From Material to Virtual: The Power of the Imaginary

This project focuses on representation of Victorian material culture, its objects in their material and social signification and their representation in painting, ads, shop windows and exhibitions in Victorian culture from 1850 to 1890. Moreover, this project presents an argument that painting in this period radically challenged public taste and the production and consumption patterns of commodities to realign objects through their virtual representation into things that provoked memory, desire and the senses. Building on a fundamental assumption of material culture studies that through making, using, exchanging, consuming, interacting and living with things people make themselves in the process, this project takes a two-fold approach: It will "archaeologically" explore histories and manufacture of particular items of jewelry, dress and furnishings depicted in selected paintings. It will also examine objects’ configured relationships in painting and in other venues, treating displays as language systems, so that in art and museums and ships meanings were generated by differences and similarities art and other venues whose display and classification systems were semantic arrangements, putting things in a conventional order with other things, to create a kind of cultural "sentence".