Keepsakes in Every Hair ~ Drift

“Recursion is not mere repetition, but a return that transforms.”
— Yuk Hui

Keepsakes in Every Hair ~ Drift is a multi-channel installation that explores how memory shifts as it moves through changing temporal, environmental, and perceptual conditions. The work creates a reflective environment of drifting text fields and evolving visual atmospheres shaped by six temporal logics: human time, liminal time, environmental time, digital time, infrastructure time, and more-than-human time. Each temporality offers a different way of sensing attention, change, and the subtle instability of recollection.

Short recollections gathered from local residents serve as initial anchors within the installation. These fragments are gradually transformed as each temporal layer interprets them through its own rhythm, creating tone shifts that resemble weather patterns passing through memory. Text and imagery expand, thin out, recombine, or brighten depending on the temporal conditions shaping them. The resulting environment feels less like narrative storytelling and more like a field of atmospheric perception.

Visitors may contribute brief impressions or memories through a mobile interface. These contributions do not replace the original recollections. Instead, they influence the installation’s tonal drift, allowing new relationships to emerge between personal memories, collective atmospheres, and temporal variation. The installation becomes a shared perceptual space where memory behaves like a fluid and responsive material.

Drift extends my broader research into the screen as an active collaborator and considers how computation, environment, and human perception together form distributed modes of sensing. In this work, memory does not remain fixed; it evolves through rhythm, repetition, and re-encounter, revealing how recollection continually shifts as it is carried forward in time.