Unseen Censors

How should we react when certain voices are shut out of public debate? It was the question current Berggruen Fellow Jamie Susskind posed in a 2018 op-ed piece on the role tech firms now play in regulating online debate and civil discourse. Who should be included and, perhaps more controversially, excluded? How do we re-learn how to talk to each other, but online?

Untitled from Carl Haplin

“We cannot have a society, in which, if two people wish to communicate the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.” Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not A Gadget, laments. “The speed, idiocy, and scale of false social perceptions have been amplified to the point that people often don’t seem to be living in the same world, the real world, anymore.”

“Humankind’s journey into the future ironically marks a reversion as well as progress,” Susskind wrote in the Berggruen Institute’s report, Renewing Democracy in the Digital Age. And so, how do we move forward? “To what extent should our lives be governed by powerful digital systems—and on what terms? That is the central political question of this century.”

To read Renewing Democracy in the Digital Age, click here. 

To order Jamie’s first book, Future Politics, click here.

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