Atlas of emotion - Giuliana Bruno

Choice : Outstanding Academic Title of the Year; Guardian : Book of the Year; 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Prize Winner

Traversing a varied and enchanting landscape with forays into the fields of geography, art, architecture, design, cartography and film, Giuliana Bruno's Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavor to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. Throughout these pages Bruno insists on the inseparability of seeing and travelling. In an evocative montage of words and pictures she emphasizes that the voyeur must also be the voyageur, that "sight" and "site" are irrevocably connected. In so doing, she touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Annette Messagem; the film-making of Peter Greenaway and Michaelangelo Antonioni; the origins of the movie palace and its precursors, the camera obscura, the curiosity cabinet, the tableaux vivant; and on her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, the journey for which Bruno is our cicerone opens new vistas and understandings at every turn. This is an affective mapping that ultimately puts us in touch with mental landscapes and inner worlds.

Giuliana Bruno is Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts , and Streetwalking on a Ruined Map , winner of the 1993 Katherine Kovacs prize for the best book in film studies.

"A hugely ambitious mapping of the complex intertwinings of film, architecture, and the body. We think of film as a predominantly visual medium, but Bruno insists that it is as much about the positioning and movement of the body in space—hence that is, as she puts it, ' haptic '. This adventurous book will be of interest to anyone concerned with what we might call 'mobility studies': the attempt to understand cultural performances not as the manifestation of fixed structures but as the expression of restless energies."—Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University

"Bruno's endlessly provocative narrative weaves film and architecture so tightly together that they swap identities. Buildings melt into fluid emotions while flickering images become astonishingly solid. Traditional disciplinary limits dissolve to reveal a completely different kind of map, a psychogeography of cultural life. In an exhilarating ride, the reader is transported across this vast hidden landscape to reach a whole new understanding of spatial experience. Essential reading for architects in love with the elusiveness of their own field."—Mark Wigley, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University

"This is a journey into and an inventory of the alchemist lab, or Hexenkuche , out of which the Western infatuation with re-created spaces, places and motions has operated in the past 400 years—a vast continent of mimetic obsessions, now uncovered and cartographed with Latin lucidity, Neapolitan lavish, and a pinch of feminist stregoneria ... . Bruno's atlas/book teaches the reader many things: among them, the meaning of topophilia, and how to never again mindlessly speak or write of something taking place .."—Wolfgang Schivelbusch, author of The Railway Journey