ITP Thesis Archive 2025

Project Description

How can food act as a bridge between personal identity, cultural heritage, and shared human experience, and in what ways can immersive media deepen our emotional connection to it?

Plated Memories is an interactive dining table experience that transforms food into a portal for storytelling, memory, and cultural reflection. Through projection mapping and sensor-based interaction, the table responds to a set of traditional Chinese-Korean dishes, activating hand-drawn animations and ambient sounds that evoke intimate moments around the table.

Growing up in an East Asian household, meals were never just about eating. They were rituals, ceremonies, culture, and even stubborn family pride. Even something as ordinary as dumplings—饺子—carries infinite variations and deeply personal stories. No two households are the same way.

As an international student living in New York City for over five years, food has remained my most tangible connection to home. In my family, food was our language of love. My mom never said “I love you”—instead, she said, “吃饭了吗?” (“Have you eaten?”). Each dish placed on the table—seaweed soup, dumplings, or fried eggs with chives—triggers hand-drawn animations and ambient soundscapes projected around the plate. These visuals unfold intimate narratives: a mother’s quiet care through birthday soup, the shared joy of folding dumplings during Lunar New Year, and the comfort of an everyday home-cooked meal.

This project began with a projected animation and grew into an immersive, sensory installation that honors the emotional depth of everyday meals. By combining technology with memory, Plated Memories invites viewers to reflect on their own food heritage—what dish brings you back? What stories live at your table?

Ultimately, this work explores how food is a shared human language across cultures and how technology can help preserve and celebrate the personal accents within it.

Technical Details

Each dish is embedded with an RFID tag. An RFID reader beneath the surface detects the tag and identifies the dish when placed on the dining table. A Node.js script then sends an OSC message to MadMapper, triggering a corresponding animation while hiding others. These animations wrap around the plate in real-time, projected from above.

All visual assets were hand-drawn, then animated. Also, background audio is layered with ambient sounds—boiling soup, folding dumplings, soft conversation—played through a hidden speaker embedded under the table.

The small and round table setup is designed to foster intimacy. Real tableware and textiles from the artist’s home add to the authenticity, bridging the digital and physical elements of the experience.

Research/Context

Plated Memories emerged from my desire to explore food not just as sustenance, but as a vessel of memory, identity, and cultural continuity. This project blends personal experience with academic and cultural research, examining how food can be both deeply individual and universally human.

One of the foundational texts that sparked my thinking was Nourishing Traditions, which repositions food as an expression of heritage and identity rather than a purely scientific or nutritional concern. I’ve also been inspired by films like Eat Drink Man Woman and Ratatouille, which portray food as a bridge between generations and a medium for emotional connection. These influences helped shape my interest in using storytelling to illuminate how food rituals define family and cultural life.

In my coursework at NYU Steinhardt food studies classes, I’ve been exploring how food today serves as a narrative of selfhood, memory, and cultural values. Also, visiting the Tenement Museum was powerful, it showed me how ordinary domestic artifacts, like kitchen tools or handwritten recipes, could become portals into broader social histories and immigrant experiences. I wanted to create something similar—intimate and interactive—that invites people to connect with their own food memories.

Interactive museum pieces like Enfield E8000, Sharing Louisiana’s Civil Rights History, and IDEO’s Future Kitchen also informed my approach to storytelling through technology.

Last but not least, this project is dedicated with deep love and gratitude to my mom and both grandmothers, whose hands, recipes, and quiet care shaped the heart of this work. I appreciate their sacrifices for our family, always feeding us well and loving me deeply!