People

Antonia Hernández

Antonia Hernández

President & CEO, California Community Foundation

Biography

Ms. Antonia Hernandez serves as Director at Local Initiatives Support Corporation since January 2007. She has been a Director of Golden West Financial Corp. since 1995. She joined the California Community Foundation as President and CEO in February 2004. She was President and General Counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a national nonprofit litigation and advocacy organization. Before joining MALDEF as a regional counsel in Washington in … 1981, she was a staff attorney with the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice and then worked as counsel to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Ms. Hernández is a trustee for the Rockefeller Foundation and a member of the board of directors for the Automobile Club of Southern California and Golden West Financial Corporation. She serves on various commissions, advisory boards, committees and panels, including the Pacific Council for International Policy. She holds a J.D. from UCLA.

Hernández was previously a member of the LA Committee and Think Long California.

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