This seminar explores how developments in science, economics, and politics transformed the representation and understanding of what constitutes the ‘real’ over the course of the 19th century. Examining the decorative arts, print media, and architecture—alongside contemporary philosophical, scientific, and literary texts—we will interrogate how artists, thinkers, and makers responded to radical social and technological shifts. Romantic debates on imagination, nature, and perception blurred the boundaries between subjective experience and the external world. Photography reified lived experience while simultaneously challenging established notions of representational truth. The Realists attempted to paint modern life as ruptured by social stratification and glossy consumerist spectacle. By contrast, the Impressionists focused exclusively on empirical experience, atomizing perceptual experience to the point of breakdown. By the century’s end, theories of the unconscious reshaped our understanding of subjectivity, and Symbolism and Art Nouveau artists retreated into abstraction and dream. This course encourages interdisciplinary engagement, drawing from art history, media studies, philosophy, and cultural history to investigate how visual and material culture both reflected and contributed to evolving conceptions of our shared reality.