People

Jane Keller

Jane Keller

Creative Director

Biography

Jane Keller is the Creative Director of the Berggruen Institute. She is a veteran film editor, creative director, and artist. Before joining the Berggruen Institute, she was the lead creative and editor at Los Angeles-based creative agency Happy United LLC, which she founded in 2015, and honed her editorial and creative talent at leading editorial houses and agencies in New York. Jane has delivered campaigns for clients such as American Express, Kodak, Match.com, Royal Caribbean, and Bank of America, and projects for A&E, National Geographic, Lenny Kravitz, and Barbara Kopple. Her work has aired on all major networks and reached tens of millions of viewers. Jane was nominated for the Best New Editor award by Boards Magazine who called her “one of the best new editorial talents in advertising for her unique blend of creative and technical talent.” She was co-chair and head of production of Mythic Bridge, a nonprofit that provided hands-on filmmaking education to at-risk youth, leading its Change The Script Campaign that raised awareness for LGBTQ youth and the Mythic Bridge LGBTQ Filmmaking Workshops. Jane holds a bachelor’s in art history and a bachelor of fine arts in art making from Tufts University.

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