2026
Web-based interactive multi-channel installation with AI-mediated generative text and imagery, distributed projection, a networked display system, and a mobile interaction interface.
Keepsakes in Every Hair ~ Drift is an interactive installation that examines memory as a living constellation shaped by place, language, time, and technological mediation. Developed for a context marked by migration, mobility, and multilingual exchange, the work begins with short recollections rooted in everyday life. These memories remain as emotional anchors, while their expressive details drift through six interacting temporalities: human, liminal, environmental, digital, infrastructural, and more-than-human. Through this recursive structure, memory does not return as fixed preservation, but reappears in altered form across shifting conditions of relation, translation, and reception.
Projected text, distributed screens, and a local mobile interface bring these temporal layers into contact. Through their smartphones, visitors encounter each memory in its present drifting state, with highlighted words indicating where transformation has taken place. By touching a fragment and leaving words in response, they enter the work’s ongoing process of variation, allowing memory to absorb new traces while registering degrees of resonance. As recollections move through visitor presence, environmental change, translation, and data-driven temporal rhythms, they are neither erased nor simply retained. They expand, contract, and recur in altered forms, sustaining an emotional trace even as language, image, and tone continue to shift.
Rather than treating recollection as fixed archive or private content, Drift stages memory as a distributed ecology shaped by urban life, collective encounter, environmental signals, and technical systems. Computation functions here not as an authorial center, but as one perceptual and generative layer among others. The work therefore asks how memory is carried, reshaped, and unevenly sustained across languages, locations, and repeated acts of reception, and how its persistence is conditioned not only by technology, but also by place, power, and proximity.
