People

Marjan Horst Ehsassi

Marjan Horst Ehsassi

Policy Strategist, Advocate and Practitioner, 2022-2023 Berggruen Fellow

Biography

Marjan H. Ehsassi is a strategic policy advisor, practitioner, movement builder, and a fierce believer in citizen-centric, inclusive, responsive and impactful government-led engagements that provide citizens with consequential voice in policy reform.

She has traveled to and worked to enhance space for civil society in some of the most complex environments including Iran, Ukraine, and North Korea. A lawyer and international governance expert, she received her Doctorate in International Affairs from SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, with a concentration on democratic innovations, deliberation and government-initiated citizens’ assemblies. She has studied the impact of citizens’ assemblies on participants in France, Belgium, Canada, and the United States.

Marjan is Strategic Director of the Democratic Action Fund and serves on several boards including Healthy Democracy, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Meridian Council. She was one of four guarantors selected to the Collège des Garants of the French Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life (Convention Citoyenne sur la Fin de Vie) (2022-2023) and is on the Oversight Committee of G1000’s We Need To Talk Citizens’ Panel (2022-2023).

As a Berggruen Future of Democracy Fellow, Marjan supports programs that raise knowledge, build capacity and test deliberative platforms in the United States, including the Global Innovations in Democracy Parliamentary Forum, the Summit of Democracy Working Group on Deliberative Democracy, the Future of Institutions on Deliberative Democracy, and the design and implementation of the Citizens’ Assemblies in the United States.

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