Thematic Section

The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale

Author(s)

  • Giuliana Bruno

    Harvard University

Keywords
  • Ecology of Immersivity
  • Atmospheric thinking
  • Empathy and immersion
  • Scale and magnification
  • Jesper Just
Abstract

How does an artwork express an “environmentality?” Can we redefine immersion, in critical terms, as a form of environmental projection? In taking up such questions from my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, my text addresses the relation between projection and environmentality in the visual arts in order to question immersivity. Confronted with the phenomenon of environmentalization, we need to re-imagine the ecology of representation. Positing ecology as an environmental relation, I will consider its artistic imagination both historically and theoretically. I propose that we revisit the environmentality of media archaeology to understand how this impulse is furthered in current moving-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. I will especially address environmentality as it relates to movement and scale, questioning the relation between immersion and magnification. I will advance my argument by presenting the large-scale moving-image installations of the Danish-born, New York artist Jesper Just. Does magnification always, only imply spectatorial immersion? Other forms of experience arise when confronting an ecology of scale in art. What else happens when we scale? Can immersion be understood, more critically, as a form of environmental absorption? In recasting immersion in environmental terms, I propose that we consider absorption as empathic projection with space. In shifting from the human subject’s own immersive identification to this critically aware, enveloping field of empathic projection with the non-human, we can discard the prevalent human-centric position that pervades most immersive discourses. A different ecology of immersivity rises to the surface by relating the empathic “projective imagination” to “atmospheric thinking.”

References
  1. Benjamin, W., “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Arcades Project (1935), trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press-Harvard University Press, 1999).
  2. Bennett, J., Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
  3. Bennett, J., “Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman,” in S. Iovino, S. Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 239-52.
  4. Bennett, J., Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
  5. Berry, C., Harbord, J., Moore, R., eds., Public Space, Media Space (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
  6. Bordini, S., Storia del panorama. La visione totale nella pittura del XIX secolo (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1984).
  7. Bruno, G., “The Screen as Object: Art and the Atmospheres of Projection,” in C. Iles, ed., Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, exhibition catalogue): 156-67.
  8. Bruno, G., Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002).
  9. Bruno, G., Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
  10. Casetti, F., Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
  11. Cavell, S., The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
  12. Chakravorty, S., “Spaces of Spectatorship: Architectures of the Projected Image,” Polished Panels 1, no. 2, Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture (March 7, 2016), http://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2016/03/spaces-of-spectatorship-architectures-of-the-projected-image/, accessed August 30, 2023.
  13. Charney, L., Schwartz, V.R., eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
  14. Connor, S., The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010).
  15. Didi-Huberman, G., “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (2003): 275-89, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412903002003001.
  16. Dixon Hunt, J., Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992).
  17. Doane, M.A., Bigger than Life: The Close-up and Scale in the Cinema (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
  18. Epstein, J., “Magnification and Other Writings,” October, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 9-25, https://doi.org/10.2307/778434.
  19. Fried, M., “The Laying Bare of Empathic Projection,” in Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2011): 205-215.
  20. Fried, M., Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
  21. Friedberg, A., The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006).
  22. Griffiths, A., Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museum, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
  23. Huhtamo, E., Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013).
  24. Hussey, C., The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927).
  25. Hyde, R., Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All-Embracing” View, (London: Trefoil/Barbican Art Gallery, 1988, exhibition catalogue).
  26. Kee, J., Lugli, E., eds., To Scale (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015).
  27. Kim-Cohen, S., Against Ambience and Other Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
  28. Lipps, T., “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure” (1905), in K. Aschenbrenner, A. Isenberg, eds, Aesthetic Theories: Studies in the Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965): 403-12.
  29. Mallgrave, H.F., Ikonomou, E., eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994).
  30. Manovich L., The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001).
  31. McQuire, S., Martin, M., Niederer, S., eds., Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009).
  32. Oettermann, S., The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1980), trans. D. L. Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
  33. Pinotti, A., “Towards An-Iconology: The Image as Environment,” Screen 61, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 594-603, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa060.
  34. Roquet, P., Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
  35. Schivelbusch, W., The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
  36. Smithson, R., “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in N. Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York: New York University Press, 1979).
  37. Stewart, S., On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
  38. Trumpener, K., Barringer, T., eds., On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2020).
  39. Verhoeff, N., “Screens in the City,” in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048531691-013.
  40. Wilder, K., “Projective Art and the ‘Staging’ of Empathic Projection,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 5, no. 1-2 (2016): 125-40, https://doi.org/10.1386/miraj.5.1-2.124_1.
  41. Youngblood, G., “The Artist as Ecologist,” in Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970).
Read Article
Published

28 December 2023

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827
How to Cite
Bruno, G. (2023). The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale. AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433], 2(I). https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827
Copy

Issue
Vol. 2 No. I (2023): Immersions and Dives: From the Environment to Virtual Reality

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...
License
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.