EventsSpatial Perception of Atmospheres

Mariaenrica GIANNUZZI (ATMOS-Project, University of Turin)

Abstract:

My contribution investigates how atmospheres as medium, milieu, and ambience transform the perceptual field, affecting our proprioceptive states. It does so through a genealogical method that traces the birth of the concept in the work of Gernot Böhme as this philosopher rearticulated the "metaphor" of feeling a certain atmosphere, or feeling in clouds, feeling in envelopes, toward a topological and architectural understanding of how spaces are felt. While the metaphor tends to convey subjectivist, or better, pathic (exposed, anchored to the present situation, embodied, see Waldenfels 2012, 2019; Griffero 2019) accounts of how the space of experience is already in tune with our feelings, or better felt-body states, the analogy between the space of the kinesthetic mind and the space of built environment developed by Böhme tends to conceive of things, artworks, or artefacts that do not cast a meaning, or a representation, but rather perform pre-cognitive perceptual intensities. Thus, atmospheres have become relevant to question the nature of the sensorium, for instance, how to define atmospheric perception of space – and hence, perception per se – "peripheral" (Pallasmaa 2019), "enactive" (Fuchs-De Jaegher 2009), or "affective" (Slaby, 2017; Vendrell Ferran 2022), only to mention the most relevant methodological directions, including those emerged in the field of analytic philosophy in the last 15 years. After discussing how this new debate on perception appropriated the German atmospheric tradition and did or did not redefine spatial perception, I will detail the spatial qualities that begun to be attributed to atmospheres, as the concept shifted from identifying weather-features to signify: (1).situatedness, (2).felt-body experience, (3).shared emotions, and (4).shared bodily orientation. 

About the author: 

Mariaenrica Giannuzzi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turin as part of the ATMOS project. She holds a PhD in German Studies from Cornell University (2023), where she investigated aesthetics of nature configured through the literary trope of Kreatur, while working as a Teaching Assistant (2017–2021) and Research Assistant. She was a DAAD Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin (2021–2022), Visiting Fellow at the ERC project "An-Icon" at La Statale University of Milan (2022–2023) and lecturer at La Sapienza University in Rome (2024). Her publications include Il male della natura. Critica della violenza, letteratura e storia naturale (Mimesis, 2023), Politics of the Creature: Geological Figures of German Modernism (Cornell eCommons, 2024), and studies on Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, Heinrich von Kleist, Milena Jesenská and others. She is an active translator.