Conference: Surface / Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media

Lecturer: Giuliana Bruno (Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University)
Date: December 25,  2013 Wednesday 
Time: 18.00-20.00 
Place: santralistanbul Campus, E1-301 

Lecture abstract:
"I will present an aspect of the research for my forthcoming book, titled Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014), in which I turn to surface and screen to investigate the place of materiality in our contemporary world. 

In this age of virtuality, with its rapidly changing materials and media, what role can materiality have? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in visual forms?

I propose to think of materiality as a surface condition—a “becoming” screen. Screens have become a material condition of our existence. As architects increasingly turn the façades of their buildings into screens, and artists reinvent the art of projection on gallery walls, this lecture will contribute concrete reflection to these intersecting architectures. In addressing surface materiality in film and moving-image installation art, it will offer a history of the screen as a material form of dwelling, a moving space."

Book Summary:
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? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world.

Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation memory and transformation can take place.

Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.

Giuliana Bruno:
Giuliana Bruno is Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Her books include Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (MIT, 2007); Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 1993), winner of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual book award for best book in film studies; and Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002), which won the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in Culture and History for “the world’s best book on the moving image.” Her forthcoming book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media, will be published by Chicago University Press in 2014.