Objects Between Material Culture and Visual Culture

What happens to a squeezer, a coffee maker, a corkscrew, when they leave the kitchen and become part of a film set? What happens when material culture is transformed into visual culture? What new roles, meanings and connections to the subject, do objects find themselves constructing in the content continuum of virtual media? This paper attempts to answer, albeit partially, these questions by using a specific case study, namely the analysis of the presence of some of the most famous Italian design objects, the kitchen objects by Alessi, within the American filmography of the last twenty years. The ultimate aim is to reason in terms of meaning and narrativity according to the methods proposed by sociosemiotics and cultural studies, in order to identify new characteristics and functions that design can perform within an experiential context that is already dominant: the world of images.