People

Nicolas Berggruen

Nicolas Berggruen

Chairman and Founder

Biography

Nicolas Berggruen is the Chairman of the Berggruen Institute, which addresses fundamental political and cultural questions in our rapidly changing world. Focusing on Great Transformations in the human condition, brought for example by climate change, restructuring of global economics and politics, and advances in science and technology, the Institute seeks to connect deep thought in the human sciences—philosophy and culture—to the pursuit of practical improvements in governance. To this end, Nicolas formed the 21st Century Council, the Council for the Future of Europe and the Think Long Committee for California; all dedicated to the design and implementation of good governance—drawing from practices in both East and West.

Committed to leaving a legacy of art and architecture, he sits on the boards of the Museum Berggruen, Berlin, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He is a member of the International Councils for the Tate Museum, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the President’s International Council for The J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles. He has collaborated on projects with such renowned architects as Richard Meier, Shigeru Ban and David Adjaye; and is presently planning the Institute’s new headquarters in the Santa Monica mountains with Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and Los Angeles’ Gensler.

Mr. Berggruen is co-author with Nathan Gardels of Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (University of California Press) and Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century, a Financial Times Book of the Year, and co-publisher of Noema Magazine.

Berggruen was previously a member of the 21st Century Council, Council for the Future of Europe, Globalization and Geopolitics, and Think Long California.

Nicolas Berggruen is also Chairman of Berggruen Holdings, the investment vehicle of the Nicolas Berggruen Charitable Trust.

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