People

Ben Cerveny

Ben Cerveny

Senior Fellow

Biography

Ben Cerveny is the president and chairman of the Foundation for Public Code. His work concerns the fundamental relationship of computation with society.

For more than 25 years Ben has worked as an executive, strategist, and designer in the context of operating systems, media applications, web services, products, the built environment, and digital games.

Before founding the Foundation for Public Code, he was a Design Fellow at Samsung, working with design teams across the company and leading a project on room-scale programmable environments.

Previously, he helped design the massively multiplayer game about collaborative creativity online that became Flickr [and also named it], founded the Experience Design Lab at Frogdesign, and was founder and CEO of Bloom Studios, whose data visualization iPad app Planetary was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution.

He has written and lectured extensively, and taught at UCLA, New York University, and the University College London. He serves on the advisory council of the Digital Public Goods Alliance and the steering committee of the UN/ITU GovStack project.

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