Walter, 147 Grosse Fatigue (Henrot), 142–­43 Groys, Boris, 39 Guattari, Félix, 21, 301n164; and ecology, 28 Guerin, José Luis, 7 Guerra, Michele, 85, 304n115 Guests (Wodiczko), 139 Guggenheim Museum, 41 Guided Tour (Iglesias), 315n8 Gülkaynak, Işik, 307n101 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 92 Gür, Gürden, 117, 307n101 Haacke, Hans, 56, 135, 152 Hadid, Zaha, 263 Haeckel, Ernst, 44 Hamilton, Ann, 15, 136, 297n37; screen fabric, 29

327 INDEX

as metaphor for projection, 115, 117; steam, as force of, 152; and sympathy, 99; of transduction, 103–­4, 106–­7, 296n4; transformation of, 110; transmission of, 13, 44, 84, 105–­6, 108. See also electromagnetism Enlightenment, 74, 302n59 environmental archaeology, 93, 235, 264 environmentality, 11, 22, 36, 62, 123, 136, 222, 261–­62, 297n46; and art, 233–­34; cultural and aesthetic imagination of, 109; as elemental thinking, 252, 263; and fluidity, 70; material forms of, 251; as material imagination, 201; in mediality, 106; as “pattern of relations between organisms,” 280; as reticular milieu, 31; and screening, 185; as site of intermixing, 14; social change, 34; as space of material transmission, 128; and sympathy, 98–­99. See also ecology environmental medium, 15, 122, 271, 279, 319n18, 320n11 environmental projection, 145, 207, 240, 256, 263, 285; empathy with space, 177 environmental transmission, 70, 78 Epstein, Jean, 41, 93, 95–­96, 221; photogénie, as term, 94 Esposito, Roberto, 24 Essays on Physiognomy (Lavater), 5 Euclid, 44 Evans, Cécile B., 263 Evans, Robin, 1, 5, 37–­39, 150, 295n9 event of a thread, the (Hamilton), 29, 297n37 Excursus: Homage to the Square (Irwin), 160, 269, 274, 278–­80, 320n3, 320n5; cinematic atmospheric setting of, 272; fogging out the space, 273; and light, 270–­71; scrim-­ walls, 270–­71, 273; square, potential of, 270; veil, of light, 270 expanded cinema, 148, 152, 172, 234 experimental film and video, 134, 172; ambient modality of, 54 Exposition Universelle Internationale, Stereorama at, 181–­82 Exposure Adjustment on a Sunset (Vierkant), 156 Expression of Emotions in Man and Animal, The (Darwin), 314–­15n30

INDEX

328

Hangzhou (China), 190 Hansen, Miriam Bratu, 82 hapticity, 152, 188, 221, 235–­36; celosías, 207; haptic atmospherics, 181; haptic ecologies, 24; and landscape, 192; materiality of, 241; and screening, 2, 122; of space, 41, 274; “tuning up,” 58 Harvard University, Psychological Laboratory, 72 Hauksbee, Francis, 70–­71 Haussmann, Georges-­Eugène, 178 haze, 30, 221, 247, 270, 283, 286; act of projection, 277; atmospheric screening, 152; density of, 246, 280; interference, phenomenon of, 276; opacity, and nebular aesthetics, 276; as perturbation, 277; and projection, 154; sensorial, 276–­77; as site of potentiality and processual space, 276 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 43, 79 Henrot, Camille, 15, 142–­43 Heraclitus, 254 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 79 Herzog & de Meuron, 213 Hidden Conference, The (Barba), 240 Hildebrand, Adolf von, 79 Hiller, Susan, 142, 310n64 Hill, Gary, 172 Hippocrates, 25 Hisakado, Tsuyoshi, 134 Hispanic-­Arabic decoration, 213 Holt, Nancy, 117 Holzknecht, Arnold, 138 Horn, Eva, 46 Horn, Rebecca, 187 Hotel Monterey (Akerman), 218 Ho, Tzu Nyen, 141, 281–­82, 321n35 House of Shadow Silence, The (Rotsztain), 311n77 Hudson River School, 271 Hufeland, Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich, 69 Huhtamo, Erkki, 52, 124, 181 Hume, David, 97, 99–­100 Huyghe, Pierre, 55–­56 hybridity, 30, 50, 194, 285; and fluidity, 24 hypnosis, 67; as magnetic transmission, 66; as term, 66 ICA Watershed, 161 If You See Something . . . (Wodiczko), 139 Iglesias, Cristina, 16, 315n8; and ambiance, 197, 199, 201–­2, 206–­7; and architecture, 206, 215; atmospheric screening, 205; atmospherics of, 204, 207, 210–­11; celosías (jalousies) of, 200–­201, 205–­7, 213; cine-­ projection, 205–­6; and dooring, 199–­200;

empathy, with space, 201; environmental projection and atmosphere, 207, 215; folding screen architecture, 210; grid figure and architectural tapestry, 213; interspaces of, 205–­6; latticed patterns, 207, 213, 215; material translucency, 205; Moorish window screen, 207; multiple planarity, 198; organic matter and natural forms, 198, 213; ornamentation, 210, 212–­13, 215; partitions as participatory, 201; screen as ambient architecture, 200, 202, 211; screening of space, 197, 199–­200; screen memories, 200; surface materiality, 199; tapestries of, 210–­11, 213; veiling space, 207, 210 Iles, Chrissie, 308n4 Il mondo magico (The Magical World) (exhibition), 251, 318n2 I Made a Circuit and then a Second Circuit (Barba), 241, 246 imaging, 1–­2, 62, 66, 160, 182, 190, 218, 220–­ 21, 253, 259; as luminiferous, 276; and materiality, 252 immersion: and ambiance, 111–­12, 184–­85; as aspect of projection, 111; atmospheric, 115; v. contemplation, 113; different forms of, 113; digital, 145; domestic space, 111; as form of habitation, 111; nebularity of, 270; perturbation, active process of, 112; reciprocal, 254; sensory envelopment, 113; as spatial awareness, 195; and transduction, 112 “in the air,” 22, 47, 128, 222, 288; affects, 63; as aria, 53. See also air influencing machine, 70–­71, 171, 302n59; as cinematic device, 72; as device of imaginative projection, 73 Ingold, Tim, 52, 81 innervation, 82, 84, 304n104 In Pursuit of Venus [infected] (Reihana), 195 Inside the Outset—­Evoking a Space of Passage (Barba), 249, 285 Institute of Contemporary Art, 281 interspace, 205–­6 Intercourses ( Just): absorption, 194; projective site, as magnified psychogeography, 191; scale, as geography, 195; as state of becoming, 190 International Cloud Atlas, 52 International Meteorological Society, “International Year of the Clouds,” 52 Interno/Esterno (Mauri), 126 intersubjectivity, 76; and projection, 69–­70 In the Mood for Love (Wong), 30 Invention of the Art of Drawing (Suvée), 3 Invention of the Art of Drawing, The (Schinkel), 4, 5

