The Transformations of the Human

Transformations of the Human (ToftH) was founded by Tobias Rees in 2018 as an experimental program within the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, California.

In 2016, Reid Hoffman had introduced Rees to Nicolas Berggruen, who offered to incubate the program at the Berggruen Institute. The program was designed as a testbed for assembling new ideas that would track the ways in which contemporary technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are disrupting post-Cartesian notion of the Human.

In July 2021, the Berggruen Institute spun ToftH out as an independent organization, jointly funded by Reid Hoffman and the Berggruen Institute, that works with clients to discover the philosophical stakes of their work and with students to conduct experiments at the intersection of philosophy and technology. Please follow the ToftH school and experience here: tofth.org.

The Transformations of the Human program is designed as a philosophical study and artistic exploration of the manifold ways in which artificial intelligence and biotechnology challenge our established conceptions of what it means to be human. By placing philosophers and artists in key research sites to foster dialogue with technologists, the aim of the program is to render AI and Biotech visible as unusually potent experimental sites for reformulating our vocabulary for thinking about ourselves. The Transformations of the Human program ambition is to feed our findings back into the production of both artificial intelligence and biotech and to thereby contribute to both human and non-human flourishing.

 

For an overview of the program, please see the 2018-2019 ToftH Portfolio.

 

 

Robert Fraser

Robert Fraser

Executive Assistant, Transformations of the Humans
Kim Newman

Kim Newman

Director, Operations, Transformations of the Human
Tobias Rees

Tobias Rees

Founder, CEO of ToftH.org

Advisory Board

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