Globalization and Geopolitics

Today’s dominant intellectual framework of international affairs is shaped by realism and power politics. Notions of nation-state, national interest, zero-sum competition, and big power rivalry underlie these debates and inform policymaking. While these notions are helpful in analyzing the power balance of international affairs, they are inadequate in helping us understand the deeper motivations and aspirations driving, directing, and shaping policy making. A closer look at embedded values, philosophical traditions and historical experiences will promote deep cross-cultural understanding and allow building strategic trust among the world’s great powers.

We started exploring the prevailing model of world governance from the cultural perspectives of China, India, Africa, and the Muslim world by organizing international workshops, including the “Classical Indian and Chinese World Views,” and Tianxia series. We will hold a second workshop on Tianxia in a global context in the first half of 2021.

Achievements in 2019:

• Proposed book publication: the volume of the first Tianxia conference is ready to be published in the first half of 2020; the publishing contract with CITIC has been signed
• International workshop “Classical Indian and Chinese World Views,“ July 2019, Beijing: it was organized in collaboration with Tsinghua University’s World Peace Forum, and a volume of papers is expected to be published in 2020.

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