Invisible Cinema, 146, 311n79 iridescence, haptic qualities of, 24 Irwin, Robert, 16, 39–­40, 128–­29, 160, 269–­71, 273, 281, 283, 285, 320n3, 320n5, 320n8; atmosphere, embrace of, 279–­80; atmospheric sheets, 278; blurring and shrouding, effects of, 286; canvas, material of, 278; elemental philosophy, touch of, 280; environmental medium, surface of, 279; environment of atmospheric screening, 274; and haze, 277; light and air, as material construction, 280; nonrepresentational cloudiness, 278; opacity, and nebularity, 276; and screening, 279–­80; scrim, use of, 275–­76, 278–­79; and shadows, 275; theory of clouds, 280; visual fog, aesthetic of, 277; wall, notion of, 278–­79 Israel, Alex, 154 IT (Andreotta Calò), 266 Italy, 133, 257, 291 Ivens, Joris, 308n13 Jaar, Alfredo, 15, 138–­39, 257, 285 Jacobus, Mary, 276 James, William, 72, 82, 84 Japan, 142 Je tu il elle (Akerman), 231 Jonas, Joan, 259–­60, 319n23 Joselit, David, 31–­32, 297n49 Jung, Carl Gustav, 159; and alchemy, 166–­67, 252 Jung, Jacqueline, 207 Just, Jesper, 15–­16, 177–­78, 187, 189, 313n2, 314n20, 314–­15n30; ambiance, interest in, 188; atmosphere of projection, 188; empathetic projection, penchant for, 193; “geographies of tenderness,” 188; “gigantic,” as enveloping notion, 195; landscape and garden history, 180–­81; LED screen technology, 192–­93; mareorama and moving panoramas, 181–­84; mobilized geography, 180; panoramic vision, 179; projective space, use of, 179, 191; scale and origin of projection, 182–­84; scale and visual display, 184–­86; screen as environmental medium, 182; urban environment and global scale, 190, 194–­95 Kabul (Afghanistan), 29 Kahn, Douglas, 104–­5, 253 Kalfa, Bilge, 307n101 Karababa, Avsar, 307n101 Kenaan, Hagi, 6 Kentridge, William, 310n56 Kenzari, Bechir, 211

Là-­bas (Akerman), 231; geography of thresholds, 229 Lacan, Jacques, 76; gaze, concept of, 77–­78; linear perspective, 297n56; mirror-­stage, 34 La chambre (Akerman), 231 La dama de Corinto (Guerin), 7 Lamb, Beatrice, 310n72 Lament of the Images ( Jaar), 138 Lampadine con i raggi solidificati (Bulbs with Solidified Rays), 125 Land Art, 56, 117, 152 landscape, 14, 22, 34, 49, 106, 112, 116, 182–­83, 186, 213, 218, 222, 229, 235, 244–­45, 270, 283, 285; as aesthetic experience, 90; affective tone, as shimmer, 90; atmosphere of projection, 181; of city, outdoor projections, 52; of connections, 246; as face, 220–­21; filmic, 221; as framed, 243; landscape design, 178, 180, 215, 280; landscape films, 86; landscape painting, 64, 226, 271, 276; modern configuration of, as haptic, 180; mood, expression of, 79, 91, 217; photography, fascination with, 42–­43; of projection, 16; as screen, 147–­ 48, 192, 220; as screened, 271; of sea, 261, 319n28; sensory, 52; of simulation, 143; temporality, layers of, 243; and Stimmung, 90–­91, 221; textural character, 54–­55; theory of, as modern form of perception, 90–­91; urban, 192, 220, 263, 265; veiling of, 53 Landscape for Fire (McCall), 151 Lapelyté, Lina, 157

Laplanche, Jean, 20, 69, 165, 313n31 La siesta (Muntadas), 308n13 Latour, Bruno, 49; actor-­network theory (ANT), 296n34, 300n149 L’Attico (art gallery), 257 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 5 Leavitt, Henrietta Swan: atmospheric space, mapping of, 248; as human computer, 247 Le Corbusier, architectural promenade, 297n50 Leimert Theatre, 320n8 Le Navire Night (Duras), 187 Leonard, Zoe, 264–­65, 320n35 Leonardo da Vinci, 1, 25, 36 Le Parc, Julio, 15, 150 Leslie, Esther, 253–­54 Les Rendez-­vous d’Anna (Akerman), 218 Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, 195 Le Triptyque de Noirmoutier (Varda), 261 Levinas, Emmanuel, 122 Life of the Lobster (Moholy-­Nagy), 319n26 light, 9, 11, 96, 113, 117, 235, 285–­86; as agent of ambiance, 47; ambiguity, as essential to, 109; as atmospheric entity, 150; as conductive force, 47; electromagnetic conception of, 43; as energy, 47; as environment, 114; as medium, 44, 114; and memory, 132; and meteorology, 276; photons, 109; rhythm of, 15; as space modulator, 41; temporal change, 47; theories of, 42–­43, 108; of things, 281; transduction, 133; translucency, 205, 270; transmission of, 43, 108; wave-­particle duality, 109; wave theory, 43. See also luminosity Light and Image Projection Presentation for the Film Guild Cinema (Kiesler), 145–­46 Light and Space movement, 16, 39–­40, 128–­30, 160 Light Play: Black, White, Gray, A (Moholy-­ Nagy), 27, 311n89 light space, 37, 41, 122, 138, 161, 238–­39; act of screening, 129; energy of, 149; filtering of, 128; perturbations, 132; sensorial experience, 148; solid, 164, 244; as transformative, 162 Light-­Space Modulator (Moholy-­Nagy), 15, 27, 236, 311n89, 317n12 light waves, 10–­11, 24, 44, 67, 114, 118, 146 liminality, 24, 218 Lindsay, Vachel, 144; “sculpture in motion,” 234, 239 Line Describing a Cone (McCall), 150 Lipps, Theodor, 78–­82, 90, 217, 229, 304n98 liquidity, 37, 253–­54, 256, 319n26; act of

screening, 259; liquid screen, as milieu, 262–­63; plasticity of, 262–­63; projective, 259; sympathetic, 263; of water, 107. See also fluidity Loew’s Paradise Theatre, 145 Long Distance Wireless Photography (Méliès), 61, 64 Long Film for Four Projectors (McCall), 150 Lonzi, Carla, 130 Loock, Ulrich, 205 Lo Savio, Francesco, 127–­28 Lo schermo (The Screen) (Rotella), 126 Los Angeles (California), 265, 320n8 Los Angeles Theatre, 174 L’ospite armeno (The Armenian Guest) (Mauri), 125 Lotze, Hermann, 304n98; theory of inner co-­feeling, 90 Lucretius, 25, 90 Lumière, Louis, 260 Lumière brothers, 52 luminosity, 1, 37, 109, 122, 152, 247, 261, 270; atmosphere of projection, component of, 106; atmospherics, 132, 144, 204, 234, 245; and cloudiness, 276–­78; as connector of mediums, 147; ethereal, 207; filtering of, 141; and iridescence, 24; material, 165; and modernity, 150; opacity, 26, 128; of projection, 126, 235–­36, 266; and shadows, 36, 275; spatial, 39; surface, and translucency, 205; temporal projection, 108. See also light Mack, Heinz, 127 Madrid (Spain), 213 magic, 64, 67, 174; and science, 66, 173 Magic Lantern (Hiller), 142 magic lantern shows, 67, 72, 74, 124, 141, 162, 174, 246–­47; and phantasmagoria, 142, 149, 154 magnetic attraction, 39, 68–­69 magnetism, 43, 67, 73, 97, 162; conductive transmission, as form of, 70; and electricity, 104, 149; and hypnotism, 66; as infra-­body projection, 70; organic, 68; as projective force, 105. See also animal magnetism Maid of Corinth, The (Allan), 3 Maillet, Arnaud, 65–­66 Maison au soleil (Lo Savio), 128 Malevich, Kazimir, 19 Mangolte, Babette, 316n6 Manifesto Blanco (Fontana), 130 Manifesto of Spatialism (Fontana), 130 Manzoni, Piero, 129, 131

