Airless Atmosphere

I was at notable art institution e-flux listening to Giuliana Bruno, a professor at Harvard University, speak about her latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media. She began by recounting an ancient myth by Pliny the Elder—his mere name a throwback to when aging was a symbol of immense wisdom rather than diminishing faculties, how chic!—about a Corinthian girl who, on the eve of her lover going off to fight in some unnamed war, notices the outline of his shadow in the light upon the wall and traces it into perpetuity. (The romance of time before the camera. How far we have fallen.) I feel for the Corinthian girl, and I wonder whether her lover ever returned to her, and I thank both God and the universe-at-large that there is no forced conscription under American law (if there were, though, I think my boyfriend and I would just run away).

This anecdote about the Corinthian girl is widely understood as a story symbolizing the birth of painting, but Bruno was up to something else. “When this woman in love transformed an architectura…