Berggruen Institute Founder Nicolas Berggruen joins The Quarantine Tapes: A podcast from Onassis LA and dublab hosted by Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber

EPISODE SUMMARY
Shadow Governments, COVID-19 lessons from the Berggruen institute’s time in China, the ultimate capacity of government, equality, and visions of economic restructuring and free distribution. ‘We have to arm each citizen with more or better social and economic minimums, access and ability to integrate from an information standpoint, into a greater world’.


EPISODE NOTES
“This [pandemic] forces the entire world to in essence step back and to not only deal with the crisis at hand, but also to see how we can develop in the future and who do we want to be in a future that will have these types of challenges.”

Nicolas Berggruen is the Chairman of the Berggruen Institute, which addresses fundamental political and cultural questions in our rapidly changing world. Committed to leaving a legacy of art and architecture, he serves on museum boards and councils from Los Angeles to Berlin and is presently planning the Institute’s new headquarters in the Santa Monica mountains with Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron. Berggruen is co-author with Nathan Gardels of Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism and Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century, a Financial Times Book of the Year.

Paul Holdengräber is an interviewer and curator of public curiosity. He is the Founder and Director of Onassis LA (OLA), a center for dialogue. Previously he was the Founder and Director of LIVE from the NYPL, a cultural series at the New York Public Library, where he hosted over 600 events, holding conversations with everyone from Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Ricky Jay to Jay-Z, Errol Morris to Jan Morris, Wes Anderson to Helen Mirren, Christopher Hitchens to Mike Tyson. He is the host of “A Phone Call From Paul,” a podcast for The Literary Hub.

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