329 INDEX

Kholeif, Omar, 318n21 Kiesler, Frederick, 145–­46, 311n78; “Total Theater” project, 147 Kim-­Cohen, Seth, 112–­13 kinship, 8, 69, 100–­101. See also relatedness Kircher, Athanasius, 68, 149–­50 Kirkwood, Jeffrey West, 71 Kittler, Friedrich, 32–­33 Klein, Melanie, 228; mother-­infant relationship, 76; projective identification, 76, 165, 170, 228 Kluge, Alexander, 117 knots + surfaces (Thater), 165, 169, 174–­75 Kotz, Liz, 165 Kracauer, Siegfried, 149 Krauss, Rosalind, 310n56 Kubelka, Peter, 146–­47 Kuhn, Annette, 87 Kulturkirche Saint Stephani, 174 Kunsthaus Bregenz, 282–­83

INDEX

330

mapping, 9, 32, 44, 70, 179, 248; architectural and cartographic, 37; environmentality of, 36; filmic space, 37; and projection, 192 Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un Frigidaire vide (To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge) (Akerman), 227–­28 Marclay, Christian, 15, 142 Mareorama, 185, 189; panoramic culture, 16; as postcinematic, 186; precinema, as form of, 16; two screens of, 183; and weather, 184. See also panorama Marey, Étienne-­Jules, 34, 43, 247, 260 Marks, Laura, 81, 304n95 Marquee (Parreno), 142, 310n66 Martin, Craig, 46 mashrabiy’ya, 200, 207, 211. See also celosía Massumi, Brian, 274 materialism, 13, 97, 104, 240 materiality, 52, 71, 92, 102, 129, 133, 157, 206, 240, 248, 256; ambient, 200, 235; of art, 285; of atmosphere, 51, 221; atmospheric, 198, 233–­35, 245–­46, 274; of canvas, 124; casting of light, 165; of cine-­projection, 29; cultural ecologies, 252; diaphanous, 235; of energy transfers, 66; environmental, 211, 233, 236, 251, 280; of ether, 152; experience of time, 236; filmic, 96, 226; of film medium, 121; as haptic, 241, 246; as imaginative instrument, 74; and imaging, 252; of light, 40–­41; material world, 76; of media and media arts, 31; mixed, processual form of, 49; of objecthood, 77; and ornament, 213; as porous, 212; of projection, 12, 16, 64, 125, 142, 154, 164, 172, 211, 233, 237–­38, 244; projective, 96–­97, 152, 228, 233, 249; psychic, 262–­63; psycho-­social content, 115; and relationality, 76, 234; of screen, 139, 144, 259, 273; of screen history, 215; of sky and perception of clouds, 49; of space, 36, 81, 124; surface, 37, 150, 199; textural, 124, 213; vibrant, 81; vital, 47, 81, 95, 172, 226 material relations, 13–­14, 16, 29, 64, 75–­76, 78, 99, 234, 240–­41, 246, 248–­49, 286 matière subtile, 25 Mauri, Fabio, 15, 121, 124, 126, 157, 308n12; solid light cinema, 125 Mauri Muntadas (exhibition), 308n13 Maxwell, James Clerk, 43, 109 MAXXI Museum, 264, 266; as site of projection, 263 McCall, Anthony, 15, 150, 152; sold light films, 151 McCormack, Derek P., 112 McElheny, Josiah, 135

McElwee, Ross, 314n20 McKim, Kristi, 52 McQueen, Steve, 102, 306n59 mechanical reproduction, 170 media, 11, 22, 23, 30–­31, 33, 39, 46, 76, 92, 195, 217, 231, 235; ambient, 50, 52, 54, 192; “infuriated,” of today, 24; media diaphana, 26, 47; meteorology of, 93; mixed, 126; of modernity, 84, 105, 149; new, 122, 144, 154, 234, 236; photographic, 42; precinematic, 124; projective, 51; revamping of, through digital methods, 139–­40; screen, 10, 12, 36, 75; technical, 24, 27; temporal dimension of, 53. See also medium media archaeology, 15–­16, 64–­66, 123, 135–­37, 144, 174, 234, 241, 246–­47, 266 mediality, 24, 31, 68, 70, 93; intermediality; and projection, 73. See also medium mediarology, 31, 297n45 media studies, 8, 31–­32, 104 mediate motion, The (Eliasson), 282–­83 media theory, 22, 34, 93 mediation, 7, 21–­22, 24, 27, 30, 31, 82; and ambiance, 58, 93; nebular concept of, 51 medium, 46; of air, 50, 57; as ambiance, 23, 26, 31, 51, 89, 93; as ambient matter, 46, 93; ambient space, link between, 25; atmosphere, as process of intermediation, 10–­11, 148; as atmospheric space, 15, 27; as configured, 171; and dispositif, 32; and energy, 43, 70, 118; environmental, 15, 82, 91–­ 92; of film, 26; as haptic experience, 26; as in-­between space, 28, 45; of light, 44, 114, 128; of life, 30; “mediate matter,” 59; and milieu, 25–­26, 31, 38, 41, 58, 123; mixture, fluidity, 24, 110; processual, 49; projective mediality, 8–­9, 18, 21, 22, 76, 87; receptive transmission, 87, 171; of relational transfer, 13; of screen, 125, 200; and sound, 104; as term, 23–­24, 27; as transduction, 39, 103, 105. See also mediality Meireles, Cildo, 15, 136–­39 melancholia, 100, 302n58 Méliès, Georges, 61–­62, 64, 66–­67, 87, 245 Memoria desordenada (Disorderly Memory) (Borelli), 315n8 memory, 36, 52, 72, 79, 85, 108, 125–­26, 138–­39, 227, 230, 257; archival, 267; cultural, 174, 218, 242; historical, 246; and light, 132–­33; as lived space, 200; memory theater, 181; physical experience of, 253; texture of, 54 Menghi, Roberto, 130 Mesmer, Franz Friedrich, 13, 65–­68, 97, 105; animal magnetism, 70; floodabilities, 69; intimate space, 69

