People

Inho Choi

Inho Choi

Political Scientist, 2022-2023 Berggruen Fellow

Biography

Inho Choi is a Political Science Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University, expecting to receive his degree in July 2022. He holds his M.A. and B.A. in Political Science from Seoul National University. He investigates ways to utilize East Asian political thought and international history for reconstructing the foundational concepts of the contemporary global order, such as sovereignty. His article, “‘Chinese’ hegemony from a Korean shi perspective,” proposed the rule of virtue to reorient sovereignty toward attunement to human and non-human cosmic forces and has appeared in International Relations of the Asia-Pacific. At the Berggruen Institute, he will continue the research on the rule of virtue and write his book on the virtues of the state in East Asian International Relations. He will also extend the analysis of his book in two related projects. First, he explores how the fractal conception of space in East Asia can resolve conflicts of territorial sovereignty. Finally, he uses the Neo-Confucian notion of cosmic attunement to provide a novel normative language for ordering great power politics in the age of Anthropocene.

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