People

Gerald Parsky

Gerald Parsky

Chairman of Aurora Capital Group

Biography

Gerald Parsky serves as Chairman of Aurora Capital Group, a Los Angeles based investment firm formed in 1991 that acquires and builds companies in partnership with operating management. By combining strong management, sufficient capital and careful industry selection, Aurora and its management partners continue to create growing, competitive companies in a variety of U.S. based industries. Gerald Parsky also serves on the investment committee of Aurora Resurgence, a Los Angeles based private equity firm investing in the debt and equity securities of struggling middle market companies. Gerald Parsky has served as chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of California, as well as several sub-cabinet positions under Richard Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. He has received appointments from each of the past five Republican administrations. His service has included positions at the U.S. Departments of Treasury and Energy (Nixon); as Assistant Secretary for International Affairs with the U.S. Department of Treasury (Ford); the President’s Council on Productivity (Reagan); the President’s Export Council (George H.W. Bush) and the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security (George W. Bush). He received the Alexander Hamilton Award from the U.S. Treasury Department, the highest award for a Treasury official. Gerald Parsky serves as a Trustee to both the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the George (H.W.) Bush Presidential Library Foundation in Texas. Appointed to a 12-year term as Regent of the University of California by Governor Pete Wilson, Gerald Parsky was elected unanimously by his peers to serve as their Chairman. He oversaw the Regents’ governance of the university’s vast array of endeavors including oversight and negotiations on behalf of the U.S. nuclear labs at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, student admissions, expansion of the U.C. Merced campus, as well as budget and fiscal issues including pension plans for the faculty and staff of one of the finest public institution of higher education in the country.In this role, he led efforts to professionalize the management and oversight of the UC Retirement System. In the process, it became clear that it was not prudent to continue a policy adopted in 1990 whereby members did not contribute to the UC Retirement Fund, and Gerald Parsky helped convince the Regents to change that policy. Gerald Parsky holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Virginia Law School and a bachelor of arts in English from Princeton University in New Jersey.

Parsky was previously a member of 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