mesmeric forces, 66–­68, 70, 173–­74 mesmerism, 13, 65, 302n35; craze for, and electricity, 67–­68; material imagination, 70; and psychoanalysis, 66; sensory contact, 68. See also animal magnetism metaxy, 26 meteorology, 50, 52 metropolis, etymology of, 218 Mexico, 115–­16, 222, 285 Mexico City (Mexico), 205 Michael Angelo Studios, 310n72 Michaud, Philippe-­Alain, 260–­61, 319n26 Michelsen, Annette, 146 Middle Ages, 117, 206 migrancy, 218, 224 Milan (Italy), 130–­31, 212 Milan Triennal, 130 milieu, 31, 56, 78, 91; act of screening, 27; of affect, 59; and ambiance, 25–­26, 45; ambient body, 47; atmosphere, 30; and architecture, 285; cultural techniques, 63; as encompassing site, 25; and liquidity, 262–­63; as medium, 24–­26; as perceptual, 25; and physics, 45; positivist notion of, 44; and projection, 195; public intimacy, 29; as transformative site, 25 Minimalism, 127–­28, 172 modernity, 27, 44, 46–­47, 49–­50, 79, 82, 84, 90, 150, 162, 169, 178–­80, 190, 192, 253, 260; atmospheric imagination, 11; and cinema, 149; and nebular, 276; “panoramic vision,” 147; and phantasmagoria, 174; and projection, 167, 175 Moholy-­Nagy, László, 15, 19, 147–­48, 235–­36, 311n89, 317n12, 319n26; light vision, 154; use of light, as haptic technique, 27 Monet, Claude, 253 Monumento ai caduti/Bologna (Memorial to the Fallen/Bologna) (Andreotta Calò), 266 Morellet, François, 130 Morris, Robert, 152 movie palaces, 144–­45, 174, 310n72 moving images, 77–­78; film spectator, 179; and projection, 85 Moving Off the Land ( Jonas), 259, 319n24 Moving Off the Land II ( Jonas), 319n24 moving panorama, 183; geography, engaged with, 181; as panoramania, 181. See also Mareorama Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier 1979 (Viola), 106, 108 Mulvey, Laura, 172 Münsterberg, Hugo, 72–­73, 84, 302n53 Muntadas, Antoni, 308n13

Nameless Spectacle, This ( Just), 180, 183–­84, 188–­90, 195, 313n2; double-­screen projection, 186; empathic projection of, 185; haptic communication of, 181; projective site, as magnified psychogeography, 191; panoramic form of, 185; perturbation, 178; projective scale, “mareoramic” function of, 194; “site-­seeing,” 179; spatial construct of, 177; spatial disorientation of, 178; spatial scale and panoramic transmission, experiment in, 186 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 58 Naples (Italy), 266 Napoleon (Gance), 185–­86 natural philosophy, 46 Nauman, Bruce, 172, 309n32 nebularity, 16, 151, 221, 281; atmospheric mist, 282–­83; of clouds, 282–­83, 285; nebular aesthetics, 277; nebular art, and perturbations, 278; nebular modernism, 276; weathering of, 270 Neue Nationalgalerie, 240 News from Home (Akerman), 218 Newton, Isaac, 25, 43, 46, 68, 70, 108 New York City, 192, 218; Bronx, 145; Chelsea, 269, 271; Lincoln Center, 281 Niemeyer, Oscar, 243 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 269 Nisbet, James, 42–­43 Noble-­Olson, Matthew, 74, 302n58 No Home Movie (Akerman), 231 nonhuman and human forms, 27, 32, 49–­50, 55, 76, 85–­86, 95–­96, 110–­12, 162, 164, 166, 169, 218, 220, 226; as elemental seam, 263; hybrid mixture, 11; and kinship, 100–­101. See also animal magnetism Noon Complex, The (Siegel), 112 November. Dead leaves, still life, still alive (Andreotta Calò), 253 Now (Akerman), 231 objecthood, 76–­77, 194, 229, 239; ambient,

122; becoming screen, 15–­16; and dooring, 101; materiality of, 77; of projection, 126; of screen, 124, 136, 140, 144, 206; as thing that joins, 101 Observatory (exhibition), 298n66 Occupation (von Wedemeyer), 117 Oettermann, Stephan, 181–­82 Of the Middle East (Akerman), 316n2 Okayama Castle, 142 Olivier, Karen, 34 One Day Pina Asked (Akerman), 217 1°2°3°4° (Irwin), 283 Oo Fifi: Five Days in Claude Monet’s Garden, Part 1 and Part 2 (Thater), 160, 162 opacity, 16, 128, 205–­6, 276, 281; and media diaphana, 26 Oppenheimer, Sarah, 39 opticality, 9–­11, 32–­33; critique of, 273, 279, 319n18, 319–­20n33; in film and media theory, 34, 308n5; of gardens, 180; mirror-­ screen effect, 256; as model of vision, 320n36; of screening, 123, 263, 308n6 optical media, 32–­33 Optic Ocean (Barba), 241 Origin of Painting, The (Allan), 3 Origin of Painting, The (Regnault), 3, 4 ornament, 80, 145, 303n89; architectural, 206, 212; and “feel,” 246; and tectonics, 212–­13; and texture, 215; theatrical, 272 Out of Order: Bad Display (Umbrico), 140 Ouvert la nuit—­Festival des lumières (exhibition), 318n22 Owen, Alex, 68 Païni, Dominique, 19 Painter’s Manual, The (Dürer), 37 Palacio de Cristal, 244 Palais de Tokyo, 192 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 51, 62 Panofsky, Erwin, 297n56 panorama, 185–­86; kinesethic effect, 181; as mass medium, 181–­82; panoramic viewing, 147; panoramic vision, 179; scale of motion, 182. See also moving panorama panoramic culture, 220; and Mareorama, 16 Papapetros, Spyros, 80, 303n89 papier panoramique, 175 Papp, Joseph, 311n79 Paracelsus, 68, 93, 97, 105 Para Pedro (Meireles), 136 Parc des Buttes Chaumont, 178, 180, 183 Parikka, Jussi, 31 Park Avenue Armory, 29, 238, 257, 297n37 Paris (France), 178, 190, 194–­95 Parisi, Chiara, 318n22

Parreno, Philippe, 15, 142 partition, 6, 29, 37, 124–­25, 134, 137, 146–­47, 154, 199, 210, 223, 271, 273; ambient, 279; as buffer, 275; as fabric, 235, 274; and partaking, 274; as screen, 135, 138–­39, 229–­ 30; as site of passage, 224; as veil, 197–­98; as wall, 135 Pashgian, Helen, 39–­40, 128–­29 Passage (Iglesias), 201 pathosformel, 79 pellicule, 270. See also celluloid perceptual psychology, 82, 113 Perché un pensiero intossica una stanza? (Mauri), 125 Performa 13, 319n23 Perpetual Now of Instantaneous Visibility (Barba), 238 Perrotin gallery, 192 Personal Experience behind Its Description, The (Barba), 241, 246 perspective, 5, 9, 11, 117, 125; in architecture, 22; in environmental installations, 279; in film and apparatus theory, 32–­34; of gardens, 180; mirror-­screen, 256, 319n18; mobilization of, 220; origin of, 32, and projection, 36–­37, 41, 43, 147, 151, 297n56; projective imagination, 44, 50 perturbations, 50, 112–­13, 117, 132, 157, 185, 286; atmospheres of projection, 106–­7; atmospheric thinking, as form of, 58; of forms, 81; and haze, 277; mechanics of, 183–­84; nebular art, 278; and screening, 319n18 Peru, 243 Peters, John Durham, sky media, 297n44 Petric, Vlada, 314n20 phantasmagoria, 33–­34, 67, 149, 151, 159, 247; as cultural technique of projection, 162; as immersive, 162; and modernity, 174; moving-­image display, crucial to, 162; of projection, 161–­62, 164, 172, 175; and representation, 162; as scientific invention, 173; and smoke, 162, 173; superficial projection, 162 photogénie, 95; as term, 94 photography, 15, 61, 114, 122, 190, 235, 261; cameraless, 126; landscape, fascination with, 42–­43 Phreatic Zones (Iglesias), 210 physiological aesthetics, 82 Piacentini, Marcello, 138 Piccolo cinema (Mauri), 126 Piene, Otto, 127, 172 Pinkus, Karen, 109, 167, 299n117, 312–­13n22 Pinotti, Andrea, 79, 98 Pirelli, Marinella, 133

