10.54103/ai/19827
How does an artwork express an “environmentality?” Can we redefine immersion, in critical terms, as a form of environmental projection? In taking up such questions from my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, my text addresses the relation between projection and environmentality in the visual arts in order to question immersivity. Confronted with the phenomenon of environmentalization, we need to re-imagine the ecology of representation. Positing ecology as an environmental relation, I will consider its artistic imagination both historically and theoretically. I propose that we revisit the environmentality of media archaeology to understand how this impulse is furthered in current moving-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves immersive. I will especially address environmentality as it relates to movement and scale, questioning the relation between immersion and magnification. I will advance my argument by presenting the large-scale moving-image installations of the Danish-born, New York artist Jesper Just. Does magnification always, only imply spectatorial immersion? Other forms of experience arise when confronting an ecology of scale in art. What else happens when we scale? Can immersion be understood, more critically, as a form of environmental absorption? In recasting immersion in environmental terms, I propose that we consider absorption as empathic projection with space. In shifting from the human subject’s own immersive identification to this critically aware, enveloping field of empathic projection with the non-human, we can discard the prevalent human-centric position that pervades most immersive discourses. A different ecology of immersivity rises to the surface by relating the empathic “projective imagination” to “atmospheric thinking.”
application/pdf
2785-7433
19827
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en
Giuliana Bruno
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Jesper Just
The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon
2
Thematic Section
2023-12-28
2023-02-09
2023-12-28
2024-02-07
AN-ICON
Giuliana Bruno
2023/12/28
10.54103/ai/19827
Harvard University
2785-7433
I
Jesper Just
en
Youngblood, G., “The Artist as Ecologist,” in Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970).
The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/19827/20020
2
              The
              Environmentality
of Immersive Projection:
The NatureAtmospheric
              of Scal
by Giuliana Bruno
                             e
                      thinking
                    Ecology of immersivity
                    Empathy and immersion
                    Scale and magnification
                    Jesper Just




                      Issue №1                Year 2023
                      → Immersions and Dives: From
                      the Environment to Virtual Reality
                      Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina,
                      Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello
The Environmentality
of Immersive Projection:
The Nature of Scale
GIULIANA BRUNO, Harvard University – https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827


Abstract                      How does an artwork express an “environ-
                 mentality?” Can we redefine immersion, in critical terms,
                 as a form of environmental projection? In taking up such
                 questions from my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection:
                 Environmentality in Art and Screen Media, my text address-
                 es the relation between projection and environmentality in
                 the visual arts in order to question immersivity. Confronted
                 with the phenomenon of environmentalization, we need to
                 re-imagine the ecology of representation. Positing ecolo-
                 gy as an environmental relation, I will consider its artistic
                 imagination both historically and theoretically. I propose
                 that we revisit the environmentality of media archaeology
                 to understand how this impulse is furthered in current mov-
                 ing-image projections in the art gallery that call themselves
                 immersive. I will especially address environmentality as it
                 relates to movement and scale, questioning the relation
                 between immersion and magnification. I will advance my
                 argument by presenting the large-scale moving-image in-
                 stallations of the Danish-born, New York artist Jesper Just.
                 Does magnification always, only imply spectatorial immer-
                 sion? Other forms of experience arise when confronting an
                 ecology of scale in art. What else happens when we scale?
                 Can immersion be understood, more critically, as a form of
                 environmental absorption? In recasting immersion in envi-
                 ronmental terms, I propose that we consider absorption as
                 empathic projection with space. In shifting from the human

GIULIANA BRUNO                                   29                      AN-ICON
                 subject’s own immersive identification to this critically aware,
                 enveloping field of empathic projection with the non-human,
                 we can discard the prevalent human-centric position that
                 pervades most immersive discourses. A different ecology
                 of immersivity rises to the surface by relating the empathic
                “projective imagination” to “atmospheric thinking.”




Keywords         Atmospheric thinking                Ecology of immersivity
                 Empathy and immersion                    Scale and magnification
                 Jesper Just
To quote this essay: G. Bruno, “The Environmentality of Immersive Projection: The Nature of Scale,”
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 29-55,
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19827.
GIULIANA BRUNO                                     30                                          AN-ICON
For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has
been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who
deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is the [...] pattern
of relations between organisms and their environment.1
                            How does an installation artist construct an
              atmosphere? What are the “elements” of its architecture
             – the visuals and sound – that design the ambiance of an
              aesthetic environment? In other words, how does an art-
              work express an “environmentality?” These questions are
              central to my latest book, Atmospheres of Projection: Envi-
              ronmentality in Art and Screen Media, and will be reprised
              in this essay with regard to the topic of this publication.2 I
              will address the relation between projection and environ-
              mentality in the visual arts with the aim of questioning the
              notion of immersivity and critiquing a strain of its dominant
              discourse. I am interested in exploring whether we can
              understand immersion as an atmospheric ambiance and
              redefine it, critically, as a form of environmental projection.
              We are indeed confronted today with various forms of envi-
              ronmentalization.3 This phenomenon asks us to reimagine
              the very ecology of immersivity.
                            I understand ecology, as Gene Youngblood
              prefigured in envisioning an “expanded cinema,” to be a
              fundamental form of environmental relation and related-
              ness. Such a form of relationality needs to be considered
              in the realms of history and geography in order to discern
              how the phenomenon of environmentalization affects the
              space of the visual arts and its transformations in time. In
              this respect, I propose that we reconsider the early history

