Her writings have also inspired Michael Nyman's music scores for urban silent films, and the work of numerous artists, including Renée Green’s Some Chance Operations (1999); Constanze Ruhm’s X Characters / RE(hers)AL (2003-4); Jesper Just’s trilogy A Room of One’s Own, A Voyage in Dwelling, A Question of Silence (2008);[9] Roberto Paci Dalò’s Atlas of Emotion Stream (2009); Charles LaBelle’s Public Intimacy (2010-11); Rachel Rose’s Palisades in Palisades (2014); and Carola Spadoni's "Archiving the Peripatetic Film and Video Collection" (2021-).
Combining extensive archival research with theoretical inventiveness, Streetwalking forged a feminist media history that superseded the modalities of textual analysis and authorial monograph, more common at the time.
In this early work, her embodied and mobilized approach to space and spectatorship takes the form of a female psychogeography oriented around a flâneuse traversing sites of modernity such as cinemas, arcades, and trains.
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.
It continues Bruno's engagement with the form and figure of the architectural promenade through writings on the material textures of cinema, fashion, the museum, and everyday life.
With studies of the relation between cinema and the museum, the art of Jane and Louise Wilson, Rebecca Horn, Rachel Whiteread and Mona Hatoum, and the films of Andy Warhol and Tsai Ming-Liang, the book reconsiders medium-specific histories of artistic development through its notion of “public intimacy.” Bruno conceives of this intimacy as the “tangible, ‘superficial’ contact” through which “we apprehend the art object and the space of art.”[11] Bruno's sixth book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a dynamic and densely philosophical archaeology of surface.
The book interweaves poetic reflections on screens, stains, skins, dust, films, canvases, fabrics, façades, and volumetric installations of light with theoretical engagements with Deleuzian folds, Einfühlung and empathetic projection, and experiential and materialist philosophies to argue for a new materialism based on an expanded field of surface contact.
Readings of artists include Anni Albers, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Tara Donovan, Olafur Eliasson, Isaac Julien, Anthony McCall, Sarah Oppenheimer, Gerhard Richter, Do Ho Suh, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, James Turell, and Krzyztof Wodiczko.
A series of case studies of contemporary artists and architects, ranging from Robert Irwin to Peter Zumthor, Chantal Akerman to Diana Thater, Cristina Iglesias to Rosa Barba, then shows how today's projective media constitute environments, modifying our capacity to sense variable elemental conditions.