in-progress, 2026
Interdisciplinary collaboration. Distributed networked installation with AI agent ensemble, live piano performance, and spatial sound.
Keepsakes in Every Hair ~ Migration approaches memory as a condition that emerges only once it has moved through more than one kind of listener. Shaped by migration, translation, and uneven belonging, the work treats memory not as a stable record to be retrieved, but as something rewritten each time it is read — its original form no longer recoverable once it has passed through other temporalities of attention.
Six AI agents form the work’s listening field, each shaped by a distinct temporality: human time, liminal time, environmental time, digital time, infrastructural time, and more-than-human time. The agents are formed by external traces of Masayoshi Ishikawa’s trajectory through the world — the weather, geographies, administrative regimes, and generational media of the places he has lived — never by his subjective material. They learn the world that surrounded him, not him.
Memories Ishikawa has written, tied to musical compositions of his own, enter the system as its only human input. Each agent reads the memories from its own temporality, and in reading rewrites what it reads. Real-time environmental data continues to flow through the system; the readings drift. The same memory reads differently at different moments of the exhibition. Memory does not return whole. It appears in partial signals, altered recurrences, and residual traces that continue to shape the space even as they fade.
Ishikawa’s composition and live performance enter the work alongside the agents, neither directing nor being directed by them. Computation functions here not as authorial control but as a set of autonomous listeners whose readings no one writes or predicts. What the work holds is the never-closing space between Ishikawa’s memories and the versions other temporalities make of them.
Developed with Masayoshi Ishikawa (composition and piano) and Seungho Lee (spatial design). One of two related installations exploring memory as condition rather than artifact.
