“Wealth Building in a Digital Economy” Conference

December 5, 2019

9am — Palo Alto

The Berggruen Institute, in partnership with the Aspen Institute, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and the Institute for the Future, is pleased to host the “Wealth Building in a Digital Economy” at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto on December 5th, 2019.

This invitation-only meeting is the first attempt to foster a conversation between specialists in broad wealth building and those trying to understand how to create a more equitable distribution of digital and data-based assets. By bringing together these two communities, we hope to address the challenges and opportunities that the importance of “non-tangible” capital and personal data present for creating a more equitable distribution of capital and wealth-building opportunities.

The roundtable will bring together participants from academia, policymaking, the financial industry, and the technology industry to outline the contours of the debate on the value of data and other “digital” assets and on broad public wealth building. In doing so, the organizers hope to build a sustained discussion in which issues of interest to both communities can be identified and expanded upon in later convening and working projects.

Sponsored By:
• The Berggruen Institute
• Institute for the Future
• The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
• The Aspen Institute

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