Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

Sha Xin Wei

Please note the change in time and room for the research colloquium

Wednesday March 14, 2007 at 4.00 - 6.00 pm

Room 3280, SFU Surrey Campus, 3rd floor Central City Tower

Sha Xin Wei

Title: POIESIS AND ENCHANTMENT IN TOPOLOGICAL MATTER

Abstract:

I explore some of the questions motivating installation-events like TGarden, txOom, and trg, and the qualities of experimental experience that may charge such responsive media spaces as playful or transformative events.

My interest in these responsive media spaces springs from two intertwined conversations. The first is a series of conversations about agency, language, and hybrid ontology, in which we put labels and concepts like "interaction," "map," "system," "grammar," "expression," and "human" in play. The second is a challenge from experimental theater and speculative architecture to make events in which we and our participants can palpably encounter, and experiment bodily with radical articulations of agency, desire, and action.

How can we make a responsive space and event within which initially accidental, unmarked, unrehearsed, ordinary gestures can acquire perceptible symbolic charge? These questions are practical questions of craft, and could only be answered or explored materially, in physical built spaces and peopled events, but the way in which we explored them was by doing performance research. Affiliate artists, scholars, and students, in an atelier-studio called the Topological Media Lab, have created installation-events that resonate between blackbox improvisation-experiments with special audiences, and open installation-events with public visitors.

Now, the same questions about the event also have a radical, micro-textural inflection. Could technologies like real-time media, gestural sound and calligraphic video, or sensate fabrics, be added to the Artaudian mise en scene of experimental event? Stone resists, a tree greens, and software breaks regardless of what we say. If we desire matter to perform differently, we cannot simply legislate or script it by brandishing a pen alone, we must also manufacture a symbolic material substrate that behaves differently from ordinary matter.

The kind of events I’ll describe, the kind we’re exploring, are collective, co-present, embodied, and a linguistic. The potential for physical contact is a condition for the collective embodied experiences needed to conduct experimental phenomenology. Our events are designed for three or more participants, three to destabilize dyadic pairing, and lower the threshold to improvising being in that space. Saying “embodied” marks that the participants corporeally co-structure the event, but here our bodies exceed our skin. Having dissolved line between actor and spectator, we may adopt the disposition of an agent of change, or equally a witness of the event.

Relinquishing also a categoreal fixation on objects in favor of topological magma, we inhabit ambient environments thick with media and matter that evolve in concert with poetic and poietic gesture.

Bio:

Sha Xin Wei, Ph.D., is Canada Research Chair in media arts and sciences, and Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Computer Science at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. He directs the Topological Media Lab, a studio-laboratory for the study of gesture and materiality from computational and phenomenological perspectives. His graduate courses combine critical studies of computation and technology with studio work in responsive environments and live events. Sha’s major art research work include the TGarden responsive environments, Hubbub speech-sensitive urban surfaces, Membrane calligraphic video, and Softwear gestural sound instruments, and most recently kinetic sculpture and low resolution displays responding to movement and gesture.

Sha Xin Wei was trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford Universities, and worked more than 12 years in the fields of scientific computation, mathematical modeling and the visualization of scientific data and geometric structures.

In 1995, he extended his work to network media authoring systems and media theory coordinating a 3 year long workshop on interaction and computational media at Stanford. In 1997, he co-founded Pliant Research with colleagues from Xerox PARC and Apple Research Labs, dedicated to designing technologies that people and organizations can robustly reshape to meet evolving socio-economic needs.

In 1998, Sha also co-founded the Sponge art group in San Francisco, to build public experiments in phenomenology of performance. With Sponge and other artists, Sha Xin Wei directed event/installations in prominent experimental art venues including Ars Electronica Austria, V2 The Netherlands, MediaTerra Greece, Banff Canada, Future Physical United Kingdom. He has also exhibited media installations at Postmasters Gallery New York and Suntrust Gallery Atlanta. These works have been recognized by awards from major cultural foundations such as the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology; the LEF Foundation; the Canada Fund for Innovation; the Creative Work Fund in New York; and the Rockefeller Foundation.

After obtaining an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2001 at Stanford on differential geometric performance and the technologies of writing in Mathematics, Computer Science, and History & Philosophy of Science, Sha joined the faculty of the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and the research faculty in the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center in the College of Computing, where he founded the Topological Media Lab, dedicated to the study of gesture, distributed agency and materiality with application to the phenomenology of performance and the built environment.

In 2004-2005, Dr. Sha was Visiting Scholar in History of Science at Harvard University, and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, writing about agency, materiality, performance, and topological media. In 2005, Dr. Sha became director of Hexagram’s Active Textiles and Wearable Computers Axis.

Dr. Sha is a co-editor of the journal, Artificial Intelligence and Society. Publications include the essays "Resistance is Fertile: Gesture and Agency in the Field of Responsive Media," Configurations 2003, "Demonstrations of Expressive Softwear and Ambient Media," Ubicomp 2003, and to appear in 2005-2006: "Whitehead's Poetical Mathematics," in Configurations, "TGarden As Experimental Performance," in Modern Drama, and “A Poetics of Performative Space,” in Poetics Today. He is now writing a book on poetics and enchantment in topological matter.

Sha Xin Wei