      1 G. Youngblood, “The Artist as Ecologist,” in Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton,
      1970): 346.
      2 See G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media
      (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), which considers the interrelations of projection,
      atmosphere, and environment, linking “the projective imagination” to forms of “atmospheric
      thinking.”
      3 See A. Pinotti, “Towards An-Iconology: The Image as Environment,” Screen 61, no. 4 (Winter
      2020): 594-603, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa060.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                 31                                          AN-ICON
              of projection to account for the changes in its environment
              that are occurring in the arts and media of our time. I have
              long argued that an environmentality is rooted in the gene-
              alogy of the moving image in modernity.4 It was particularly
              present in the panoramic visual culture that emerged at
              the birth of the art of projection. The extensive phenom-
              enon that involved spectators flocking to experience the
              enveloping ambiance of a panorama might be considered
              an early experiential form of immersivity.5 In an effort to
              recast immersion in this historic setting and understand it
              as a more panoramic and ambient situation, I will consider
              the environmentality of this form of media archaeology. I
              will do so in order to explore how a panoramic impulse is
              furthered in contemporary moving-image projections in the
              art gallery that call themselves immersive.
                            Such an exploration will redefine immersivity
              in spatiotemporal terms as an atmospheric envelopment,
              while analyzing the making of this ambient space in visual
              art. In linking up the early environmental impulse of pre-
              cinematic projection to the post-cinematic art installation
              of our times, I will especially address issues of movement
              and scale. I pursue this path of mobility and scaling to
              question the passivity, inactivity, and individuality that is
              usually attributed to immersivity, and to challenge a fixation
              on the subject’s optical identification with the device that
              produces immersion. In contrast to these views that often
              color both the practice and discourse of immersion, I wish
              to establish a much less static and more haptic paradigm




      4 See G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso,
      2002); and G. Bruno, “The Screen as Object: Art and the Atmospheres of Projection,” in C.
      Iles, ed., Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 (New York: Whitney Museum of
      American Art, 2016, exhibition catalogue): 156-67.
      5 On the subject of early immersive views, see, among others, A. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your
      Spine: Cinema, Museum, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

GIULIANA BRUNO                                32                                         AN-ICON
               that emphasizes the relational activation of spectatorial
               mobilities and the mobilizing force of atmosphere.
                            To this end, I will especially rethink the relation
               between immersion and a specific architecture: the “mag-
               nification” of the image. This phenomenon, first defined by
               early film theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, has itself
               today become magnified.6 In current popular and even the-
               oretical discourses on virtual or augmented reality, there
               is a tendency to believe that a large projective image nec-
               essarily induces immersion. But do we really need to col-
               lapse these two notions? Does magnification always imply
               spectatorial immersion?
                            I am interested in pursuing other forms of ex-
               perience that arise when confronting an ecology of scale.
               Scaling has long been practiced in art history, where mag-
               nification has gone hand in hand with miniaturization.7 And
               large scale has not always manifested itself as an immersive
               condition. Nor has it necessarily implied an affirmation of
               the sublime, with its immersive vision of boundless infinity
               and arresting effects of awe. In my view, the most interest-
               ing way of understanding scale is in relation to other aes-
               thetic histories and especially as an architectural practice.
               This is because in architecture scaling is an essential tool
               for building an environment. Hence a central question for
               me is: What happens to a projective environment when
               we scale? Can the effects of large forms of scaling imply
               a critical awareness, a participatory relationality? Finally,
               can immersion be redefined, more critically, as an active,
               transformative form of absorption in an environment?
                            In recasting immersion in these different, more
               dynamic environmental terms, I propose that we consid-
               er its perceptual affects as well as effects. For immersive

      6 See J. Epstein, “Magnification and Other Writings,” October, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 9-25,
      https://doi.org/10.2307/778434.
      7 For a treatment of scale in art history, see J. Kee, E. Lugli, eds., To Scale (Oxford: Wiley
      Blackwell, 2015).

GIULIANA BRUNO                                   33                                            AN-ICON
              effects are indeed affects. To be aesthetically absorbed in
              space mobilizes a particular affect: a feeling of empathy
              and sympathy with the space itself – the atmosphere – in
              which one is immersed. As an aesthetic practice, absorp-
              tion engages an empathic “projection” into an environment.
              It is a form of envelopment in an atmosphere. And thus, to
              move away from optical immersivity toward an awareness
              of this atmospheric environmentality, I suggest in my book
              turning to theories of empathy and sympathies with space,
              and advancing their discourse in contemporary ways.8
                            Let me simply mention here the writings of
              Theodor Lipps, who developed a vision of Einfühlung, or
              in-feeling, as a spatial empathy, and whose notion of em-
              pathic projection in ambiance possessed an atmospheric
              quality and tonality that aligns closely with the discourse
              on Stimmung.9 This atmospheric, tonal interpretation of the
              transmission of affects in art has been inspirational to my
              work, and some aspects of empathy and sympathy appear
              to be returning, with different interpretations, in other new
              materialist, “sympathetic” forms of aesthetic philosophy.10
                            With the specific aim here of expanding the
              projective reach of absorption in aesthetic space, one might
              turn in particular to “the laying bare of empathic projec-
              tion” as recently reconsidered by Michael Fried.11 The art
              historian has long been interested in the “the invention of


      8 For further articulation of this subject, see G. Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection, especially:
      chapters 2-3.
      9 See, among others, T. Lipps, “Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure” (1905), in K. Aschenbrenner,
      A. Isenberg, eds, Aesthetic Theories: Studies in the Philosophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs NJ:
      Prentice-Hall, 1965): 403-12; H. F. Mallgrave, E. Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space:
      Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art
      and the Humanities, 1994).
      10 See J. Bennett, “Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman,” in S. Iovino, S.
      Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 239-52;
      J. Bennett, Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (Durham NC: Duke University Press,
      2020).
      11 M. Fried, “The Laying Bare of Empathic Projection,” in Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray,
      Marioni, Gordon (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2011): 205-15. For a different
      interpretation of empathy in art, grounded in the political force of trauma and sensitive to
      its cultural memory, see J. Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art
      (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

GIULIANA BRUNO                                  34                                          AN-ICON
              absorption:”12 what he calls “a powerful mode of emotional
              communication [that] can be actuated by absolutely mini-
              mal physiognomic and gestural means.”13 Such a minimal,
              non-representational form of “empathic projection” com-
              municates an atmosphere of inner absorption. It is interest-
              ing that Fried borrows the term “empathic projection” from
              the philosopher Stanley Cavell, for whom this is a path for
              overcoming the borders of separation and creating “a seam
              in human experience.”14
                            If understood as such a projection, an immer-
              sive process can create relational seams that are atmo-
              spheric joinings and affective joints. To perceive empathy
              with space is to sense the ecology of its atmospheric, situ-
              ational existence in time. This experience of an atmospheric
              tonality has the connective capacity to bridge the divide
              between subjects and objects. An empathic absorption
              in an environment further connects the human and the
              nonhuman, creating an experiential seam between the an-
              imate and the inanimate. If we become attuned to sensing
              immersivity as such an active, interstitial space of relation,
              we can access an ecology of relationality that is not con-
              fined to anthropocentric modalities. Environmentality, then,
              offers a way not only to reclaim empathic projection in art
              but to project it into larger ecologies.
                            In the form of “empathic projection” practiced
              in the art of cine-projection, the work of technology extends
              to the surroundings, and this affects its atmosphere. The
              projective apparatus itself plays an important part in this
              process of absorption. A deeper absorptive modality sur-
              faces in environmental artworks that do not hide their own



      12 M. Fried, “Four Honest Outlaws:” 208.
      13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010): 76-7.
      14 S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York:
      Oxford University Press, 1999): 425.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                35                                         AN-ICON
              projective mechanism in their temporality and spatiality.15
              The energy of a diffused projective empathy is mobilized
              when a self-reflexive technology reveals its own mechanism
              at play, laying it bare and activating it in ambiance. If we
              recast immersivity with this sense of environmentality – that
              is, with awareness of the cultural techniques that make it
              possible – we can discard the prevalent human-centric, per-
              spectival position that pervades most immersive discours-
              es. We can overcome the fixation on the human subject’s
              visual identification and singular preoccupation with the
              projective apparatus, especially those of VR or AR, to focus
              instead on the inanimate, the environment, and the natural
              realm. It is time to stop putting individuality and opticality
              at the center of immersivity, and to pursue a more critically
              aware, haptic field of empathic projections. In this way, a
              different ecology of immersivity and relationality can rise to
              the surface in enveloping forms of environmental screening
              that link the “projective imagination” to an “atmospheric
              thinking.”

                                 Environmentality and Empathic
                                 Projection in Art

                            Having laid out my theoretical premises, let me
               now turn to an artistic practice that is in line with what I have
               proposed. I like to think closely, along and through the work
               of contemporary artists who perform analytical gestures of
               environmental projection. Hence, I will pursue my critical
               argumentation about immersion by navigating through the
               work of the Danish-born, New York-based artist Jesper Just,
               whose forms of empathic projection express an atmospher-
               ic thinking. I will specifically address the manifestation of

      15 On this subject, see K. Wilder, “Projective Art and the ‘Staging’ of Empathic Projection,”
      Moving Image Review & Art Journal 5, no. 1-2 (2016): 125-40, https://doi.org/10.1386/
      miraj.5.1-2.124_1. Wilder analyzes in particular the experimental landscape films of Chris
      Welsby.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                  36                                           AN-ICON
              scale and the magnification of the image in these works
              to challenge the notion that these are totalizing immersive
              conditions. His work will also enable us to rethink a crucial
              architectural component of immersivity: the design of an
              installation.
                            A projection that is “environ-mental” – that cre-
              ates a psychic atmosphere of empathy with space, its size
              and motion – arises in the ambiance of Just’s moving-image
              installation This Nameless Spectacle, presented several
              times since 2011. This is due to the self-aware design and
              spatial construction of the installation. As viewers walk into
              the gallery space, they confront two very large screens
              that face each other. Each screen measures approximately
              twenty meters in length by five meters in height. As they
              are also placed more than twenty meters apart, it is hard
              to escape the sense of magnitude of this projection.16 The
              massive scale of the installation provokes a physical re-
              action, demanding that the viewers become not simply
              immersed but rather “incorporated” into it. Indeed, one
              cannot help being absorbed into the space of this projec-
              tion, empathetically enveloped in its atmosphere.
                            To understand what is going on in this magni-
              fied ambiance of projection, gallery viewers must position
              themselves in the midst of this moving work and negotiate
              a space between the large ambient screens. Moving along
              the course of the gallery, not only a physical displacement
              but also an imaginary motion takes hold of one’s body. A
              form of “empathic projection” is triggered here because
              the work lays bare its exhibitionary mechanism, showing
              off its magnificent projective scale in moving form.
                            Confronting this particularly large species of
              screen, and the distance that both isolates and unites the

      16 This Nameless Spectacle was conceived and exhibited with these dimensions as part of
      the monographic exhibition This Unknown Spectacle, devoted to the work of Jesper Just, on
      view October 21, 2011-February 5, 2012, at MAC/VAL, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-
      Marne, France.

GIULIANA BRUNO                               37                                        AN-ICON
               two screen entities, one’s habitual relation to space, even
               the space of one’s body, changes. Different types of scal-
               ing are confronted, haptically sensed, resulting in a sculp-
               tural experience of screen architecture. As the projective
               screen becomes a sculptural object, it impels the viewer
               to become more aware of volumes. One constantly has to
               measure the scale of one’s body against the scale of this
               milieu of projection.
                             Corporeally absorbed in the space of this vid-
               eo work, rather than being optically, passively immersed,
               viewers physically experience a form of spatial, even atmo-
               spheric “perturbation.” Nothing is static on these encom-
               passing screens, including the landscape they present. At
               the beginning of the film, the camera tracks through the
               space of a park. An atmosphere blossoms into being here:
               as the light shimmers on the leaves of trees for a long while,
               the sound of movement can be heard. You follow the sound
               cue that propels you to continue through the space of the
               park, sensing its atmosphere, breathing its “air.”17 There is
               a breeze, and the tree branches tremble and quiver. The
               motion of leaves in the wind on one screen always finds
               corresponding atmospheric movement on the other. These
               screens, you discover, always move in unison, often giving
               the impression of a movement advancing through space.
               Different views and vistas are presented, and you feel as if
               you were actually “tracking” through the park, sympathet-
               ically absorbing its atmospheric scenery.




      17 As further developed in Atmospheres of Projection, an “air” is here understood to be the
      atmosphere of a site, and an affect that affects us. On the effects of air in painting, see G. Didi-
      Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual
      Culture 2, no. 3 (2003): 275-89, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412903002003001; S. Connor,
      The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010).

GIULIANA BRUNO                                    38                                            AN-ICON
                                 Panorama of a Historical Movement,
                                 while Absorbed in the Atmosphere
                                 of a Park

A park [is] a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical
region [...] a “thing-for-us.”18
                             As you navigate the sea of images of this en-
               vironment, you end up displaced back in time as well as
               destabilized by atmospheric perturbations. The scale of
               the installation space communicates a geology of strat-
               ified temporalities and nonlinear times. With This Name-
               less Spectacle, Just has created a post-cinematic ride that
               takes us inside the prehistory of large-scale visual display.
               As it transports us through the atmosphere of the park, it
               leads us to rediscover the environmental configuration of
               modern visual culture and the emergence of a form of im-
               mersive projection from its very atmosphere.
                             The point of entry that Just stages for This
               Nameless Spectacle is the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a
               public garden, developed as part of the plan for remodel-
               ing the urban fabric of Paris directed by Georges-Eugène
               Haussmann. The manner in which Just films in this park,
               employing scale and movement in its depiction, reveals the
               cultural ambiance of environmentalization of which the park
               is a part. In the nineteenth century, an ambient movement
               arose across diverse cultural expressions, including land-
               scape design. Moving along the path of modernity from
               view painting to garden views, from travel sketches to itiner-
               ant viewing boxes, from panoramas and other geographical
              “-oramas” to forms of interior/exterior mapping, from the
               mobile views of train travel to urban promenades, a trans-
               formative experience of spatial absorption was born. This

       18 R. Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in N. Holt, ed., The
       Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York: New York University Press, 1979): 119.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                 39                                         AN-ICON
              new geography was the product of a “panoramic vision”
              that dynamically reconfigured the environment.19
                            In this novel geovisuality, sites were set in mov-
              ing perspectives, expanding both outward and inward as
              they were absorbed and consumed in movement by the
              spectator. This new ambient sensibility engaged the phys-
              icality of the observers, challenging their ability to take in
              a mobilized space. And from this moving panorama at the
              end of the nineteenth century a new observer emerged
              in the persona of the film spectator, a body empathically
             “projected” into an environment of moving images.20
                            With This Nameless Spectacle, Jesper Just im-
              pels us to travel back to this history of “site-seeing.” He
              employs a panoramic mode of spatio-visual construction,
              and does so to expand the potential of this precinematic
              history in our times. Absorbed in this projective space, one
              can experience in particular the sense of scale and the at-
              mospheric touch of garden vistas. Garden views created
              the experience of embracing an environmental terrain, and
              of being enveloped in its ambiance. They combined a sen-
              sualist theory of the imagination with a touch of physicality.
              The garden designs of modernity engaged the corporeality
              of the body in the moving absorption of an environment.
              Automata, sculptures, and playful fluid mechanisms that
              included fountains and watery landscapes enhanced this
              natural atmospherics, as is the case with the Parisian park
              Just films. The vistas themselves incited viewers to move
              into the transformation of an ambiance. Ultimately, then,




      19 See W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the
      Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
      20 For a more extensive treatment of the history of modern, mobilized space, see, among
      others, G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion; A. Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft
      (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006); F. Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity
      (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); L. Charney ,V.R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the
      Invention of Modern Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).

GIULIANA BRUNO                                  40                                         AN-ICON
              landscape offered the body an ever-changing experience
              of atmospheric spatio-visual display.
                             As one ponders the origin of this embracing
              space – a landscape of “atmospheric screening” – one
              realizes why Just chose this setting for This Nameless
              Spectacle. This is an installation that enhances the mate-
              rial apparatus of visual display to create an environmental
              projection. Landscape is not at all a simple background
              here but rather the moving core of a technology of projec-
              tion that self-reflexively incorporates a historical setting in
              its very ambiance. Its design holds within itself the actual
              movement in space that led from garden views to the es-
              tablishment of the filmic screen as a place for pictures to
              be “sensed” in projective, atmospheric motion.
                            This Nameless Spectacle reminds us that the
              garden, like the cinema, is not an optical but a haptical af-
              fair, inviting empathy with space. The picturesque garden,
              in particular, was the place that historically “enable[d] the
              imagination to form the habit of feeling through the eye.”21
              It was an affective “mode of processing the physical world
              for our consumption.”22 This modern landscape initiated a
              form of immersivity that is a virtual form of touch, putting
              us “in touch” with inner space and engaging all senses syn-
              esthetically in shifting sensations of ambiance. Empathic
              projection would be felt as one’s interiority was mobilized
              in the process of relational connection with the natural site.
              A reciprocal, sympathetic relation with the nuances of am-
              biance was thus established in architecting the atmosphere
              of the garden.
                             In moving through the Parisian park in This
              Nameless Spectacle, Just retraces this ambient genealogy
              of modernity: the mobilization of atmosphere, understood

      21 C. Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
      1927): 4.
      22 J. Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape
      Architecture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992): 4.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                41                                         AN-ICON
              also as affective ambiance, in an environmental process
              that traveled from landscape design to cine-projection. In
              this ambient sense, as the shimmering light of the projec-
              tion, the breath of air, and the motion of the wind come to
              be virtually sensed on one’s skin, a real atmospheric “per-
              turbation” can be felt in the installation. Even an effect of
              weather arises in this empathic projection. And so environ-
              mental phenomena that are present in a natural landscape
              come to join the very atmosphere of projection.

                               Environments of Projection:
                               A Digital Mareorama

Announcing an upheaval in the relation of art to technology, pan-
oramas are at the same time an expression of a new attitude
toward life.23
                           In the context of this environmental panorama,
              the technique of projective display of This Nameless Spec-
              tacle is also to be considered, especially as it regards ab-
              sorption in scale. The spatial arrangement of the work, set
              on two large screens that appear to roll out moving images
              for a spectator in their midst, mediates a haptic, atmospher-
              ic communication that clearly reinvents modernity’s pan-
              oramic forms of immersive exhibition. This contemporary
              mode of enveloping display exhibits a fluid technological
              history of environmentality, especially in its way of mobiliz-
              ing scale. In its gigantic mobility, it specifically recalls the
              technique of the “moving panorama.”
                           A product of nineteenth-century’s exhibitionary
              culture, the panorama form is usually associated with enor-
              mous paintings exhibited in circular spaces, surrounding


      23 W. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),” in The
      Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press-Harvard
      University Press, 1999), 6.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                42                                         AN-ICON
              the observer with the weight of their scale.24 One applica-
              tion of this giant form of display included movement. In-
              spired by the circular panorama, the moving panorama was
              particularly engaged with geography.25 A popular form of
              entertainment across Europe and the United States, mov-
              ing panoramas offered spectators the sensation that they
              themselves were being transported as images of space
              scrolled panoramically before their eyes, with sound and
              light effects that enhanced the overall sense of transport.
                           The apparatus of display played an import-
              ant part in the construction of this absorbing geography,
              which was not merely representational. A framed fabric of
              drawable curtains, moved by a mechanical cranking system,
              could suffice to produce the effect of a moving screen, turn-
              ing into an enveloping scrolling screen. But more complex
              mechanisms were also devised, and the most advanced
              were exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle Interna-
              tionale, in Paris. The Stereorama, for one, let spectators
              imagine they were taking a sea voyage, sailing along the
              Mediterranean coast, aboard a ship rocked by waves. This
              elaborate form of environmental display involved a feat of
              technological imagination and execution. The point of this
              technique of moving exhibition was the scale of motion.
             “Unlike the usual panoramas,” as a contemporary article
              tells us, “the background is painted on the outer mantle
              of a slowly revolving cylinder with a wide protruding edge
              carrying forty concentric sheet-metal screens four inches
              in height on which the waves have been painted.” As for
              the screens, they “are moved up and down by an electric

      24 See, among other works, R. Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All-
      Embracing” View, (London: Trefoil-Barbican Art Gallery, 1988, exhibition catalogue); S. Bordini,
      Storia del panorama. La visione totale nella pittura del XIX secolo (Rome: Officina Edizioni,
      1984); K. Trumpener, T. Barringer, eds., On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between
      Canvas and Screen (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2020).
      25 As media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo shows in his comprehensive history of these
      panoramas, motion, both virtual and actual, was an essential sensory component of this
      particular precinematic form, which produced kinesthetic effects in the audience. See
      E. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related
      Spectacles (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013): 46-54.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                  43                                          AN-ICON
              motor through a linkage system including rods, hinges, and
              wheels.” 26
                            Considering this history of exhibition, we can
              venture to propose that the invention of the projection of
              moving images on a screen, and the function of active
              immersivity that is reinvented today, arose from the scale
              of the enterprise of the moving panorama, which not only
              produced scrolling motion and waves of perturbation but
              was also an itinerant medium.27 Spectators were offered
              the virtual sensation of being absorbed in a journey through
              the shifting atmospheres of a landscape.28 With this public
              spectacle, open to the environment, a majestic, virtual form
              of imaging atmospheric change took hold of one’s body.
              The panoramic object of display, capable of offering the
              pleasure of scrolling through an ambiance, thus created
              the material condition of existence of the cinematic screen
              as itself a space of atmospheric projection.
                           The projective screen, then, did not come into
              being as a small, flat, frontal, windowed geometry, as is
              usually assumed is some media studies, but rather as a
              gigantic geographic and moving display.29 In other words,
              the screen emerged as an environmental medium. It is im-
              portant to acknowledge this lack of frontality, fixity, and
              flatness in early forms of screening, and to underscore an
              expansive milieu of volumetric plasticity and movement, if
              we wish to rewrite the genealogic course of the projective

      26 “Die neuesten Panoramen,” in De Natuur (1900): 257-58, as cited in S. Oettermann, The
      Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1980), trans. D. L. Schneider (New York: Zone Books,
      1997): 177.
      27 This was an apparatus of haptic mobility, for it not only produced scrolling motion and
      waves of perturbation with its mechanism but was also an itinerant medium. It was often taken
      from place to place by itinerant showmen.
      28 A particularly precinematic development of this traveling medium, also presented at the
      Exposition Universelle in Paris, was the exhibition Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama, which
      simulated a trip from Moscow to Beijing aboard the famous railway. A succession of images
      of the diverse environment viewers were imaginatively traversing appeared as if rolling past a
      framed window of the train car.
      29 In arguing that the screen performs an environmental operation, and challenging a narrow
      interpretation of its geometry, I specifically respond to claims put forth in L. Manovich, “The
      Screen and the User,” in The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001): 94-
      115.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                 44                                          AN-ICON
             apparatus as a set of environmental operations. It is crucial
             as well to stress for my argument regarding the atmospher-
             ic ecology of visual display that, in the moving panorama,
             atmosphere was not only displayed but cultivated. The
             display constituted an environment in itself, and it was ca-
             pable of registering change in the atmosphere of a site.
                           The changes in ambiance were at times en-
             hanced by cutouts that depicted objects in the surround-
             ing scenery, moving in zones that extended from the fore-
             ground to trees far out in the field. Rotating in endless
             loops around the scrolling canvas of the panorama, these
             cutouts “projected” a sense of depth to the transformation
             of the landscape. Multiple backdrops operated at different
             speeds to create a sense of rolling vistas, with the added
             effect that the differences in speed between each of them
             created variable combinations of scenes. In this display,
             which turned a means of transport into the emerging cin-
             ematic screen, endowing it with the ability to modify an
             ambiance, the scale of the display was as relevant as the
             rolling, diffracted, dispersed movement.

                         An Oceanic Voyage from Postcinema
                         to Precinema

                           As this form of “projective imagination” merged,
             at time of modernity, with an “atmospheric thinking,” a
             projective future was also envisaged, for inscribed here is
             also the kind of magnification that characterizes display in
             our digital age. As we ponder the elaborate construction
             of Just’s This Nameless Spectacle, it becomes evident that
             his giant installation has, built into it, a mechanism that
             reinvents the environmental history of projective display
             we have just outlined. In its digital configuration, it cre-
             ates virtual traveling through atmospheres that reenact the


GIULIANA BRUNO                      45                             AN-ICON
               immersive ambiance and environmentality of the moving
               panorama.
                            The perambulating movement through the Parc
               des Buttes Chaumont recalls in particular the function of
               the early roll transparencies created by Louis Carrogis de
               Carmontelle, representing the moving vistas of the Parc
               Monceau, near Paris.30 But it is not only the motion of the
               representation that creates the emotion and triggers the
               empathic projection with the garden space but also the
               moving mechanism of the projective dispositif, and espe-
               cially its scale. The corresponding, diffracted motion that
               occurs in the space of the installation, not simply on but
               between the two large screens that face each other, is
               laid bare, and it is closely connected to the empathy with
               space created in a particularly absorptive form of moving
               panorama.
                            The configuration of Just’s moving-image in-
               stallation recalls especially the dynamic, atmospheric use
               of display that characterized the environment of the Mareo-
               rama.31 This was a spectacular form of moving panorama
               that used two “screens” simultaneously, rolling out a set
               of moving scenes that simulated the atmosphere of a voy-
               age at sea. Spectators were positioned in the middle of
               the display, aboard a ship, which rocked back and forth to
               enhance the sensation of motion and perturbation of being
               projected into the natural environment of a seascape. An
               article written at the time tells us that

the plan for the Mareorama presented [...] two screens, each 2,500
feet long and forty feet in height [...] to be unrolled,” with “a double,
swinging movement [that] was to be imparted to the spectator’s
platform which was shaped like a ship.
       30 See E. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: 40-6.
       31 The topic of the moving panorama was discussed in an interview with the artist in New
       York on September 16, 2011. Just has generously shared his artistic process with me on
       several other occasions, for which I thank him.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                 46                                         AN-ICON
                             The scale of the scrolling screens was grandi-
               ose, for “215,000 square feet of screen was to be unrolled
               before the visitor’s eye.” And the movement produced was
               impressive and destabilizing: “One of the screens moves
               on the port side, the other on the starboard.”32 In addition
               to this mechanics of perturbation, elaborate effects repro-
               duced atmospheric changes related to different times of
               day and rendered shifts in weather and actual perturbations.
                             Absorption in the Mareorama was an experi-
               ence of unfolding events in a floating, situational ambiance
              – even in climatic perturbation – precisely as happens in
              Just’s installation. Viewers were sandwiched between two
               giant, moving screens that enhanced the sensation of tak-
               ing in an atmosphere and experiencing its changing states.
              All the kinesthetic effects made the visitors to the space of
               the Mareorama not only feel the motions but empathize with
               them. In a similar manner, spectators of Just’s installation
               who negotiate their own movement between complex ap-
               paratuses of rolling projective display, do so kinesthetically,
               imaginatively, and virtually as well as with actual motion.
                             In This Nameless Spectacle, architectural mag-
               nitude contributes greatly to the empathic absorption in the
               shifting, fluid ambiance, that is, in the environment itself
               of the projection.33 The Mareorama “ship” could accom-
               modate seven hundred spectators. Just’s double-screen
               movement likewise relies on the scale of the gallery in which
               it is exhibited, and on a physically grandiose sense of space
               that underscores the environmental root of the emergence




      32 S. Oettermann, “Die neuesten Panoramen,” in The Panorama: 179.
      33 Although conceived in the extremely large format discussed, the screens have been
      adapted to the architecture of the gallery site for subsequent exhibitions. A reduced scale, for
      instance, at J. Cohan in New York in 2012, created a more intimate feeling for the spectator,
      who was sandwiched between the still-large screens of the mareoramic display.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                  47                                           AN-ICON
              of projection in forms of giant, moving display.34 The Mareo-
              rama ultimately magnified the sensory, sympathetic impact
              of exposure to an affecting atmosphere; following its cur-
              rents, Just’s own liquid mode of exhibition activates this
              ambient “sense” of display in installation form in its own
              empathic projection. Laying bare the projective dispositif
              that turns the gallery space into a moving vessel, it makes
              it into a vehicle of atmospheric perturbations. In this sense,
              the space of the art gallery constitutes a real part of the
              installation, and the persona of the gallery viewer becomes,
              quite poignantly, “installed.”
                            On this screen interface, the turn of the last
              century thus joins the beginning of the new millennium in a
              reflection on the environment of projection and its cultural
              ecology. Just links together the energy of potentiality that
              characterized the space of visual display in early modernity
              with the potential expressed today when experimenting
              environmentally with digital technology. The artist not only
              shows us how central the environment of projection is in
              our time but argues that the desire for absorption in geo-
              graphic display is truly enduring. Ultimately, This Nameless
              Spectacle demonstrates how the large-scale architecture
              of the screen has traveled across time in projection while
              exhibiting the screen itself as an environment, even an am-
              bient architecture – the atmospheric form in which projec-
              tion comes into being, and can even dissolve.




      34 Just’s installation returns us to that historically dynamic, multiple form of ambient display
      without, however, reproducing the construction literally. He does not exhibit the actual
      machine or mechanism that is at the origin of the work but rather incorporates the scale of
      the Mareorama and its movement across screens in the physical spatiality of the installation,
      which encompasses the transit of viewers in gallery space. In this sense, the installation does
      not follow the trend of display that has been spreading since the arrival of the digital age, in
      which artists have taken to exhibiting outmoded forms of visual technology in the gallery. Just
      does not belabor the obsolescence of the cinematic apparatus or its panoramic predecessor
      or show any sense of nostalgia for older forms of display. This Nameless Spectacle rather
      works at historicizing from within, reinventing the possibilities of screening expressed by the
      moving, modern mode of ambient display that gave rise to the cinematic era of projection.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                  48                                           AN-ICON
                                Scaling an Environment

                            As screens become prominently incorporated
              into both our private and public lives, the work of scalar
              reinterpretation that Just pursues becomes particularly sig-
              nificant, for a reinvention of the act of screening in the en-
              vironment is especially pressing today. Screens proliferate
              in widely different forms in our surroundings. They have
              decreased in size, becoming more portable: computers,
              smart phones, and iPads, which enable us to scroll hapti-
              cally, now travel with us at all times as our personal pan-
              oramas. The rise of the miniature form goes hand in hand
              with magnification. In contrast to the shrinking size of our
              personal screens, we are witnessing an increasing use of
              the gigantic as screens have become especially magnified
              in the spectacle of three-dimensional exhibition.
                            Digital technology has enlarged the possibilities
              of projection in expanded cinematic forms of immersivity.
              Large-scale panoramic forms of projection, such as LED
              video walls, proliferate and have changed the very pan-
              orama of our environment, creating a veritable immersive
              screenscape.35 The technique of 3-D projection mapping,
              in particular, can turn an entire building or landscape into
              a screen environment.36 Heirs of the atmospheres of “son
              et lumière” shows, and of modernity’s dioramas and pan-
              oramic spectacles, these magnified projections can even
              design a performative environment. A haptic, immersive
              landscape is digitally fashioned as the façade of an edifice

      35 On the urban screen, see, among others, S. McQuire, M. Martin, S. Niederer, eds., Urban
      Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009); N. Verhoeff, “Screens in the
      City,” in D. Chateau, J. Moure, eds., Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship (Amsterdam:
      Amsterdam University Press, 2016): 125-39; C. Berry, J. Harbord, R. Moore, eds., Public
      Space, Media Space (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
      36 S. Chakravorty, “Spaces of Spectatorship: Architectures of the Projected Image,” Polished
      Panels 1, no. 2, Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture (March 7, 2016), http://www.
      mediapolisjournal.com/2016/03/spaces-of-spectatorship-architectures-of-the-projected-
      image/, accessed August 30, 2023. In projection mapping, a two- or three-dimensional object
      is spatially mapped by using specialized software that mimics the real environment it is to be
      projected upon. This software can interact with a projector to fit any desired image onto any
      surface, small or large.

GIULIANA BRUNO                                 49                                          AN-ICON
              turns into a projective skin. Cities are punctuated by these
              seductive large-scale projective envelopes that create am-
              biance.
                            But in projection mapping, the idea of an en-
              vironment of projection risks becoming literalized. If the
              ambiance of projection is remapped in a reductive way, the
              notion of ambient media itself shrinks. The effects of media
              façades created in literal ways are often questionable, as
             “ambient” begins to take on environmental connotations
              that are pacifying and not far removed from commerce.37
              After all, large-scale projection mapping is mostly used,
              contiguously with artistic and urban-branding pursuits, by
              publicity and advertising firms. Basking in the glow of giant
              projections can lead to opiate effects or the simple encour-
              agement of consumption as opposed to the production of
              engagement and perturbation.
                            As the ambiance of projection is being trans-
              formed by digital technology, artists are increasingly re-
              sponding creatively and critically to these issues of the
              sculptural and panoramic scale of immersive projection.
              Just, for instance, critically exposed how large-scale projec-
              tion transforms the urban environment with the projection
              of his Servitudes (2015), a cinematic, architectural work
              consisting of eight sequences filmed in and around the
              World Trade Center in New York. Originally conceived for
              the subterranean gallery space of the Palais de Tokyo in
              Paris, this filmic work was scaled up in November 2015
              and displayed on a series of large electronic billboards
              on the building façades of New York’s Times Square. In
              2019, the same work was also projected onto layers of
              semitransparent fabric in yet another geographic location,
              in museum space – a fact that makes one question the
              function of scaling as well as further reflect on the nature
      37 For a critical reading of the ambient, see P. Roquet, Ambient Media: Japanese
      Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); S. Kim-Cohen,
      Against Ambience and Other Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

GIULIANA BRUNO                                50                                         AN-ICON
               and fabric of projection in relation to its specific geography
               and location.38

                                 Projecting a Global Urban Scale

                             These experiments on the vast projective po-
               tential of digital technology thus force us to rethink the issue
               of large-scale immersive projection in light of its own com-
               plex history. It is particularly urgent to ask ourselves ques-
               tions about the nature and consequences of scaling. What
               changes in an environment of projection when subjected
               to different scales? How does scale change the nature of
               the screen itself as an object? What kinds of projection,
               understood as forms of cultural transmission, does mag-
               nification comport?
                             With this variability of scale, Servitudes rein-
               forces the penchant for “empathic” projection that Just
               exhibited in his earlier works, for, as we have noted, this
               process is set in motion when works actively lay bare their
               own projective mechanism rather than keeping it static and
               invisible. Intercourses, which premiered at the 2013 Venice
               Biennale, took this up at a global scale.39 This five-channel
               video and installation was set in a suburb of Hangzhou,
               China, that has been built as a replica of Paris, France. The

      38 When this work was commissioned by Paris’s Palais de Tokyo for their expansive
      subterranean gallery space, Just began to research the exhibition hall, which dates from
      Paris’s 1937 world’s fair. The 2015 projection of Servitudes in New York’s Times Square was
      part of Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance. Servitudes
      was installed on semitransparent screen fabric in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen,
      Denmark, June 15 - August 11, 2019.
      39 Reflecting on how a pavilion at the Biennale represents a country inside another country,
      Just engaged the architectural configuration of this conflated projection and intervened in
      the site of the Danish Pavilion, itself a composite structure. By walling in the grand entrance
      of the building’s neoclassic façade, he enticed viewers to walk around the colonnade and
      enter instead through a courtyard, which ushered them inside the modernist part of the
      pavilion. Here, the interior space had been transformed into a construction site. Walls built
      from concrete cinder blocks created another architectural path within the already hybrid space
      of the pavilion. The rough, impermanent fabrication of the concrete blocks lent a sense of
      eeriness to the site: though it appeared to be a place in the making, it felt as if it were already
      in ruins. In constructing an installation space that evoked the atmosphere of a ruin in progress,
      Just made material the layered process inherent in the imaginary fabrication of such sites,
      closely engaging their imaginative “projections.”

