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

Sha Xin Wei

Wednesday Jan 9th, 2008 at 2:30 - 4.00 pm

SFU Surrey Campus, Room 5380 (5th Floor Galleria)

Sha Xin Wei

Canada Research Chair, Media Arts and Sciences (Fine Arts and Computer Science, Concordia University)

Title: The Topological Media Lab: studying subjectivation, agency and materiality from phenomenological, social and computational perspectives.

Abstract:

I will discuss and overview our work at the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University. The TML studies distributed agency, materiality, and gesture from phenomenological, social and computational perspectives. We study the phenomenology of gesture and performance, how media can be tangible, how people inhabit spaces made of responsive matter. Based on such studies, our goal is to create modes of performance and responsive environments with ethico-aesthetic impact.

The TML invents gesturally nuanced, time-based media and expressive instruments that support novel responsive architectures, based on a topological approach to media: physical and computational matter, image or sound that evolve continuously under continuous gestural input.

The projects are inspired by collaborative work with artists, performers and researchers in Europe, Canada, Japan, and the U.S.A. The studio-lab's physical-computing artifacts, installation experiments, and scholarly presentations provide opportunities for students to integrate critical, artistic, and scientific practices.

Artists and researchers with backgrounds or interests ranging from fine arts, electronic music, theater and architecture to materials and textile sciences, computational physics, signal processing, computer vision and pattern recognition etc. have all been welcome to the TML.

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