People

Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio

University Professor, Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, University of Southern California

Biography

Antonio Damasio, chairman of the jury for the annual Berggruen Prize, is University Professor, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Damasio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processes underlying emotions, feelings, decision-making and consciousness. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and the recipient of many awards (including the Grawemeyer Award, 2014; the Honda Prize, 2010; the Asturias Prize in Science and Technology, 2005). Damasio is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.  He has been named “Highly Cited Researcher” by the Institute for Scientific Information and holds Honorary Doctorates from several major Universities.

He has described his discoveries in several books (Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens, Looking for Spinoza, Self Comes to Mind, The Strange Order of Things and Feeling and Knowing 2021) translated worldwide.

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