331 INDEX

Musée d’Art Contemporain, 136 Museo Madre, 308n12 Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego), 283 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 247, 319n23 museums, 8, 106, 144, 150, 287 Musil, Robert, 198 Mussolini, Benito, 138 Muybridge, Eadweard, 42–­43; atmospheric cameras, experiments with, 247 My Mother Laughs (Akerman), 231

INDEX

332

Pirelli HangarBicocca, 319n23 Piscator, Erwin, 147 Pittura (Mauri), 125 Plato, 79 Plato’s cave, 6, 33–­34; apparatus theory, 32 Pliny the Elder, 1, 3, 5–­7 Poland, 225 Pollmann, Inga, 45, 92 Polyptych IX (Iglesias), 210 Polyvision, 185–­86 Pontalis, Jean-­Bertrand, 20, 69, 165, 313n31 Ponti, Gio, 130 Porter, Edwin S., 61, 149–­50 Pre-­R aphaelites, 253 Prima che sia notte (Andreotta Calò), 263–­64 Princenthal, Nancy, 200 processual philosophy, 22 processual thinking, 254, 259; and fluidity, liquidity, 253, 256; relational forms, 10, 12, 49, 57, 63, and Stimmung, 91 proiectionem, 174 projection, 66, 101, 134, 189, 218, 228; act of, 2, 5, 8–­9, 13, 29, 35–­37, 39, 53–­54, 61, 63, 78, 82, 85, 103, 105, 107, 113, 118, 121, 125, 133, 136, 139, 159, 171, 222–­23, 233, 243, 246, 252, 257, 263–­66, 319–­20n33; art of, 2, 5, 7–­8, 10–­12, 14–­16, 19–­20, 24, 27, 29, 32, 36, 39, 41–­44, 47, 50–­53, 58, 62, 67, 82, 84, 93, 97, 104–­6, 118, 121–­23, 139, 144, 150, 168–­69, 221, 229, 236, 247; and affects, 62, 171; and alchemy, 8, 94, 164–­71, 175, 252; ambiance of, 3–­5, 8, 14, 22–­23, 27, 33–­34, 47, 59, 63–­64, 82, 157, 160, 172, 178, 192, 205–­6, 224, 235; ambient medium of, 87; ambient milieu of, 38, 117–­ 18; ambient transmission of, 78; aquarium, as metaphor for, 260–­61; archaeology of, 171; as architectural construct, 22, 164; architectural origin of, 5; architecture of, 8, 20, 22, 32; as atmosphere, 2–­3, 7, 9, 16, 19, 51, 58–­59, 78, 95, 115, 117–­18, 152, 154, 247; atmospheric materiality of, 233–­34; “becoming space” of, 2; and cartography, 8–­9, 36–­37; as centrifugal, 78; and climate, 52; collective dimension of, 35–­36; cultural ambiance, 64, 122; cultural memory, 242; as cultural technique, 8, 27, 121, 125; darkness, sense of, 6; as defense mechanism, 63, 74; digital technology, 192; displacement, as form of, 69, 74, 169; as dispositif, 32, 73–­75, 169–­70; doors and “dooring,” 29, 59; elemental aspects of, 37; and empathy, 80, 82, 89; environment of, 33; environmental agency of, 223; environmental transmission, 78, 234; as epistemological instrument, 171; excor-

poration, expulsion, 20–­21, 78; and floodabilities, 69–­70; fluid exchange, between animate and inanimate, 165; genealogic environment of, 19; and hapticity, 36–­37; haze, associated with, 154; and hypnosis, 66; and imagination, 94–­95, 251; and the inanimate, 101–­2, 168–­69, 171; as in-­between space, 29; and incorporation, 78; intermedial connection, 49; internal process, as externalization of, 162; intersubjectivity, 69–­70; as landscape, 243; large scale, 192–­94; and light, 38–­41, 43, 165; luminosity of, 106, 133, 235–­36; materiality of, 125, 164–­65, 172; material history of, 33–­34; material imagination, 252; as material process of mediation, 22, 76, 167; material space, 35, 78; matter-­energies, 105; mediality and mediate matter, 59, 73; mediatic quality of, 21–­23, 63; mediation, as place of, 29, 78, 166; as medium of animation, 61; melancholy, 74–­75, 302n58; as milieu, 10, 12–­13, 32, 36, 44, 195; and modernity, 82, 167, 175; nebular atmosphere of, 282; objecthood of, 126; and openness, 110–­11, 117; permeable boundaries of, 63, 163; phantasmagoria of, 161, 164, 172, 175; as processual movement, 35–­36, 63; projective identification, 76; as project, 34; psychic dimension of, 62, 132; and psychoanalysis, 8, 20, 62–­63, 69, 74–­75, 78, 165, 170–­71, 252; public intimacy, 121; reciprocal, 111; relatedness, sense of, 96; and relationality, 63–­64, 77, 224; as relational transmission, 14, 59, 63; reverberation of, 106; as screen and screening, 51, 125, 242, 263; solar energy, as metaphor for, 115; spectatorial, 84, 184–­85; sympathy, as form of, 16, 70, 102; as term, 8–­9, 19–­21, 164–­65, 167–­68; a “throwing forth,” 20–­21, 159, 165, 174; transduction, form of, 21, 39, 63, 90, 94, 103, 105, 112, 152, 167; transformation, material instrument of, 21, 223; as transformative process, 35, 62–­63, 223; as transitional, 38; translation, as form of, 63; transmission of, 27, 63; as transmission of energies, 61; transubstantiation, as form of, 167; and weather, 52–­53 Projection Instructions (Fisher), 172, 237–­38 projection mapping, 192 Projections (Mauri), 125 projective ambiance, 16, 37–­39, 50, 172, 191, 247 projective atmosphere, 156, 174; elemental agency of, 286 projective environment, 2, 8, 16, 141, 150, 185, 211, 247, 261

projective geometries, 44 projective imagination, 9–­10, 15, 21–­22, 44, 62, 70, 109, 118, 121, 157, 164, 171; atmospheric thinking, 73–­74, 79, 89, 172–­73, 183; black box and white cube, 106; haptic cartographies of, 75; as milieu, 122; and sympathy, 97 projective materiality, 96–­97, 249 projective mediation, 97 projective screen, 101; architecture of passage, 122–­23; as door, 28; as cultural technique, 29; as environmental medium, 15, 122, 182, 271, 279; environmental transformation, as place of, 29; intermediated passage, 49; as location of dislocation, 171; as medium, 24–­25, 28; as milieu, 24–­25, 29; as plastic mediator, 262; as sculptural object, 177–­78; and transduction, 123; as transitional environment, 171; volumetric plasticity, 183 projective space, 5, 19, 36, 106, 154, 179, 186, 191, 220, 228, 243, 265; as atmospheric ambiance, 51; enveloping of, 146; and galleries, 161–­62, 236; film as, 95, 136, 226, 257; mobility and imagination, tied to, 39 projective transduction, 118 projective transmission, 62, 64, 101, 103, 111 Prologue: x18 (Irwin), 320n3, 320n5 PSAD Synthetic Desert III (Wheeler), pink noise, 41 psychic energy, 72 psychic projection, 9, 39, 63, 78, 108–­9, 241; and alchemy, 166, 252; as defense mechanism, 74; as dispositif, 169–­70; as site of mediality, 92 psychic theory, 276 psychoanalysis, 65, 70, 82, 86, 228; and cinema, 170–­71; ego, limits of, 69; and mesmerism, 66; object relations, 78; and projection, 8, 20, 39, 62–­63, 69, 78, 165, 170–­71, 252 psychoanalytic film theory, 313n28 psychogeography, 191 public gardens, 178–­79; sensorial ambiance, 180 public intimacy, 29, 76, 115, 124, 130, 151, 154, 285; cinema, as basis, of, 5, 157; of movie theaters, 121; as spectatorial, 249 public spaces, 14, 115, 121, 133, 136, 144, 146, 207 Public Theater, 311n79 Putrih, Tobias, 136 Pythagoras (Ho), 141 Question of Silence, A ( Just), 188

