People

Jacques Attali

Jacques Attali

Chairman & CEO, Attali & Associés

Biography

Professor, writer, Honorary Member of the Council of State, Special Adviser to the President of the Republic from 1981 to 1991, founder and first President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London from 1991 to 1993, Jacques Attali (www.attali.com) is currently CEO of A&A, an international consulting firm in strategy, based in Paris, and President of PlaNet Finance, an international non-profit organisation assisting microfinance institutions all over the world. PlaNet Finance is the most important world institution of support to the microfinance. PlaNet Finance advises and finances the development of the microfinance in 80 countries, and launched the LH Forum, movement for positive economy (www.ecoplus.tv).

He founded Action Contre la Faim in 1980 and the European programme Eurêka (a major European programme on new technologies that invented, among other things, the MP3). In, 1989, he also launched an international programme of action against the disastrous floods in Bangladesh. Jacques Attali then advised the Secretary General of the United Nations on the risks of nuclear proliferation. He is at the origin of the higher education reform, known as LMD, to bring all European degrees into line.

Jacques Attali has a doctorate in Economics and is a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique (first in the class of 1963), the Ecole des Mines, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and the Ecole Nationale de l’Administration. He taught Economic Theory at the Ecole Polytechnique, the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and the University of Paris-Dauphine. He has received honorary doctorates from several foreign universities and is a member of the Universal Academy of Cultures.

Jacques Attali is an editorialist for the magazine L’Express. He has written fifty books, translated into more than twenty languages, with over six million copies sold all over the world, including essays (dealing with a wide variety of subjects ranging from mathematical economics, to music), biographies, novels, children’s tales and plays.

Jacques Attali was nominated President of the Commission for the liberation for French economic growth by the President of the French Republic in August 2007.

He belongs to the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, according to the Foreign Policy Magazine (May/June 2008 and 2010).

Attali was previously a member of The Worldpost Advisory Council.

Articles

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