Dictatorships and Data Standards

Since the 19th century, government statistics have been central to our sense of shared social reality. Is that going away?

Nils Gilman

Dictatorships and Data Standards
NILS GILMAN
Since the 19th century, government statistics have been central to our sense of shared social reality. Is that going away?

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision last month to add a question to the 2020 Census asking about citizenship status has predictably led to a firestorm of controversy. Census professionals, former Census directors, and progressive activists have responded furiously since the decision was announced, arguing that the added question will scare undocumented residents from filling out the census forms, leading to an undercount of the population in immigrant-rich communities.

As Ari Berman recently put it, “The census is America’s largest civic event, the only one that involves everyone in the country, young and old, citizen and noncitizen, rich and poor.”…

www.the-american-interest.com

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