Atlas of Emotion

An award-winning cultural history of how we experience the world through art, film and architecture

Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavor to map the cultural terrain of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative blend of words and pictures, Giuliana Bruno emphasizes the connections between “sight” and “site” and “motion” and “emotion.” In so doing, she touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Louise Bourgeois, the filmmaking of Peter Greenaway and Michelangelo Antonioni, media archaeology and the origins of the museum, and her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, Bruno’s book opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.

“One of those critical works packed with learning and insights that at the same time takes you on an exhilarating ride through its author’s imagination.”
—Marina Warner, Guardian

“A hugely ambitious mapping of the complex intertwinings of film, architecture, and the body. 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

“In this astonishingly provocative, captivating, tender, elegant, and passionate nonchronological, interdisciplinary book, Bruno connects splendidly a psychogeography of cultural life … She takes the readers through a poetico-scholarly and picturesque journey—a visual travelogue, based both on philosophical theories and erudite conjectures … Bruno writes like an expressionist painter, who deeply captures the invisible and the instantaneous.”
—Choice

“In an exhilarating ride, the reader is transported across this vast hidden landscape to reach a whole new understanding of spatial experience.”
—Mark Wigley, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University

“The richness of Bruno’s take on the relation of motion and emotion … demonstrates its continuing relevance for current interdisciplinary visual cultural research.”
—Leonardo

Giuliana Bruno is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, winner of the 1993 prize for outstanding book from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Public Intimacy (2007), and Surface (2014). Atlas of Emotion won the 2003 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in Culture and History—a prize given to “the world’s best book on the moving image.