People

Yi-Huah Jiang

Yi-Huah Jiang

Political Scientist; 2015-16 Berggruen Fellow at CASBS

Biography

Yi-Huah Jiang received his BA and MA degrees from the National Taiwan University and his PhD in political science from Yale University. He previously taught political philosophy at the department of political science at National Taiwan University. From 2008 to 2014, he served as minister of research and evaluation commission; as minister of the interior; as vice premier; and finally as the premier of Taiwan. He is now a senior advisor to the president of Taiwan. Jiang’s academic interests lie in political philosophy, democratic theory, general education, and Taiwanese politics. He is the author of Liberalism, Nationalism and National Identity (1998) and Essays on Liberalism and Democracy (2000). He earned Distinguished Teaching Award from National Taiwan University and Distinguished Research Award from the National Science Council of Taiwan in 2002. During his public service years, Jiang launched the master plan to streamline the central government; enhanced the welfare benefits for the poor and the physically or mentally challenged people; facilitated the development of e-commerce and social enterprise; increased the national income per capita and reduced the unemployment rate; revised the capital gains tax to create a fairer society; implemented the K-12 education reform as well as the vocational education reform; and passed a series of strict regulations regarding environmental protection. During his Berggruen Fellowship year at CASBS, Yi-huah Jiang will reflect on how social harmony and individual freedom can be reconciled in modern society from the perspectives of both comparative political philosophy and public policy. He thinks this question is particularly pressing in East Asian countries where conventional norms that tend to promote patriotism and solidarity at the cost of individual autonomy are undergoing structural transformation.

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