People

Evan Spiegel

Evan Spiegel

Co-Founder and CEO, Snap Inc.

Biography

Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Snap Inc. Snap is a camera company that empowers people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world and have fun together.

Evan and Snap co-founder Bobby Murphy created Snapchat while at Stanford University. Today Snap is a publicly-traded company with over 210 million daily active users around the world.

In 2017, Evan formed the Spiegel Family Fund, which is committed to philanthropy in California and beyond. Through dedication to the arts, education, housing, and human rights, the Fund supports multiple organizations that contribute to human progress. Evan and Snap co-founder Bobby Murphy also created the Snap Foundation, dedicated to developing pathways to the creative economy for underrepresented youth in Los Angeles.

Evan graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Engineering, Product Design. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Miranda and their three children, Flynn, Hart, and Myles.

Spiegel was previously a member of the 21st Century Council and the LA Committee.

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