People

Guy Verhofstadt

Guy Verhofstadt

Brexit Coordinator, European Parliament

Biography

Guy was born in 1953, and attended school and university in Ghent, where he studied the law. In 1972, he became President of the Liberal Flemish Students’ Union in Ghent and, four years later, was elected as a City Councillor there.  Keen to follow his interest in national politics, Guy went on to take a number of high profile posts including Political Secretary to Willy De Clercq, National President of the Party for Freedom and Progress (PVV), an MP in the House of Representatives, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Budget, a Senator, and National President of the PVV and National President of the Flemish Liberals and Democrats (VLD).

In July 1999, he became Prime Minister of Belgium, heading three separate governments over the course of nearly ten years.

In June 2009, Guy Verhofstadt was elected to the European Parliament where he will pursue his interests in European politics after winning the unanimous support of the ALDE Group in their leadership contest.

In addition to his duties as a politician, Guy has written a number of books including, The United States of Europe (2006), The New Age of Empires (2008) and Emerging from the Crisis: How Europe can Save the World (2009).

Guy Verhofstadt is married to Dominique Verkinderen.  They live in Ghent and have two children, Charlotte and Louis.

Verhofstadt was previously a member of the Council for the Future of Europe and The WorldPost Advisory Council.

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