Events

Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media

Lecture by Giuliana Bruno

When:
Thursday, November 12, 2015, 5:00pm - 5:00pm
Description:

What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? Professor Giuliana Bruno, the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, will discuss these elements in her talk based on the her latest research and book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media, University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Giuliana Bruno's seminal work Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002) won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in Culture and History – a prize awarded to "the world's best book on the moving image" – and has provided new directions for visual studies. Atlas was also honored as Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association, and named a Book of the Year in 2003 by the Guardian. Her recent book Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (MIT Press, 2007) has been translated in Europe and Asia. For Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 1993), a journey through modernity and cultural memory, she won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual award for best book in film studies. Off Screen (Routledge, 1988) was devoted to women and film, and Immagini allo schermo (Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991) was named one of the 50 Best Books of the First 100 Years of Film History.

Professor Bruno has contributed to numerous monographs on contemporary art, including Isaac Julien for The Museum of Modern Art, 2014; Jesper Just for the Venice Biennale 2013 (and MAC/VAL, 2012); Jane and Louise Wilson (2004), Chantal Akerman (MHKA, 2012); Diana Thater (LACMA, 2015), and exhibition catalogues of the Museo Reina Sofia and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

She also writes frequently on architecture and the visual arts for international books such as Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (MCASD, 2009), Space (MAXXI Museum for 21st Century Arts, Rome, 2010), and Ruins (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2011).

Co-presented by the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies.