Bruno's fourth book, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002), was a pioneering work of visual studies, advancing an interwoven theorization of art, architecture, film, and philosophy within a personal framework. Conceived as a scholarly travelogue, the book has been widely recognized for its poetic wordplay and conceptual intersections, for instance, in the blurred meanings of optic and haptic, motion and “e-motion,” sight and “site.” Drawing widely from varied methodologies and philosophies, and creating its own, the book inventively links concepts from classical film theory, art history, architectural modernism, cultural geography and cartographic thinking, phenomenologies of embodiment and haptic experience, and affect theory as well as feminist thought. Close analyses of urban visual practices and modernist media spaces constitute the book's nonlinear structure, including sections on the arcades, phantasmagoria, pre-cinematic viewing devices, cabinets of curiosity, memory theaters, movie palaces, the “theatrical” anatomy table, urban panoramas, site-seeing voyages, and the city symphony. In a 2018 review of the book, media theorist Jussi Parikka reflects on how the book's combinatory, media-genealogical approach in 2002 prefigured “some of the infrastructures of theory and method of contemporary contexts,” including the field of media archaeology.
