Deep Time: Ground Truth(s) Day 3: 28.11.26. Luke Fowler, Mariam Rezaei, Jennifer Walshe & Nina Guo with Wobbly

Fruitmarket’s annual festival of new music, Deep Time, returns this November, this year curated by Irish experimental composer, performer, writer and artist, Jennifer Walshe.

We are living through a strange moment. Machines now generate convincing realities faster than anyone can check them, reality itself often functions in a performative mode, and truths are a matter of choice, whether personal or algorithmic. It can feel as though the ground beneath what we see, hear and trust has quietly turned to dust as slop flushes through the devices in our hands. ‘Ground truth’ is a term with multiple meanings. Geographers use it for the moment you look away from the map or satellite image and walk the actual field, checking what the data claimed against what is really there. More recently, artificial intelligence borrowed the phrase – a ground truth is the verified slice of reality a system’s performance is measured against, the anchor that stops it drifting into invention. In both cases it references the same idea — what we agree to be real. (Which, of course, may or may not necessarily be real.) Over three days, Jennifer Walshe’s edition of Deep Time features artists who engage with a wide range of artistic realities, from deep and old to frenetic and fractal, in radically different ways.

The bar will be open at Fruitmarket before the performances and until 10.30pm every evening. Snacking boxes will be available for pre-order in the café.

The artists will be in conversation with writer and broadcaster Kate Molleson before the performances. 

Luke Fowler
A Sensation Never Yet Known, 2026
16mm transferred to 4K digital

A Sensation Never Yet Known is a new work by Luke Fowler. It explores the history of electronic music in Scotland through a film portrait of Janet Beat, a pioneering composer and educator whose contribution has been overlooked until recently. Filming the now 88 year-old Beat over the course of a year, Fowler uses film as a medium that attests to presence: of Beat in the here and now, of the camera within her domestic space, and of her life’s work within the larger context of experimental music. Rather than a biographical or narrative work, A Sensation Never Yet Known weaves together moments of conversation. We hear Beat recount her childhood experiences of listening to the natural world, her graphic scores for dancers and the obstacles she faced as a female composer of electronic music. If attentive listening has been central to her work, attentive listening and looking is the foundation of Fowler’s project as it traces the collected objects in Beat’s home, the natural world and animal life that surrounds her, and the ever-present potential in her musical scores. Extending his long-standing interest in how cultural and political figures of the 1960s and 1970s are remembered, A Sensation Never Yet Known also reflects Fowler’s practice as both an artist-filmmaker and a musician in his own right.

Mariam Rezaei 
On/Off Beat, 2026
First performance, commissioned by Fruitmarket

A new performance by Mariam Rezaei which will use samples from the electronic music archive of Scottish electronic music pioneer, Janet Beat, who was Jennifer Walshe’s teacher at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Jennifer Walshe & Nina Guo, with Wobbly
REALITY: The Pilot, 2026
First performance, commissioned by Fruitmarket

What happens when we watch reality television? When we enter the hypermediated fever dream of housewives, singles, makeovers, aspiring models, real estate agents, preppers and wedding planners? When we find our conversation clogged with terms like hometown date, eternal male singles cafeteria and smize? Who do we become, as we laugh, judge, weep, and memeify the fame-hopefuls vying for our attention at any cost? Is it the lowest possible form of entertainment or is there something worth sieving from the trash? Wildly virtuosic vocalists Guo and Walshe are your guides as we descend into the phantasmagoric world of reality TV, where the confessional booth, the elimination ceremony and the reunion special collapse into one endless, glittering loop. Electronics legend Wobbly (Jon Leidecker) is their co-pilot through the latent space. Host and contestant, editor and edited, algorithm and its captive: Walshe and Guo can't tell which they are, and by the end of tonight’s performance, you may not be able to either.