People

Nancy Baker Cahill

Nancy Baker Cahill

ToftH Artist Fellow

Biography

Nancy Baker Cahill is an artist working at the intersection of fine art, new media and activism. She is the Founder and Creative Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) public art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. She initiated “Coordinates,” an ongoing series of collaborative, curated & site-specific AR public art exhibitions, including “Defining Line” along the LA river, and the city-wide “Battlegrounds” (24 artists and 30 AR artworks) in New Orleans. She is the recipient of an ARC Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, and was a 2019 nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Baker Cahill was a featured 2018 TEDx speaker in Pasadena, was the subject of a 2019 Bloomberg Media Art and Technology short documentary, and received an “Impact Maker to Watch” award at LA City Hall. She is an international public speaker and was included in the 2019 Desert X Biennial in the Coachella Valley. Currently she is creating a site-specific, combination analog & new media installation for Facebook’s AIR program.

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