People

Stephanie Sherman

Stephanie Sherman

Associate Director

Biography

Stephanie Sherman is a director, writer, and strategist focused on socio-speculative systems design. She is Associate Director of Antikythera and director of MA Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins, University of Arts London. Her research is situated at the intersection of histories of technology, platform infrastructures, and spatial futures. Her PhD dissertation, Auto: A Prehistory of Platform Automation, explores automotive histories as precedents for protocols, pathologies, and proclivities of contemporary platform automation. She formerly led the City Design Studio at the Royal College of Art London.  She holds an MA in Philosophy from Duke and a BA in Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Stephanie is a member of Autonomy, a think tank on the future of work, and produces radio broadcasts on mobility and movement with Radio Espacio Estacion, an online nomadic translingual radio station. She is on the Board of Directors at Elsewhere, a living museum set in a former second store she founded in 2003. She has produced programs, events, speculative designs, and experiences in collaboration with Hyundai, MIT Media Lab City Science, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Gates Foundation, SAP Design, Ford Motor Co, The Air and Space Museum Washington DC, The Sunlight Foundation, and SOM Architects, amongst many others.

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