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 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 functions as an independent perceptual perspective through which memory is sensed and reconfigured.

At the center of the installation is a networked AI system that approaches memory as an ongoing process rather than a stable record. Short recollections serve as initial reference points within the system. These fragments are continuously interpreted through multiple temporal perspectives, allowing language, rhythm, and visual intensity to shift gradually over time. Memory does not unfold as narrative, but as an accumulation of tonal and perceptual changes.

Visitors may interact with the installation through a mobile interface, contributing brief impressions or responses. These contributions do not replace existing material. Instead, they subtly influence how the system recalibrates attention across its temporal layers. As a result, memory shifts through repeated encounter, variation, and recontextualization.

Drift extends my broader research into the screen as an active collaborator and considers how computation, environment, and human presence together form distributed modes of perception. In this work, memory remains provisional and migratory, shaped by repetition and relation rather than fixed meaning.