What Will Life Become

What Will Life Become?

Thursday, April 21 @ USC // Friday, April 22 @ Berggruen Institute // #WWLB

REGISTER

To participate in the Keynote Conversation and Public Forum on April 21, join us in person at USC Michelson Hall 101 or over YouTube beginning at 1:00 p.m. We’ll also send you the findings of the Workshop.

REGISTER

ABOUT

Biotechnologies that push the limits of life, artificial intelligences that can be trained to learn, and endeavors that envision life beyond Earth are among recent and anticipated technoscientific futures. Such projects unsettle theories and material realities of body, mind, species, and the planet. They prompt us to ask: How will we conjure positive human futures and future humans?

On Thursday, April 21 and Friday, April 22, the Berggruen Institute and the USC Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public, together with philosophers, scientists, and artists, collaboratively and critically inquire:

What Will Life Become?

KEYNOTE CONVERSATION
“Speculative Worldbuilding”

PUBLIC FORUM
“What Will Life Become?”

PANELS
“Futures of Life”
“Futures of Mind”
“Futures in Outer Space”

WORKSHOP
“Embodied Futures”

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VISION

The search for extraterrestrial biosignatures, human/machine cyborgian mashups, and dreams to facilitate reproduction beyond Earth are future-facing technologies. They complicate the purported thresholds, conditions, and boundaries of “the human,” “life,” and “the mind” — as if such categories have ever been stable. 

In concert with the Berggruen Institute’s newly launched Future Humans Program, What Will Life Become? invites philosophers, scientists, and artists to design and co-shape the human and more-than-human futures of life, the mind, and the planet.

Day 1 at USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience 101 features a Keynote with director and speculative architect Liam Young who will discuss world-building through narrative and film with Nils Gilman; a Public Forum with leading scholars K Allado-McDowell, Neda Atanasoski, Lisa Ruth Rand, Tiffany Vora, moderated by Claire Isabel Webb, who will consider the question, “what will life become?” Reception to follow.

Day 2 at the Berggruen Institute features a three-part Salon: “Futures of Life,” “Futures of Mind,” and “Futures in Outer Space.” Conceptual artists Sougwen Chung, Nancy Baker Cahill, REEPS100, Brian Cantrell, and ARSWAIN will unveil world premieres. “Embodied Futures” invites participants to imagine novel forms of life, mind, and being through artistic and intellectual provocations.

Questions:

How will scientists reform expectations of life and personhood in a post-biological world?

How will the extra-planetary recapitulate or stage new social relations, institutions, and politics of Earth?

How do novel human/non-human agents (animals, robots) disrupt andro- and anthropocentric hierarchies of species and mind?

How will concepts of indigeneity, race, and ethnicity be shuttled to worlds beyond Earth and times beyond our present?

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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