truth

The main text that inspired truth is a short quote by Spanish Renaissance writer Baltasar Gracián. Writing at the dawn of the printing press and its proliferation throughout Europe, he contended openly with the growing reality that one could print whatever truth one wanted to in order to influence others. I find in his writing many similarities to the questions we confront now over the matter of truth. Political actors are more emboldened than ever to lie to their citizenry, while news organizations seek not to inform, but to mold an audience and spin together simple and digestible narratives from the complex issues that face us as a body politic. Perhaps even more insidiously, the development of artificial intelligence and deepfakes allows one to fabricate entire realities with increasing realism. When we combine these factors together, what becomes of the ever-fragile truth? What sort of valence could it hope to hold in our current society? When truth, whatever it may ultimately be, becomes severed from reality, we are led ever closer to our own ruin.

The text of truth begins with the quote by Gracián, and then cycles through versions of the quote generated by Microsoft’s AI, Copilot, as well as dialogues from my own interactions with Copilot in the generation of the text. Towards the end of the work, the piece incorporates fragments of songs generated by Suno, a text-to-music generator. truth was commissioned by and is dedicated to soprano Anika Kildegaard.