Delicious Memories

Workshop designed and facilitated by Kristine Diekman and Laura Nova

"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.

The creative embroideries that the participants crafted were incorporated with electronics into a tablecloth which was exhibited as a popup in the Essex Market in NYC, a marketplace over 100 years old that houses diverse vendors. Nova and Diekman were subsequently invited to install Delicious Memories at ISEA 2022 in Barcelona as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art where hundreds of visitors interacted playfully with the stories.

 

The Process

Diekman and Nova worked with a small group of multi-generational women living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan NY helping them uncover a personal story from their lives that responded to the prompt, “Delicious Memories.” They lead a simple zine creation technique to spark the participants’ memories and imaginations. The participants designed their cover page recollecting and drawing a delicious moment in the lives. They continued to fill the eight pages of their zine with additional drawings and text that built on the initial image. After completing the zine they identified an image that was representative of that memory. With basic embroidery instruction, they embroidered the image incorporating conductive threads and other materials such as metal beads as tactile sensors. The embroideries were not only illustrative but offered the listener a tactile experience that would evoke the author’s stories. A soft and sensuous touch. A rough path. A smooth bead. A line that could be traced.