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 the need for meaningful, inclusive, and impactful government-led engagement that provides citizens with a consequential voice. 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 recently received her Doctorate in International Affairs (DIA) from SAIS, Johns Hopkins University with a concentration on democratic innovations, design integrity, and government-initiated Deliberative Mini-Publics (DMPs). She has studied and produced case studies on the impact of citizens’ assemblies on participants in France, Belgium, Canada, and the United States. Marjan is on several boards including Healthy Democracy and has been invited to serve as Independent Guarantor in the Collège des Garants of the French Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life (Convention Citoyenne sur la Fin de Vie).

As a Berggruen Fellow, Marjan supports several initiatives to raise knowledge and test deliberative platforms in the United States, including the implementation of a Legislators’ Forum on Innovations in Democracy, the Working Group on Deliberative Democracy for the Second Summit on Democracy, the Future of Institutions Working Group on Deliberative Democracy, the Democracy Action Fund, and the design and implementation of the first State-wide Citizens’ Assembly 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