Deep Time: Ground Truth(s)

Deep Time: Ground Truth(s) will run in Fruitmarket Warehouse from Thursday 26.11.26 to Saturday 28.11.26. Walshe’s work has been commissioned, performed and broadcast by ensembles all over the world. She also performs as a vocalist specialising in extended techniques, as an improvisor, and is a writer and researcher. She is Professor of Composition at the University of Oxford.

Walshe has a prolific, expansive and inquisitive practice that is alive to the information-laden, digitised world we live in, and also questions how histories of music are established. She has written an opera set on a spacecraft going to Mars (MARS 1); has used AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history (A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance); developed a project in which she assumed 12 different alter egos, all members of a fictional art collective, Grúpat; and has written a long-form essay that explores the many dimensions of how we might think about art and music made with AI (13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music).

For Deep Time: Ground Truth(s), Walshe will build on her longstanding interest in the intersection of music, art, technology and artificial intelligence to explore the multiple, overlapping ideas of truth and ‘truth’ in a post-digital world. Walshe will present a new commission for Deep Time, in collaboration with Berlin-based soprano Nina Guo, alongside commissions, performances, film screenings and talks by her invited artists. The title refers to ‘ground truth’ in AI (a term for the ‘accurate’ data used to train and test a model in machine learning), but also to the other sorts of ‘truths’ we can discover and observe in the natural world around us.

At a time when we are trying to make sense of the realities, benefits, risks, and weirdness of AI in our lives, Deep Time invites us to respond in the way Walshe proposes we think about art and music made with AI: ‘perhaps we can try to think like the networks do – in higher dimensions. From multiple positions, simultaneously. Messily’.

Deep Time is supported by the Hinrichsen Foundation.

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