Up Next: America's Young Poets

October 22, 2020

11am Virtual

Full Video

Selected Excerpts

 

LA-based collective Get Lit presents America’s most exciting young poets for a powerful take on American life and politics

About this Event

LA’s spoken word scene is blowing up right now – and the grassroots poetry group Get Lit is at the epicenter of this activist movement.

2020 has been a year of protest, division, despair, and hope. In the run-up to this November’s Presidential election, a generation growing up in America today are standing up and making their voices heard on the issues that will impact their future.

Join Get Lit hosts Mason Granger and Tyris Winter live from Second Home Hollywood’s yellow rooftops to hear from some of the country’s most exciting young poets and their powerful take on life in the United States.

The Poets
Violeta Tabilla-Esquivel aka ‘La Poeta Violeta is a 14-year-old LatinX spoken word artist. She speaks on climate change, LatinX-girl power, immigration reform, and gun violence.

Nyarae Francis is a 16-year-old Hamilton High School student from Inglewood, CA. Her poetry speaks on the community, academic inequality, mental health, the joys of life, family, gender and sexuality and the black experience through the eyes of a young woman finding healing and growth through poetry.

Salome Agbaroji is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian-American poet based in Los Angeles County, California. Through each piece she urges social change and community action to improve the nation and our world.

The Hosts
Tyris Winter is Get Lit’s Social Media Curator, an aspiring legend, and self-proclaimed 70s guru. With a passion for the arts, his love lies in multiple outlets, from painting, dancing, fashion, to poetry.

Mason Granger is a poet with 15+ years of professional experience and the Manager of Public Outreach at Get Lit. In 2014, he created SlamFind, a digital platform specifically intended to connect fans of poetry videos with the poets & live poetry venues where these videos are born.

This event is part of a new series presented by Second Home and Berggruen Institute – public events that bring together the most inspiring and celebrated figures of our time to exchange and discuss groundbreaking cultural, social and political ideas.


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