in-progress, 2026
In collaboration with Masayoshi Ishikawa (composer, piano) and dancers from Harrisonburg Dance Cooperatives
Distributed networked installation with six AI temporal lenses, live piano, spatial sound, video, sculptural elements, and machine-generated visual and sonic residues
Premiere: Duke Hall Gallery, Harrisonburg, Virginia, October 2026
Memory is not known through one time alone. It becomes legible across several temporalities at once, through conditions that continue to shift rather than settle into a single account.
The work is anchored in six of Masayoshi Ishikawa’s memories. These are entrusted fragments rather than biographical data to be reconstructed, held in relation to sound, place, time, and movement. Each memory has already migrated once, into his music. The installation stages a second migration, carrying these anchors through machine perception, spatial sound, bodily movement, material form, and live response. Temporal systems carry them through signal, route, ritual, and return, while the memories themselves are never altered.
Six temporal lenses read around these memories. Each lens pairs a local language model with an adapter trained on public context gathered around the timeline of Ishikawa’s life: the places, years, climates, and local conditions he passed through. Each runs on its own networked module and attends through one temporality: human, liminal, environmental, infrastructural, digital, or more-than-human time. The memories themselves, along with his own writing and biography, never enter the lenses’ training or anything the system shows. What the lenses learn never names him, and they are not allowed to infer his inner life. During the exhibition, live feeds from the places along his life path, from weather and tides to flight paths, bird sightings, and headlines, press on each lens’s reading without rebuilding it. The lenses drift; the memories stay fixed.
Each lens meets the live data through its own orientation and judges whether the encounter converges, diverges, or drifts. What surfaces, as short captions and sound in the room, is the present as seen through that lens: a residue, not an explanation. A lens speaks only when the present resonates with its register; otherwise it stays silent, and the silence is kept as a reading. These residues register partial perception: what a lens can gather, what it cannot hold, and how the memory continues to move around the edges of its own account. Across the six lenses, the same present never resolves into a single reading. Visitors witness this drift; nothing they do enters the system.
Around this machine-perceptual field, the memories take further forms. A video installation developed with dancers carries them into movement, and a group of sculptural elements gives them material presence within the space. Ishikawa’s live piano is one of these encounters: the sonic residues of the six modules gather into a field that he listens to as he improvises. The machine does not accompany the pianist; it returns a distributed perception of the memory to the musician, who responds in performance.
One of two related installations in the Keepsakes in Every Hair series, with Drift, exploring memory as a field of conditions rather than a stable record.
Exhibition developed with Masayoshi Ishikawa (composition and piano) and Seungho Lee (spatial design).
