People

Johanna Hoffman

Johanna Hoffman

Urbanist, 2021-2022 Berggruen Fellow

Biography

Johanna Hoffman is an urbanist working in the space between design, planning, fiction, and futures. The Founder and Director of Planning at Design for Adaptation, Hoffman uses strategic planning and speculative design to help communities, cities, and organizations translate future uncertainties into present-day choices. 

She has created adaptation strategies for international companies, led long-term planning for leading academic centers, designed interactive installations of urban futures, and held fellowships at centers such as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the European Futures Observatory, and USC. She holds an MLA from UC Berkeley.

Her first book, Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-Create the Cities We Need, was published in October 2022 by North Atlantic and Penguin Random House. A blend of applied research and professional insight, the text contextualizes speculative design tools within the realities of city planning to illuminate the ties between collective imagination and more resilient urban design. In addition to leading her consulting practice, Hoffman is currently developing her second book project, which explores the links between proactive climate adaptation and socio-spatial imaginaries of control.

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