Rahmanali, Zelal Zülfiye, 307n101 Rainbow Assembly (Eliasson), 114–­15, 309n37 Rancière, Jacques, 135, 201 Randerson, Janine, 300n136 Raudive, Konstantine, 310n64 Reanimation ( Jonas), 259, 319n23 receptive relationality, 5, 14; ambiance of, 22 receptive transmission, 64, 82, 87, 98, 101 receptivity, 12–­13, 30, 57, 59, 63, 78, 87, 105, 110–­11, 226; atmospheric, 92; processes of, 98; and pulsation, 84; reciprocal movement of, 82 reciprocal projection, 63, 110, 112; as immersive, 111 reciprocity, 81, 111 Recorded Expansions of Infinite Things (Barba), 241, 246 Red (Barba), 241 REEL-­UNREEL (Alÿs), 29 Regnault, Jean-­Baptiste, 3, 4 Reihana, Lisa, 195 Reina Sofia Museum, 240–­41 relatedness, 64, 89, 92; and sympathy, 97, 100. See also kinship relational forms: affect, 76; ambiance, 64, 224; atmospheres, 57, 133; boundaries, 285; cinema, 72; connections, 12, 25; cultural history, 75; dynamics, 21; empathic connection, 62; energy, as relational medium, 15; linkage, capacity of, 228; modality, 57, 110, 226; possibilities of encounter, 201; potential of projective imagination, 122; projection, relational quality of, 16, 59, 63, 70, 76, 81, 105, 106, 223, 227, 233, 249, 291; receptivity, 30, 63; screen, and commoning, 207; screen, and linkage, 87; screening, as empathetic, 222; sites of the collective, 144; social space, 122, 285; “surface of design,” 201; transduction, 105, 122–­23; transformation of subjects, objects, and space, 63; transindividuality, 63; and transfer, 13, 89, 103; vitality, 13 relationality, 9, 12–­13, 63–­64, 72, 82, 144; ambient effects of, 77; as bioenergetics, 69; environment of, 89; of projective identification, 76 Remember and Forget (Ruscha), 315–­16n24 Renaissance, 9, 32, 43–­44, 53, 117, 123, 223 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Hirsch Observatory, 245 resonance, 11, 13, 15, 22, 81–­82, 85, 92, 98, 115, 167, 237, 252; and atmosphere, 30, 118; as attunement, 78, 90; connectivity, and

relationality, 64; of energetic environments, 105; as fluid current, 69; magnetic, 142; as sympathetic relatedness, 95, 99; as transmission, 58; vibrancy, and vitalism, 59, 79, 101 Retrospective in Solid Light (exhibition), 308n12 Rhythmic Instinction to Be Able to Travel beyond Existing Forces of Life (Parreno), 142 Riegl, Alois, 80, 90, 303n89 Righini, Mario, 130 Robertson, Étienne-­Gaspard, 149–­50, 247 Rococo art, 174 Rome (Italy), 125; Piazza Navona, 257 Room for one colour (Eliasson), 114, 309n37 Room of One’s Own, A ( Just), 188 Rossellini, Roberto, 319n26 Rotella, Mimmo, 126 Rotsztain, Jeremy, 311n77 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 1 Ruscha, Ed, 210, 315–­16n24 Ruskin, John, 276, 280 Russia, 225 Sala, Anri, 85 SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (Wheeler), 41, 298n95 San Diego (California), 285 Santa Monica Museum of Art, 174 Saraceno, Tomás, 55 Sargentini, Fabio, 257 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 77 Saunders, Matt, 140, 310n57 Saute ma ville (Akerman), 231 scale, 37, 160, 165, 169, 179, 181, 183, 189, 218, 235; and ambiance, 188, 191; disjunction, relation between, 186; face and close-­up, 186; in film history, 186; and format, 204; and galleries, 184–­85, 220; as geography, 195; large-­scale projects, 15–­16, 56, 85, 115, 126, 190, 192, 194–­95, 246, 253, 263, 274; and movement, 182, 185; panoramic transmission, 186; screening, link to, 195; screen scale, different forms of, 194–­95; and space, 177–­78 scaling, 192, 194; as haptic, 177 Scarpa, Carlo, 130 schermo, 123–­24 Schermo panoramico 2 (Rotella), 126 Schermo schermo (Gioli), 126,–­27 Schifano, Mario, 126 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 4, 5 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 179 schizophrenics, 71 Schmarsow, August, 81, 177, 304n98 Schultz, Nora, 144

science, 8, 64, 66–­67, 84, 109; and cinema, 96 Science, Fiction (Thater), 161 Scott, David, 63 Scott, Ridley, 53 Scotus, Michael, 26 screen, 37, 137, 192; as active environment, 95; ambiance, 124; as ambient architecture, 190; and architecture, 125, 206; as atmospheric landscape, 95; as cultural technique, 125, 143–­44, 207; as doorway, 28, 34–­35, 125, 207; empathy, channeling of, 139; as environment, 124, 190, 279; environmental history of, 223; etymology of, 123–­24; film theater architecture, 124; genealogy of, 206; as haptic, 122; as in-­between space, 28–­29; as landscape, 147–­48; latticed screen, as sacred space, 207; and light, 150; materiality of, 34, 129, 144; mediation of, 29; mirror-­stage, 34; movie palaces, 145; objecthood of, 101, 136, 139–­40, 144, 204; as processual object, 101; of projection, 142–­43, 229; as projective surface, 206; public intimacy, milieu of, 29; as sited, 121; as site of partition, 223–­24; spectator absorption in, 146; as tensile environment, 144; as translucent, 211–­12; as transitive element, 207; as word, etymology of, 123–­24, 206 screening, 11, 66, 87, 124, 128, 157, 161, 163, 186, 189, 194, 226, 234, 279–­80; act of, 37, 126–­27, 135, 319n18; act of, as cultural technique, 122; ambient space of, 135; and dooring, 122; environmental function of, 274; environmental history of, 183; luminous surface of, 235; and milieu, 27; nonlinear temporalities, 34; panoramic forms of, 33–­34; and perturbation, 319n18; process of, 159; and scale, 195; and scanning, 141; “screening” space, 32, 51, 58–­59, 148, 197, 257; transformative architecture of, 235; transport, as vehicle of, 143; veiling, act of, 275–­76; as visual display, 195 Screens (Mauri), 124–­26 screen space: and atmosphere, 116, 154; commoning, forms of, 207; as environment, 211 screen surface, 36–­37, 62, 78, 122, 136, 139, 143, 146, 150, 221–­22, 224, 234, 246, 263; as cultural fabric, 28; expanded cinema, 148 Screens: Virtual Material (exhibition), 310n57 Scrim veil—­Black rectangle—­Natural light (Irwin), 279–­80; atmospheric screening, 278; clouds, turning into, 276; microclimate, creation of, 276; opacity, 276; screening, form of, 278; scrim, use of, 274–­75; veiling of light, 276

