Surface: matters of aesthetics, materiality, and media

Surface: matters of aesthetics, materiality, and media
Giuliana Bruno

Giuliana Bruno will lecture on the subject of her new book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014). What is the place of materiality in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In this book, Giuliana Bruno investigates the space of material 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. She engages the surface as a place of material contact between people and art objects. In surface encounters, one senses the fabrics of the visual - the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Bruno (Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University) illuminates this modern surface condition at a time when façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. Showing how technologies of light produce new forms of materiality, she treats the screen surface a site where different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surface addresses contemporary visual culture, revealing new object relations and material connections across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media.

Organized by Escola de Comunicação, Artes e Tecnologias de Informação da Universidade Lusófona.
Local: amphitheater, floor -1.
Free admission, previous booking.