GIULIANA BRUNO                                   51                                            AN-ICON
            large scale of the projection inside the pavilion created a
            feeling of cultural displacement. In it, three Black men me-
            ander in a desolate ambiance of empty streets, uninhabited
            façades, and unfinished staircases that lead nowhere. This
            Paris imagined in China had a postapocalyptic feeling, even
            a quasi–science fiction dimension, despite actually being a
            real place. The projected images worked together with the
            architectural design of the pavilion to instill in us a concrete
            sense of how a global urban imaginary is made, and what
            scale this process has assumed. What is performed and
            projected here is a becoming of global scale – a state that
            contains processes of dislocation, hybridization, and entropy.
                          Intercourses is named after that which lies in
            between: relational things like processes of interstitial con-
            struction. It deals with the actual process of projection as
            a space of relation and intermediation. In this sense, it fol-
            lows the course of Just’s investigation of environmentality
            as a magnified psychogeography. The very magnitude of
            the exhibition space drives a navigation of atmospheres,
            engaging viewers in the scale of the destabilizing projec-
            tive ambiance in which they are themselves empathically
            projected.
                          Intercourses confronts even more directly than
            This Nameless Spectacle the effects and affects of the tech-
            nology of scaling in contemporary digital culture. This is a
            work of actual scalar construction, for its five screens have
            different configurations that generate further geographic
            dislocation through their differing positions in space and
            angles of view. Moreover, this Paris-in-China suspended
            between states of ruin and construction offers projections
            that can vary radically in size, from one to fifteen meters,
            depending on the site of the installation.
                          In such a way, Just questions the different
            forms of screen scale that proliferate in our digital envi-
            ronment. In laying bare the architecture of the projective

GIULIANA BRUNO                      52                              AN-ICON
              mechanism, he triggers a critical response to the cultural
              phenomenon of variable screen size, making us reflect on
              how miniaturization relates to magnification in digital cul-
              ture. By confronting what happens in the process of scaling
              up or down, from one size to the other, he creates cultural
              awareness of the state of screening today while exhibiting
              the process itself of flexible projection. This architectural
              scaling makes gallery viewers aware of the very architec-
              ture of screening, and especially attuned to how ambiance
              changes in scale.
                            Furthermore, for Just, large scale does not
              consist in simple magnification or simplistic immersivity.
              The magnitude of the largest screen in Intercourses, rather,
              challenges the conventional use of magnitude in film.40 Less
              associated with figurative facial close-ups, as is traditionally
              most often the case in cinema, it is more attuned to the
              vastness and complexity of the geographic and cultural
              landscapes it renders. Scale is here also anything but mon-
              umental and does not constitute a direct correlate of the
              aesthetic of the sublime, so often evoked when speaking
              of immersion. Rather than monumentalizing its own object,
              the large scale of the projection takes the gallery viewer
              into an ambiguous affective and cognitive space that asks
              for attentive, even contemplative absorption – displaying
              a critical form of empathic projection.
                            This process of projective absorption in scale
              leads to deciphering the geographic hybridity of the site
              shown on screen while enveloped in the siting of the pro-
              jection. After all, wandering through a look-alike Paris with
              French actors of African descent, one could easily believe
              that this is in fact Paris – and that would be an acceptable
              response. But if, galvanized by the scale of the large screen,
              the installation viewer scans the surface and “screens” the

      40 On magnification and the close-up in film, see M. A. Doane, Bigger than Life: The Close-up
      and Scale in the Cinema (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

GIULIANA BRUNO                                 53                                         AN-ICON
              space closely, she can sense that something is off: the ur-
              ban scale here is quite different than that of Paris. As one
              tunes in to surface, scale, and atmosphere, scanning the
              big screen, and further notices the presence of Chinese
              inscriptions or too many air conditioners dotting the build-
              ing façades, one can finally understand how, working with
              and against architecture, inhabitants of this replica of Paris
              in China, located in the district of Tianducheng, adapt the
              space to their own use.
                           In Intercourses, then, Just enhances scale as
              a geography, detecting defining nuances in ambient pro-
              jection and working with dimension in culturally affecting
              ways that defy the simple effect of immersive viewing. Here,
              immersion is not understood, as conventionally assumed,
              to produce virtual illusion but, rather, spatial awareness. As
              was the case in This Nameless Spectacle, the artist also
              works specifically against the astonishing use of magni-
              fication one finds in digital hyperrealism, with its purely
              spectacular effects of immersivity.41 For Just, scale rather
              functions as a real environmental modality. His installations
              invite close discernment of the surrounding space and en-
              gage contact with the larger environment. They resist using
              scale as a building block to create virtual monuments and,
              working with movement and active screening, also resist
              the arresting sense of awe associated with boundless im-
              mersive magnitude. In other words, Just is an artist who
              does not fall into the trap of large projection as mere man-
              ifestation of a technological sublime.
                           Jesper Just’s critical investigation of this press-
              ing subject of immersivity finds correspondence in the prac-
              tices of other artists who are attentive to scale, reconfigure
              scalar paradigms, and also engage the panoramic form of
              exhibition as a projective environment. In a compelling way,
      41 This reminds us that, as Susan Stewart suggested long ago, “the gigantic” is a particularly
      enveloping notion. See S. Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
      Souvenir, the Collection (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

GIULIANA BRUNO                                 54                                          AN-ICON
             Lisa Reihana also questioned the scale and atmosphere
             of immersive projection at the New Zealand Pavilion of the
             2017 Venice Biennale with her large-scale installation In Pur-
             suit of Venus [infected] (2015-17), for which she reinvented
             the giant form of the panoramic spectacle in scrolling dig-
             ital fashion. Inspired by the French scenic wallpaper Les
             Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804-1805), the installation
             created a large-scale panorama in which real and invent-
             ed narratives of colonial encounter take place. This work
             took the very surface of a panoramic wallpaper and made
             it into an animated, moving surface of unfolding projection.
             Here, videographic and animation technologies contribute
             to a reimagination of the nineteenth-century shape of the
             moving panorama while probing its historical, ideological,
             and political dimensions. In Reihana’s reinterpretation of
             this mode, history is not only displayed but scrolls out and
             drifts along panoramically, in a critical reading that ques-
             tions the very form of its spectacular, colonial, scalar, im-
             mersive projections.
                           In the face of digitally magnified immersion, and
             the return of the spectacular phenomenon of large-scale
             panoramic projection, one can only welcome the kind of
             environmental research that motivates Jesper Just and Lisa
             Reihana, for this is an exploration that is aimed at critically
             excavating, and exhibiting, the complex history of large-
             scale, immersive visual display, its forms of mediality, and
             the culture that it transmits and circulates in the environment.
             Here, the present not only exposes but challenges the past,
             and finally, changes its course. Only if we are put in a posi-
             tion to experience critically the cultural atmosphere that links
             scale and motion to immersive screening, and consider this
             multifaceted, nonlinear historicity, can we hope to redefine
             the terms of, and give a new name to, the ecology of ab-
             sorption in space – the environment itself of projection.


GIULIANA BRUNO                       55                              AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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