Inaugurating Its First European Center of Activity, the Berggruen Institute Announces the 2021 Berggruen Prize Recipient at Its Newly Acquired Casa Dei Tre Oci in Venice.

The Institute intends to make Casa dei Tre Oci its center of European activity: a gathering place for global dialogue and new ideas, housing an international program of summits, workshops, symposia, and exhibitions in the visual arts and architecture.

In an inauguration ceremony at the Berggruen Institute’s new European Center for Activity, Casa dei Tre Oci, Nicolas Berggruen announces philosopher Peter Singer as the 2021 recipient of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. The $1 million Prize is given annually to thinkers whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world. Peter Singer will receive the Prize in the Spring of 2022 in a ceremony to be held in Los Angeles.

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