Material Culture

Introduction

Some Material Culture is two-dimensional: pictures, paintings, ceremonial towels or rushnyky. These items can be presented in books or on a computer screen without difficulty. We have over 200 photographs of rushnyky on this web site. However, much of Material Culture is three-dimensional: from small decorative objects to entire buildings. The representation of these objects in publications has always been difficult.

Consider the Ukrainian decorated Easter egg or pysanka. A pysanka has a design written on a curved surface that flows around the whole egg. It cannot be appreciated from a single "face-on" view. Ideally, it should be held in the hand and examined from all sides.

A person wearing a village costume is never looked at in a stationary "face-on" view. As the person approaches the viewer, subtle changes in angle show slightly different aspects. Perhaps the costume is meant to accentuate a particular part of the body, say the hips, which may not be obvious from the chosen angle. If only the view could be changed slightly by the viewer moving to one side.

A room in a house is never looked at with a fixed gaze, one wall, then the next, then the next. The observer looks around, seeing how the light from a window illuminates a picture on a wall, or how an icon corner is always opposite from the door.

With computers, it is now possible to do just these things. The term is Virtual Reality (VR).