333 INDEX

Quintilian, 1, 3

INDEX

334

Sea, The (Rotella), 126 Sean Kelly Gallery, 315n6 Segal, Hanna, 76 Semper, Gottfried, 211–­12 Send Me Sky, Henrietta (Barba), 247 Seneca, 138 sentient matter, 95; sentient beings, 57, 101; sentient perception, 82; sentient weathering, 286 Senza Ideologia: Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky (Mauri), 125–­26 Senza titolo (La fine del mondo) (Andreotta Calò), 254, 257; as haptically sensitive, 255–­56 Serpentine Gallery, 56 Serra, Richard, 227–­28 Serres, Michel, 24, 197, 276; quasi-­objects, 49 Servitudes ( Just), 192, 314n28 shadow play, 3, 5–­6, 116–­17, 122, 140, 260 shadow theater, 8, 161, 275 Sharits, Paul, 172 Shutter Interface (Sharits), 172 Siegel, Amie, 112 Siegert, Bernhard, 27, 38 Silverman, Kaja, 188 Simmel, Georg, 38, 61, 90–­91 Simondon, Gilbert, 21, 63 Sirens of Chrome ( Just), 188–­89 “site-­seeing,” 31, 179 site-­specificity, 31, 226 siting, 2, 32, 116, 226 Skulptur Projekte Münster, 55–­56 Sky Backdrop (Israel), 154 Sloterdijk, Peter, 58, 68–­69, 300–­301n162, 302n35 Smith, Adam, 97 Smithson, Robert, 134, 178, 233, 253, 257, 312–­13n22 Smithsonian Institution, 143 Snow, Michael, 135, 217 social meteorology, 300n136 social sciences, 97 Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) (Snow), 135 Solar Flux Recordings (Barba), 244, 318n23 Solomon, Phil, 302n58 Somaini, Antonio, 26, 93 son et lumière shows, 192 Sonnier, Keith, 130, 172, 309n32 South (Akerman), 222 Southern California minimalism, 269 Spacelength Thought (Barba), 239 Spatial Ceiling (Fontana), 131 Spatial Concepts (Fontana) 130 spatiality, 22, 49, 189; of affect, 57; of film form, 217

Spazio-­Luce (Space-­Light) (Lo Savio), 127–­28 spectatorship, 16, 32, 47, 85; collective space of, 264; and image, 66; mobilized, 189; and spectating, 157; spectators, and public intimacy, 124 Spiral Jetty (Smithson), 253 Spiral Light (Grisi), 133 spiritualist movement, women as mediums, 67–­68 Spitzer, Leo, 1, 91–­92, 109, 297n44, 299n117; ambient medium, 46; milieu and ambiance, 25–­26 Split Second (Mirror) (McCall), 151 Spooner, William, 14 Stating the Real Sublime (Barba), 235, 239 Steam (Morris), 152 Steam Screens (VanDerBeek and Brigham), as interactive, 152, 154 Stemme (voice), 93 Stewart, Kathleen, 57–­58, 195; atmospheric attunements, 92 Steyerl, Hito, 15, 157 Stimmung, 12, 57, 59, 89, 94, 101, 111, 145, 154, 221, 229, 285; air and light, 92–­93; and ambiance of projection, 92; ambiguity of, 92; as animated, 95; animistic side of, 95; as atmosphere, 91, 95; atmospheres of projection, 92; as attunement to place, 90, 92; as climate, 95; communicative dimension of, 90; and landscape, 90–­91, 221; landscape, theory of, 91; as located experience, 92; meteorological sense of, 93; musicality of, 93; perturbations, 92; receptivity, 92, 95; relatedness, 92, 95; resonance, sense of, 91–­92; smell, sense of, 91; sympathetic form of, 95; vitalist side of, 95. See also atmosphere Stoichita, Victor, 5–­6, 36 Strasburg (Gemany), 147 Structuralism, 217 Structuralist films, 172 Struth, Thomas, 85 St. Werner, Jan, 237 Sun Cinema (Von Wedemeyer), 115–­16, 285, 307n101; as solar sculpture, 117 Sun/Screen/Scan (Umbrico), 140–­41 Sun & Sea (Marina) (Barzdžiukaité, Grainyté, and Lapelyté), 157 Sunset Boulevard (Andreotta Calò), act of blurring, 265 Sunset Light (Grisi), 133 Sun Tunnels (Holt), 117 Superficie vasta della sorgente (Gioli), 127 Suspended Corridor (Iglesias), 201

Suspended Pavilion (Iglesias), 201 suture, missing field, 188 Suvée, Joseph-­Benoît, 3 sympathy, 12, 16, 22, 64, 78, 105, 160, 163, 233–­ 34, 237, 240, 285; alchemic movements, 166–­67, 171, 229; and ambiance, 97; as ambient, 79; as ambient notion, 100; as avenue of transport, 101; as biosocially active, 97; as cognitive-­affective passage, 97; commonality, sense of, 97, 101; dilation, 100; empathy, linked to, 79, 97; environmentality, 95, 98–­99; as form of contagion, 99–­100; imaginative projective, participation in articulation of, 98; and inanimate, 168; as infective projective movement, 97; interior, 79; and kinship, 69, 100–­101; living milieu of, 70; magnetic attraction, as form of, 97–­98; mediation, as form of, 97; as medium, for transmission of emotions, 97; moving force of, 101; as natural force, and nonhuman bodies, 100; as ontological infrastructure, 100; otherness, 13; and projection, 70, 96–­97, 102; projective imagination, 97; receptive transmission, as material form of, 101, 106; relatedness of, 97, 99–­100; resonance of, 59; speculative thinking, promoting forms of, 98–­99; as term, 97; sympathetic transfer, 102; sympathy theory, 89, 97; transmission of affect, vehicle for, 97; as vitalist, 97, 99–­100 Synchronicity (Weerasethakul), 134–­35 Syria, 285 Sze, Sarah, 15, 141–­42, 310n65 Taeuber-­Arp, Sophie, 147 Tambellini, Aldo, 15, 154, 172 tapestry, 212; architectural, 213; history of walls, 211; as medium, 210; screen history, 211 Taptik, Ali, 307n101 Tate Modern, 115, 133, 240, 309n37, 319n23 Tausk, Victor, 74, 105; influencing machine, 70–­73, 171, 302n59 Taylor, Chad, 318n14 Teatro Margherita, 266 Tel Aviv (Israel), 229 Tetsuo Kondo Architects, 283 textile tectonics, 213 Thater, Diana, 15–­16, 160, 163; absorption, 174; and alchemy, 165–­68, 173; atmospheric thinking, 172–­73; cultural memory, 174; dislocation and deterritorialization, 165, 169; early cinema, and atmosphere of wonder, 173–­74; in-­betweenness, 171; ma-

