Renovating Democracy: A Book Talk with Nathan Gardels & Nicolas Berggruen

May 13, 2019

12pm Berkeley

On Monday, May 13th at 12pm as Nathan Gardels and Nicolas Berggruen, co-founders of the Berggruen Institute, discussed their new book, Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (University of California Press; April, 2019), with Laura Tyson, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business & Faculty Director of the Institute for Business & Social Impact.

Democracy is in crisis. The populist uprisings in the US and throughout Europe are not the cause of the West’s crisis of governance, but, rather, have exposed the ways in which liberal democracies have failed their citizens by failing to address the dislocations of globalization and the disruptions of rapid technological change. Neither establishment nor populist leaders have proposed any systemic solutions, so governments have become further polarized and paralyzed, compounding the problem.

In Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism, Gardels and Berggruen argue that the rise of populism in the West, of China in the East, and the spread of social media, has prompted a deep rethink of how democracy works—or doesn’t. Gardels and Berggruen have researched, field-tested, and explored these recommendations through their work at the Berggruen Institute, a think tank designed to develop and promote long-term answers to the biggest challenges of the 21st Century. Their first book, Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century, was named one of the best books of 2012 by the Financial Times.


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