Delicious Memories
Symposium:
Title:
- Delicious Memories
Organiser/Presenter(s):
Statement:
“Delicious Memories” is an intergenerational storytelling workshop and media art installation that brings together older and younger New Yorkers to tell and connect stories utilizing craft and interactive technology. The installation and the performance stitches delicious stories together into a sonic multi-sensory communal tablecloth.
The project draws on lived experiences through sensorial prompts about “delicious memories,” those highly somatic and multi-modal experiences that are deeply embedded in our bodies. The experience of physically crafting creates a connection that activates and sustains dialogues between generations. While the project employs traditional craft techniques, it integrates them into contemporary digital technologies.
During a series of workshops held from May through the end of June 2021, we met over zoom to develop, share and stitch our stories together in a circle (a zoom grid). The handwork of crafting while storytelling provides an embodied mode of personal and collective creation to spark memory and nurture social wellness. The embroidery materials included cotton and conductive thread combined with other metallic objects that are stitched onto fabric by the participants. These materials integrate conductive components that connect to small microprocessors. The surfaces invite intimate tactile interactions by listeners who, when they run their fingers over the varied textures of embroidery, hear the participants’ recorded audio stories via a bluetooth speakers placed on the communal tablecloth.
The experience of listening is augmented by tactility and the communal connection of sitting together at the table touching the embroidery sensors to play the audio stories. On the table, the visitors interact with the embroidered tablecloth that acts as touch and proximity sensors that amplify individual stories. In addition to the general public and the participants themselves “performing” the stories tactilely, we envision a group of trained and untrained performers who can perform the table to a live audience.
