...in place of what is here and endures

'…in place of what is here and endures' is an art installation presented during the Granite Noir crime writing festival utilising generative AI, sonification, vibration and reports of actual police work to question the line between fact and fiction. Extreme closeup video of the granite surfaces of the Aberdeen Music Hall and surrounding city morphs into synthetic images of granite generated by AI. Shadows cast across both real and fake surfaces mingle with flickering synthetic impressions generated from reports of actual police work. Sitting on a bench nearby one feels these reports 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. The installation 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?