23-24 February 2024, Aberdeen Music Hall, Granite Noir crime writing festival
The rock solid facts of the Aberdeen Music Hall and streets of Scottish cities morph into fiction as the shadows cast across their granite surfaces mingle with flickering synthetic impressions generated by AI from Police Scotland news headlines*. Sitting on the bench nearby one feels these reports of current police work materialise through bone conduction and vibration, their text converted into the sounds of metal striking stone: the hard physical labour that built the city over centuries.
…in place of what is here and endures seeks to make visceral the impact of various types of fiction on our experience of physical reality: from the AI technologies that enable deception to the narrative embellishments of the stories we tell ourselves to the dramas we collectively imagine of society, crime and justice. In the face of the fleeting, fake, and ephemeral are the things we feel in our body the last refuge of truth or is truth simply that which outlasts alternative stories?
Commissioned by Aberdeen Performing Arts and New Media Scotland
*Police Scotland. (2024, February 23-24). Police Scotland News. Retrieved February 23-24, 2024, from https://www.scotland.police.uk/what-s-happening/news/