2026
Interdisciplinary exhibition integrating networked sculptural installations, distributed machine perceivers, six temporal lenses, moving image, spatial sound, computational text, musical composition, live piano performance, and spatial intervention.
Collaborators
Memories and Musical Compositions: Masayoshi Ishikawa
Guest Artist: Seungho Lee
Dance Videography: Jeremy Starn
Dancers: Madeline Spivey, Heidi Pennington from Harrisonburg Dance Cooperatives
Support provided by the College of Visual and Performing Arts Faculty Development Award, James Madison University.
Exhibition: Duke Hall Gallery of Art, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia October 28 – November 20, 2026
Video documentation of Installation Components by Sangjun Yoo
Keepsakes in Every Hair ~ Migration is an interdisciplinary exhibition by Sangjun Yoo, Masayoshi Ishikawa, and Seungho Lee. Originating from Yoo’s ongoing Keepsakes in Every Hair project and his collaboration with composer Ishikawa, the exhibition expanded into a dialogue among computational systems, musical composition, bodily movement, and spatial installation.
Beginning with six personal memories from Ishikawa’s life between Japan and the United States, the exhibition explores how memories persist beyond their originating moments, carried across places, technologies, and changing conditions of time.
The memories remain fixed as points of reference, while a distributed computational system encounters the places associated with them through changing present conditions. Six temporal lenses attend to these encounters differently, allowing multiple readings of the same world to emerge without settling into a single account.
Across the gallery, networked sculptures, moving images, virtual journeys, live views of distant airports, musical compositions, and spatial interventions establish different ways of experiencing time. The exhibition extends into the surrounding architecture, where sculptural forms, directional sound, and visitors’ movements shape how its fragments are encountered.
Together, the artists bring distinct practices into relation, considering how lived experience continues beyond the individual and how memory is carried into new relationships across human, technological, and spatial conditions.
Installation Components by Sangjun Yoo
01 — Migration
Six-channel networked sculptural and spatial sound installation
Six custom-built sculptural modules, installed as freestanding and wall-mounted structures, combine LCD displays, Raspberry Pi computers, and ultrasonic directional speakers. Each operates through a distinct temporal lens: human, liminal, environmental, digital, infrastructural, and more-than-human.
Virtual travellers navigate places associated with Ishikawa’s memories through Google Street View, moving backward as though looking through a rear-view mirror. The system draws on street-level imagery, live environmental and infrastructural signals, and real-time broadcasts from various local radio stations at the memory sites. These broadcasts are computationally retextured and refracted to generate radio stories, bringing the sounds, voices, and cultural contexts of these places into new sonic narratives.
Each machine perceiver encounters these changing conditions through its own temporal lens, generating textual and sonic residues as its readings converge, diverge, or drift.
The ultrasonic directional speakers project concentrated beams of sound over a distance, reflecting off surrounding gallery walls to create localized auditory fields. These reflections make sounds appear to emerge from multiple directions, with distant voices seeming to whisper directly into visitors’ ears. As visitors move through the gallery, voices resonate, overlap, recede, or disappear, creating a spatialized listening experience in which the perceived location and distance of sound continually shift.
02 — Thereafter
Four-channel moving-image and computational installation
In collaboration with Harrisonburg Dance Cooperative
Dance Videography: Jeremy Starn
Dancers: Madeline Spivey, Heidi Pennington
Two filmed dancers, a virtual traveller’s field map, and a prompt screen form a four-channel installation. The dancers’ recorded movements and prompts express convergence and divergence through two distinct bodily perceptions of time.
The prompt screen presents three interrelated voices. Convergence and divergence emerge from the dancers’ recorded gestures and prompts, while a third voice, drift, is generated in real time by the machine perceivers in response to changing conditions at the memory sites. Their interaction brings recorded bodily perceptions into relation with the computational present.
On the FieldMap screen, a virtual traveller navigates geographical paths connecting the memory sites. Its direction is determined in real time by the changing relationships among convergence, divergence, and drift, synchronized with the Google Street View journeys across the six Migration sculptural modules. The map and street-level imagery move together, translating the interaction between recorded human perception and present-tense machine perception into a shared spatial journey.
Together, the four channels connect bodily movement, computational perception, and geographical navigation, allowing different temporalities to shape the journey as it unfolds.
03 — Departures, Arrivals, and Waiting
Real-time video and sound installation
Live views of distant airports accompany spoken monologues shaped by the cultural and historical contexts of places associated with Ishikawa’s memories.
The voices unfold through anticipation, recollection, and waiting: for someone who has departed, for a departure yet to come, or for an arrival that remains uncertain.
As aircraft depart and arrive in recurring rhythms, the monologues move between presence and absence. Personal memory and distant infrastructural activity meet in a suspended sense of time, where movement continues even as waiting remains.
04 — Residues and Musical Response
Networked computational and audiovisual installation
Music and live performance by Masayoshi Ishikawa
At the center of Migration, six machine perceivers encounter changing information from places associated with Ishikawa’s memories. Each temporal lens interprets these encounters through its own sense of time, drawing on contextual materials and real-time environmental, infrastructural, and cultural signals.
Their encounters generate residues: fragments of text and sound arising from the relationships between memories held in custody and the changing conditions surrounding them. These residues do not reproduce the original memories but register what becomes perceptible when remembered places are encountered through different temporal perspectives.
The Topology screen visualizes the changing relationships among the six temporal lenses, revealing moments of convergence, divergence, and drift. Alongside these shifting relationships, computational residues emerge and circulate through the exhibition’s audiovisual components, connecting virtual journeys, spatial sound, and moving images.
At moments, these computational responses enter into relation with Ishikawa’s musical compositions. During the live performance, Ishikawa listens and responds through piano improvisation, bringing his lived experience into dialogue with the systems carrying his memories.