Care Processing Unit
2022-present
memory, fabric speakers, quilt
Care Processing Unit (CPU) is an ongoing series of interactive quilts embedded with textile speakers, each one storing a tactile and sonic memory.
It combines the intersecting legacies of quilting, computation, and gender to imagine alternate, embodied logics of remembering in a computationally pervasive era. By encoding data as both textile object and digital audio through conductive thread and electronics, the quilt positions the materiality of memory as central to configuring and reconfiguring meaning over time.
Quilts are a communications technology, a tool merging memory and materiality. CPU explores how a hybrid quilt composed of electronic material - textile speakers - and worn fibers - repurposed clothes - might imagine alternate logics of remembering that embrace contradiction, emotion, and a human scale. These CPUs are meant to be carrier bags for individual stories and evolving memories. This CPU explores the curious state of becoming a mother while losing one. Each quilt patch contains a fabric speaker that unlocks conversations, voicemails, celebrations, or other sonic artefacts to stitch new narratives across three generations.
Patches
Credits
CPUs have been exhibited as part of a CultureHub residency in 2024 and at Prarie Ronde Gallery in Michigan in 2022. All photos above except for patches taken by Ji Hoon Kim.
Documentation
Care Processing Unit v1
Developed from 2021-22. Exhibited at electronic textile camp in fall 2022.
