I’m interested in the representation and use of space in the Tessé Room, and want to show visitors how the room served as a background for new luxury consumer goods, and how the movement of those luxury goods, with the aid of servants, allowed for the room to serve many functions. I’m would like to create a 3-D model of the Tessé Room and annotate it, so that the visitor can click on an image of the Francois-Thomas Germain coffeepot (or the Sèvres elephant head vase, or one of the snuff boxes) and be brought to a rotational image of the coffeepot, with audio or text describing how the item is both a symbol of the technological advancements made during the Enlightenment, and the new availability of luxury products like tea and coffee. I’m further interested in looking into how objects like coffeepots and porcelain link into the Consumer Revolution, but am less familiar with how that affected France than England. Considerably more work has been done on the consumer revolution in eighteenth-century Britain and her colonies, but recently scholars have turned their attention to France, and the role the consumer revolution played in shaping elite society, and leading the nation toward revolution.

My first step is to create a 3D representation of the Tessé Room and put it within a webpage, so that it can be made interactive. I will then edit the rotational images together with audio clips and subtitles, describing the materials. I think that using Rhino to 3D model the room may be the easiest way to do it, and then just put the video annotations into the webpage, so that visitors could interact with it both in the galleries (with a mounted iPad or something similar?) and at home.