Uecker, Günther, 127 Umbrico, Penelope, 140 Umwelt, 45, 111; as biological culture, 56 Un’area di nebbia (A Space of Fog) (Grisi), 133 Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Porter), 61 United States, 115–­16, 128, 181, 222, 285 Unknown Spectacle, The (exhibition), 313n2

Untitled (Iglesias), 210 Untitled (Tirelli), 34 Untitled (Wheeler), 40 Untitled (Alabaster Room) (Iglesias), 205 Untitled (The End of the World) (Andreotta Calò), stillness of, 263 Untitled (Jealousy) (Iglesias), 201 Untitled (Venice I) (Iglesias), 210 Untitled (Venice II) (Iglesias), 205 UUmwelt (Huyghe), 56 Uzan, Gökan, 307n101 VanDerBeek, Stan, 15, 152, 172 van Doesburg, Theo, 147 vapors, 26, 30, 46, 50, 58, 67–­68, 152, 173, 210, 221, 246–­47, 283 Varda, Agnès, 261, 263, 319n28, 319n29 Vasari, Giorgio, 1 Venice Biennale, 130, 239, 266, 282–­83, 321n35; Arsenale, 157, 256–­57, 263; Chilean Pavilion, 257; Italian Pavilion, 254, 256–­57, 263, 318n2; Danish Pavilion, 190; German Pavilion, 56; New Zealand Pavilion, 195; US Pavilion, 319n23 Venturi, Riccardo, 128 Vierkant, Artie, 156 Vigo, Nanda, 130–­32 Viliani, Andrea, 308n12 Villa, Maria, 309n37 Villeneuve, Denis, 53 Viola, Bill, 106, 108, 172 virtual reality, 145 Vischer, Robert, 79 visual arts, 7–­9, 31, 47, 49, 58, 87, 101, 109, 217–­18, 233 visual culture, 10, 14, 31, 58, 93, 178, 204, 220 visual media, 24, 31, 33, 105; linear perspective, 32 visual studies, 11–­12 vitalism, 13, 45, 67, 82, 85, 93, 97–­98; cultural, 84, 89; and empathy, 80–­81; formal thinking, 65; projection, 80; Stimmung, vitalist side of, 95; and sympathy, 99–­100; theories of relational transfer, 89; of things, 59 Vitti, Monica, 221 Voice in the Desert, A (Akerman), 115, 222–­23, 285 Vogt, Günther, 283 Vom Subjekt zum Projekt (From Subject to Project) (Flusser), 35 von Uexküll, Jakob, 45 von Wedemeyer, Clemens, 117, 285; heterogeneous social climate, 115–­16 Voyage in Dwelling, A ( Just), 188

Wall, Jeff, 85, 310n56 walls, 212; notion of, 278–­79; and tapestry, 211, 213; textiles, origin in, 211 Wand, and Gewand, 211–­12 Warburg, Aby, 79, 303n89 Warhol, Andy, 146 Warner, Marina, 67–­68, 162, 174 water: cinema history, 260–­61; as destructive force, 254; dissolving of forms, sign of, 253; and fire, 267; flow of moving images, 261; as generative, 254; as melancholic, 263; mortality of life, sense of, 263; as plastic mediator between life and death, 263; as precious resource, 254. See also liquidity Water and Dreams (Bachelard), 254 Water in Wind (Haacke), 152 Watsuji, Tetsurō, 51 weather, 53, 91, 117, 181; atmospheric projections, 95; and climate, 51; and culture, 276; filmic medium, as metaphor for, 52; indexicality of, 52; memorability of, 52; social climate, 285; “weather cinema,” 54. See also climate weathering, 53–­55, 154, 210, 270, 286 Weather Project, The (Eliasson), 115, 309n37 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 134 Wellbery, David, 90 Wenders, Wim, 53, 300n142 Western Round Table (Barba), 240 West, Jennifer, 154 What Need Is There to Weep over Parts of Life? The Whole of It Calls for Tears ( Jaar), 138 What the Heart Wants (Evans), 263 Wheeler, Doug, 15, 39–­40, 128–­29; infinity environments, 41, 298n95 White Curtain (Barba), 235 White Is the Color (Thater), 173 White Light Paintings (Corse), 129 White Museum (Barba), 243–­44, 318n14; Live, 238, 247; performances of, 245; phantasmagoric projections, 247 White Museum (São Paulo) (Barba), 243 Whitman, Walt, 100 Whitney Museum of American Art, 144, 264, 274, 276, 308n4; Sculpture Garden, 152 Wide White Flow (Haacke), 135 Wigley, Mark, 280 Wilder, Ken, 86 Winnicott, D. W., 86, 305n123; cultural experience, 87; third space, and milieu of potentiality, 87; transitional object, 101; transitional phenomenon, 87, 171, 228; transitional space, 228 Winter, Alison, 68

335 INDEX

terialization of atmosphere, 173; material luminosity, 165; media archaeology, 174; Minimalism, legacy of, 172; nonhuman and human, intermediation between, 169; papier panoramique, 175; phantasmagoria, 161–­62, 164, 172–­75; precinematic projection, evoking of, 173–­74; projection, archaeology of, 171; projection, and geometric form, 164–­65; projection, as epistemological instrument, 171; projective imagination, 171–­73; projector that “sees,” 169, 171–­72 Theory of /Cloud/, A (Damisch), 277, 282 thermodynamics, 43 360° room for all colours (Eliasson), 114 Three Screens for Looking at Abstraction (McElheny), 135 Thrift, Nigel, 24 Tiepolo, Giambattista, 174 Tijuana (Mexico), 285 Timekeeper (Sze), 141 Times Square Alliance, 314n28 Tirelli, Marco, 34, 298n66 Toledo (Spain), 210 Torqued Ellipse (Serra), 228 Toute une nuit (Akerman), 219 transduction, 59, 62, 64, 157; aesthetic and theory of, 106–­10; atmosphere of projection, 286; and light, 133; matter-­energy, transformation of, 256; and projection, 21, 39, 63, 90, 94, 152; as term, 13, 39, 103; as transformative phenomenon, 21, 261–­62; transmutation, as form of, 14 transductive process, 22; methodology of, 21–­22 translucency, 16, 124, 136, 200, 205, 235, 270; media diaphana, 26 Trans-­Siberian Railway Panorama (exhibition), 182 Transsolar, 283 Tres aguas (Iglesias), 210 Turkey, 285 Turner, Christopher, 71 Turner, J. M. W., 43, 45, 253, 276, 280 Turrell, James, 39–­40, 113, 114, 128–­29, 298n92 Two Worlds (Saunders), 140, 310n57

INDEX

336

Wispé, Lauren, 97 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 138–­39 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 81 Wollheim, Richard, 171 Wong, Kar-­wai, 30 World Trade Center, 192 World War II, 124

Worringer, Wilhelm, 82, 303n89; empathy, notion of, 81; and ornament, 80 Wright, Joseph, 2 Wundt, Wilhelm, 79 Yildirim, Birge, 307n101 Youngblood, Gene, 31, 280 Your colour memory (Eliasson), 114, 309n37

Zajonc, Arthur, 43–­44, 109 Zerbini (Doormats) (Mauri), 125 ZERO movement, 127, 129 Zhengming, Wen, 282 Zumthor, Peter, 50–­51, 280–­83 Zwirner & Wirth gallery, 173