My contribution to my group’s digital project is to hopefully give viewers a more authentic idea about the daily routines that took place in rooms like the Tesse. Scholarship thus far seems to have explored predominantly the wealthy class and how they spent their time in these types of spaces. I would like to extend this to all users and inhabitants of these types of rooms, regardless of class or race.
I intend to express this point visually through multiple images, probably displaying the different times of day, and how the room might have been used at a given time or date. Perhaps at 3am, servants were usually called upon to tend to the fireplace during the wintry month of January, while two children play cards while sitting on two small chairs that were from the same set and a dog lounges on a fauteuil. Or perhaps, on a Friday evening, an upper-class family living in a home that would have had a room (or multiple rooms) comparable to the Tesse room might be hosting a dinner party for those in their local community. What would the room look like in those two scenarios? And how likely were these scenarios to take place? How was the room transformed to fit the needs of those inside? And, the most important question for my individual project, how was the presence of servants seen and how did they interact with the space around them? I would image that servants, like children, were supposed to be seen and not heard (to a certain extent, it seems), but were they simply regarded as invisible? And what did that mean, to have people be regarded as invisible, irrelevant, perhaps inhuman? All of these questions have emerged for me so far in this project, and hopefully I can explore more of them throughout the semester through this blog.
I intend to use digital means such as Photoshop and Rhino. Others in my group will be working more with technical programs than me, for my real focus will be to really hone in on the research side.
I think it is terrific that you will be focusing more on the research side as this will be a way to better understand the questions you have raised, but will also be extremely useful for other members of your group. The questions you ask about the room are excellent and as you get started on the project, here are some thoughts:
1. Are there any particular readings from the course so far that give you clues about the way the room was used? A good way to begin would be to look at the course syllabus and also look at the readings ahead. Could you start to make an annotated bibliography for your project from the course syllabus? In addition to including some of the syllabus readings on your project bibliography, you might pay particular attention to footnotes in the course readings. Even if you haven’t yet read anything in the course that starts to answer your questions, are there footnotes to other sources that could be helpful points of reference?
2. After you have spent some time working with the course syllabus to think about these questions, you might also include some novels or stories from the period on your bibliography. Even if you are unable to find detailed sources about the specific ways the Tessé Room was used, you could project possible scenarios that are historically grounded using material about other domestic spaces in the period. Novels or stories might include many descriptions about interior spaces that could fill in some information about the questions you are asking or open up other related questions.
3. You might also start to create an archive for yourself of visual material that will go alongside your bibliography. You should try looking through Artstor for drawings, paintings, or other visual sources that depict domestic spaces in the eighteenth century. Like the way you could use excerpts from novels, you could use a selection of historically relevant images to reconstruct what happened in the Tessé room.
4. You can also start to collect some precedents for representations of time in domestic spaces, but these images don’t have to be restricted to the specific period we are studying. If you find images of domestic spaces that highlight the time of day in some way, you could keep those as a set of references for ways you might represent the project towards the end of the semester. Edward Tufte’s books are helpful sources to look to in thinking about the representation of information and some of the examples he includes in his books could be precedents for you.