Berggruen Fellow Mark Paul Testifies Before the Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change

Mark Paul

At the Bicameral Climate Task Force hearing on the Civilian Climate Corps (CCC), held on Wednesday, June 24, 2021, Berggruen Institute Fellow Mark Paul provided expert testimony on the economic, climate, and social benefits of creating a new CCC, adapted to the challenges and cultural landscape of the 21st century. In his testimony, Mark underscored a number of recommendations put forth by the Future of Democracy team as part of their Youth Environment Service campaign. As advocated in the Youth-led Climate Action report, Mark also shared the need to match financial investments in the CCC to the magnitude of the crises we face. He testified before the Task Force stating, “A new CCC has the potential to generate millions of new well-paying jobs across the United States economy. An estimated 15–23 jobs would be created per million in spending on the CCC, with the exact number of jobs depending on the types of employment undertaken by the program… An estimated $100 billion investment in the CCC would yield an average of 1.9 million jobs, including indirect and induced jobs.”

Read the full written testimony.

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