People

Jörg Asmussen

Jörg Asmussen

Economist

Biography

Jörg Asmussen is a German economist and politician who has been Permanent State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs since January 2014. He is responsible for the human resources and budgetary policy of the Ministry. The subjects of pension and disability policy as well as the European and international employment and social policy also fall within his area of competence.

From 2012 to 2013 he was a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank (ECB). His area of competence in the ECB included European and international relations and he represented the ECB in European and international bodies such as the Eurogroup Working Group and the EU Economic and Financial Committee.

Before joining the ECB, Jörg Asmussen served in several functions in the Federal Ministry of Finance. For example, he was head of the office of the then Minister of Finance Minister Hans Eichel (1999 to 2002), Director-General for Financial Market Policy (2003 to 2008) and State Secretary responsible for European Policy, Financial Market Policy and Economic and Fiscal Policy Strategy (2008 to 2011). In 2011 he acted as the Federal Chancellor’s Sherpa to the G20 summit. During his time as State Secretary, Jörg Asmussen had several mandates at German, European and international level. He was the German representative in the Eurogroup Working Group, the EU Economic and Financial Committee and German representative at state secretary level in the process of G-7 and G-20 Finance Ministers. He was also Alternate Governor at the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, member of the Financial Stability Board, Chairman of the Administrative Council of Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) and member of the supervisory board of Deutsche Telekom and Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit. Since early summer 2014 Jörg Asmussen has been deputy chairman of the Advisory Council to the Jacques Delors Institute in Berlin and member of the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum.

Jörg Asmussen studied economics in Gießen and Bonn and has a Master of Business Administration degree from Luigi Bocconi University, Milan.

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