Convergence — Interweaving the Threads of Great Transformations

Convergence is two or more things coming together, joining together or evolving into one. Our work on the great transformations cuts across disciplines and through history, from theory to practice and back again. This page places Berggruen ideas in conversation with the world, and with each other.
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Learning From the Landscape
Enlisting the leadership of Mia Lehrer, an acclaimed landscape architect versed in symbiotic design, the Berggruen Institute strives to ensure its anticipated Scholars’ Campus will not merely preserve the natural beauty of the Santa Monica Mountains, but enhance it.
There and Back Again: Agency and Exploitation
Gig work promised financial agency for workers. But the last decade leaves no doubt as to who is in control. In a recent Berggruen roundtable, Juliet Schor and Berggruen Fellow Trebor Scholz, author of After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win it Back, offered their expertise in democratizing the digital economy and renewing the promise of platformed sharing.
Ecological Mosaic
The art and philosophy of “assembling the dissimilar,” ecological thinking, and collaborative action are at the heart of Serpentine Galleries in London. Its director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, appeared in Noema to demonstrate how these principles, embodied in art and its tangential spaces, can be a pointed weapon against the crisis of extinction.
Refusing Separation
Breaking from the unsustainable siloes of traditional research, ToftH’s cross-disciplinary research group, h.Earth Grotto, partners with three biotechnology startups. Together, they explore the world-transforming possibilities of biologizing technology, playful science, and dissolving the division between the human and the natural.
Juxtapositions
Two works from Berggruen Fellows Aneesh Aneesh and Anjan Sundaram meet in an imagined encounter to explore citizenship and the diaspora.
def human(ai):
def ai(human)
Launched by Berggruen Fellow Maya Ganesh, “A is for Another: A Dictionary of AI” is a living archive intended to challenge traditional perspectives underpinning artificial intelligence. Compiling scholarly works, art, and cultural pieces, the interdisciplinary repository traces conversational connections to highlight the biases that shape AI, all while gesturing towards radical alternatives.
Celestial Solutions
Starry scapes have been an ancient source of guidance for humanity, but Fairer Tomorrow, Berggruen Fellow Şerife Wong’s virtual cosmos flowing with solutions for the twenty-first century, may be a first.
Money as Media
From crypto to the non-hierarchical motivations of Visa’s founder, Berggruen Fellow Lana Swartz appears on Vergecast to discuss the manifold threads of her book: New Money, How Payment Became Social Media.
Enacting Praxis
The Berggruen Institute not only invests in the generation of novel ideas and thinking, it puts those ideas into action. This pursuit can be seen as BI’s unique form of praxis.
Beyond Chatbots
What does it say of human creativity when machines become collaborators? Berggruen Fellow Elvia Wilk appeared in The Atlantic to wrangle this question via the “real life science fiction” of Pharmako-AI, a book collaboratively penned between K Allado-McDowell and a witty, philosophizing natural language processing system.
A Garden of Algorithmic Wisdom
Berggruen Fellow Stephanie Dinkins launched her immersive 3D web portal — Secret Garden — a digital terra intended to preserve and showcase the oral histories of Black women.
Liberatory Imaginaries, Protopian Actions
Berggruen Fellows Stephanie Dinkins and Elvia Wilk riff on Dinkins’s radical conceptualization of present resistance: Afro-now-ism.
Protecting the Digital Agora
A handful of tech platforms now hold the keys to the gates of political discourse; Berggruen Fellow Jamie Susskind looks to Ancient Greece and the history of public debate to explain why their transparency will be the key to protecting the public square.
In the Face of Stagnancy: Spoken Word
Two poets, 14-year-old Nigerian American Salome Agbaroji and prolific American writer Lucille Clifton, separated by lived experience and time, ask the same question, “Are we there yet?” Half a century later, the answer remains unchanged.
The Virtual Civic
Taiwan’s Digital Minister graced NOEMA magazine to discuss the efficacy of collective intelligence, hackathons, and revamping governmental tools to adapt to our digitizing planet.
Strange Expectations
Technosignatures, extraterrestrials, and the politics of listening — these are among the many ideas Berggruen Fellow Claire Webb converged to question our preconceptions of alien intention in a recent NASA workshop: Experiments of Expectation.
Perceptions and Particles
Look deeply enough at reality, it can be two things at once. Using Buddhist philosophy and quantum physics, former Fellow Tenzin Priyadarshi and Google Engineering Director Hartmut Neven show us how.
What Character is Your Algorithm?
The Institute explores the many global faces of artificial intelligence–and what they say about society.
Mourning the Folly of Youth
“Your generation must come to terms with the environment…must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance,” Rachel Carson warned in 1962. But it’s this generation, whose future is intertwined with the climate crisis, that must bear the brunt of the burden Carson warned of. Through YES, the Institute will empower youth to shoulder that responsibility.

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composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE