Xin Wei Sha
Sha Xin Wei Ph.D. is Professor at the School of Arts, Media + Engineering and directs the Synthesis atelier for transversal art, philosophy and technology at Arizona State University. He is a professor at the European Graduate School in Philosophy, Art and Critical Theory; Fellow of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems; and Senior Fellow of Building21 at McGill University.
Dr. Sha's research concerns topological approaches to poiesis, play and process. His art and scholarship range from gestural media, movement arts, and realtime media installation through interaction design to critical studies and philosophy of technology. Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford, Sha pursues speculative philosophy, experimental art, and visionary technologies that are reciprocally informed.
He publishes in experimental philosophy, media arts, science and technology studies, and computer science, including the book Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter (MIT).
Art
Sha’s art includes the TGarden playspaces, Hubbub speech-sensitive urban spaces, Membrane calligraphic video, Softwear gestural sound instruments, the WYSIWYG gesture-sensitive sounding weaving, Ouija performance-installations, and kinetic / light sculpture responding to movement and gesture, such as Cosmicomics Elektra, eSea Shanghai, the IL Y A video membrane Stanford/Berkeley, and Time Lenses Beall Center, and Palimpsest Paris. With Montanaro, Sha created media instruments for a stage work inspired by Shelley's Frankenstein. In collaboration with Khintirian, Ingalls, and Laurin, he created the Serra vegetal life environment.
Sha co-founded Sponge San Francisco to create public experimental experiences. Sha (co-)created installations in prominent venues: Ars Electronica Austria, Dutch Electronic Art Festival, MediaTerra Greece, Banff Canada, Future Physical UK, Elektra Montréal, and eArts Shanghai, and the Musée des arts et métiers Paris, Postmasters Gallery New York, San Francisco Exploratorium, Suntrust Gallery Atlanta, and SIGGRAPH. These works have been recognized by awards from major cultural foundations such as the Daniel Langlois Foundation; LEF Foundation; Creative Work Fund; and Rockefeller.
Technical research
Dr. Sha’s technical research include realtime, continuous mapping of features extracted from environmental or ensemble activity into parameters modulating the expressive improvisation of gesture in dense, palpable fields of sound, structured light, and animated materials. He has published in areas of tangible interfaces, human-computer interaction, and wearables (Ubicomp, ICMC, Sound Music Computing), calligraphic media (ACM Multimedia), movement (MOCO), responsive environments (CHI, TEI).
History
Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford, Sha worked more than 12 years in the fields of scientific computation, mathematical modeling, scientific and differential geometric visualization.
In 1995, he extended his work to network media authoring systems and media theory leading the Interaction and Media Group at Stanford. In 1997, he co-founded Pliant Research with colleagues from Xerox PARC and Apple Research Labs, designing technologies that people and organizations can adapt to meet evolving social aspirations. In 1999, Sha joined Interval Research to work on machine learning and computer vision.
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 School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and 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 performative and environmental experience.
In 2005-2014, Sha was the first Canada Research Chair in media arts and sciences, and Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts Department at Concordia University Montréal, advising PhD’s in Individualized Studies and Humanities Special Program. He directed the wearables / active textiles axis Hexagram Centre for Research-Creation.
Sha's work has been supported by the Canada Fund for Innovation, Hexagram, Concordia University, Social Sciences Humanities Research Council, Le Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies, and Le Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture; the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Academy of Sciences, and the United Nations.
In 2020, he established Weightlesstudio, an atelier for design and prototype engineering of enriched environments, as a portal between transversal research-creation and the private and public sectors.
Sha serves as an Editor for AI & Society Journal, and on the Governing Board of Leonardo.
Supervisors: Tim Lenoir, Rafe Mazzeo, and Terry Winograd
Phone: +1-650-815-9962
Address: Stauffer-B Room 255
950 South Forest Mall
Tempe Arizona 85281
Dr. Sha's research concerns topological approaches to poiesis, play and process. His art and scholarship range from gestural media, movement arts, and realtime media installation through interaction design to critical studies and philosophy of technology. Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford, Sha pursues speculative philosophy, experimental art, and visionary technologies that are reciprocally informed.
He publishes in experimental philosophy, media arts, science and technology studies, and computer science, including the book Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter (MIT).
Art
Sha’s art includes the TGarden playspaces, Hubbub speech-sensitive urban spaces, Membrane calligraphic video, Softwear gestural sound instruments, the WYSIWYG gesture-sensitive sounding weaving, Ouija performance-installations, and kinetic / light sculpture responding to movement and gesture, such as Cosmicomics Elektra, eSea Shanghai, the IL Y A video membrane Stanford/Berkeley, and Time Lenses Beall Center, and Palimpsest Paris. With Montanaro, Sha created media instruments for a stage work inspired by Shelley's Frankenstein. In collaboration with Khintirian, Ingalls, and Laurin, he created the Serra vegetal life environment.
Sha co-founded Sponge San Francisco to create public experimental experiences. Sha (co-)created installations in prominent venues: Ars Electronica Austria, Dutch Electronic Art Festival, MediaTerra Greece, Banff Canada, Future Physical UK, Elektra Montréal, and eArts Shanghai, and the Musée des arts et métiers Paris, Postmasters Gallery New York, San Francisco Exploratorium, Suntrust Gallery Atlanta, and SIGGRAPH. These works have been recognized by awards from major cultural foundations such as the Daniel Langlois Foundation; LEF Foundation; Creative Work Fund; and Rockefeller.
Technical research
Dr. Sha’s technical research include realtime, continuous mapping of features extracted from environmental or ensemble activity into parameters modulating the expressive improvisation of gesture in dense, palpable fields of sound, structured light, and animated materials. He has published in areas of tangible interfaces, human-computer interaction, and wearables (Ubicomp, ICMC, Sound Music Computing), calligraphic media (ACM Multimedia), movement (MOCO), responsive environments (CHI, TEI).
History
Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford, Sha worked more than 12 years in the fields of scientific computation, mathematical modeling, scientific and differential geometric visualization.
In 1995, he extended his work to network media authoring systems and media theory leading the Interaction and Media Group at Stanford. In 1997, he co-founded Pliant Research with colleagues from Xerox PARC and Apple Research Labs, designing technologies that people and organizations can adapt to meet evolving social aspirations. In 1999, Sha joined Interval Research to work on machine learning and computer vision.
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 School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and 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 performative and environmental experience.
In 2005-2014, Sha was the first Canada Research Chair in media arts and sciences, and Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts Department at Concordia University Montréal, advising PhD’s in Individualized Studies and Humanities Special Program. He directed the wearables / active textiles axis Hexagram Centre for Research-Creation.
Sha's work has been supported by the Canada Fund for Innovation, Hexagram, Concordia University, Social Sciences Humanities Research Council, Le Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies, and Le Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture; the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Academy of Sciences, and the United Nations.
In 2020, he established Weightlesstudio, an atelier for design and prototype engineering of enriched environments, as a portal between transversal research-creation and the private and public sectors.
Sha serves as an Editor for AI & Society Journal, and on the Governing Board of Leonardo.
Supervisors: Tim Lenoir, Rafe Mazzeo, and Terry Winograd
Phone: +1-650-815-9962
Address: Stauffer-B Room 255
950 South Forest Mall
Tempe Arizona 85281
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15 October 2021
Making Sense of Complexity Speaker Series, hosted by the School of Complex Adaptive Systems | ASU
Sha Xin Wei
After rapidly rehearsing some fundamental mathematical, conceptual, and methodological challenges to present day complexity science, we present possible alternatives for next-gen science of complex adaptive systems, drawing on Shannon, Wiener, Gill; Wittgenstein, James, Deleuze, Whitehead; Barad, Arendt; Stepney; Longo, Calude, Saari, Wolpert, Kauffman, Montevil.
Slides: topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/papers/slides/navigating-scas
In Solutions for Postmodern Living (1 November 2021) https://www.solutionsforpostmodernliving.org/world-building-blog/sha-xin-wei
How can we live in a world which is always full of surprises, where bacteria outflank antibiotics, more data yields less understanding and Gaia herself shrugs off carbon capitalism with a fever? We’ll look at a few examples of queering art, technoscience and politics playfully and ethico-aesthetically, in the 21c: post-digital responsive media environments, quantum finance and non-anthropocentric design.
Sha Xin Wei
Professor and Director, School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
25 March 2019 • Gammage • ASU
synthesiscenter.net
1984 ushered in the personal computer, 2004 social media. But our mediated lives are more complicated and brittle than ever. Can we turn from piling up the internet of things to navigating cities and infrastructures that are centuries deep? How can media conduct value as well as fact? What will computational media become in 10 or 20 years? How will we create environments that are not complicated, but rich?
Credits: Connor Rawls, Pete Weisman, Brandon Mechtley, Garrett L. Johnson, Yanjun Lyu, Megan Patzem, Emiddio Vasquez. Thanks to the TEDxASU team.
A talk at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community at Arizona State University. Learn more at ted.com/tedx
(The attached PDF has three images from original manuscript not in the published version.)
turning over a new leaf, offers a moment to think over what seems to work, and what i'd like to try to realize in a phd program that accommodates creative practices from arts and performing arts as modes of knowledge-making: what in canada has been termed research-creation. to make it worth the institutional work, such a degree program should be distinguished from a masters degree, from professional design / architecture training, and from an mfa art program. it should have its own worth. so here are some thoughts that may serve as the base for a phd program that i would like to establish. i am very deliberately modeling my standards from the humanities phd because i think the arts & humanities provide us the most generous, ample and fertile space of practice in the university as we've inherited it from bologna and padova 700 years ago.
https://synthesiscenter.net/
https://topologicalmedialab.net/
Sometimes, more often in recent years, I’ve taken to asking students and colleagues, why do you do what you do? Although that question is not the same as, “Why we live?” it is not unrelated because I think how we live would be part of my own response to the question, why we live. The quality of life is perhaps a more fruitful question than the meaning of life, so popular in an earlier era of the 20th century, more enamored of epistemology’s charms. It’s a phenomenological question about the experience of life, but I would like to answer it in a poetic way in the context of contemporary and emerging technologies of performance, where performance is construed generously beyond the domains of performing and performance arts.
One may aspire to do philosophy in the mode of poetry again, a Laozi multiply transposed. But didn’t Plato throw out the poets from the Republic because they operated in the realm of the fictive imitative, thrice-removed from the truth, and therefore were not to be trusted with the proper affairs of the polis? I’m writing this as an exercise in philosophy in the mode of art, trusting that it can be done, that it matters not only what we say or do, but how we say or do it. I’m wagering that both truth effects and ethico-aesthetic passions can be accommodated in the same breath, the way mathematicians construct truths. However, mathematicians are not scientists, because their theorems do not claim anything about the “real world.” Therefore they do not write under the sign of empirical truth. Mathematicians prove theorems true or false within propositional systems that they themselves construct. Therefore their constructions are works of imagination. Writing neither under the sign of truth nor of fiction, mathematicians create truths via imaginative processes that can be regarded as poetic processes.
It is in this spirit that I would propose to explore some questions refined from crude, concrete, and technical craft, refined over the years into what would typically be considered philosophical questions…
15 October 2021
Making Sense of Complexity Speaker Series, hosted by the School of Complex Adaptive Systems | ASU
Sha Xin Wei
After rapidly rehearsing some fundamental mathematical, conceptual, and methodological challenges to present day complexity science, we present possible alternatives for next-gen science of complex adaptive systems, drawing on Shannon, Wiener, Gill; Wittgenstein, James, Deleuze, Whitehead; Barad, Arendt; Stepney; Longo, Calude, Saari, Wolpert, Kauffman, Montevil.
Slides: topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/papers/slides/navigating-scas
In Solutions for Postmodern Living (1 November 2021) https://www.solutionsforpostmodernliving.org/world-building-blog/sha-xin-wei
How can we live in a world which is always full of surprises, where bacteria outflank antibiotics, more data yields less understanding and Gaia herself shrugs off carbon capitalism with a fever? We’ll look at a few examples of queering art, technoscience and politics playfully and ethico-aesthetically, in the 21c: post-digital responsive media environments, quantum finance and non-anthropocentric design.
Sha Xin Wei
Professor and Director, School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
25 March 2019 • Gammage • ASU
synthesiscenter.net
1984 ushered in the personal computer, 2004 social media. But our mediated lives are more complicated and brittle than ever. Can we turn from piling up the internet of things to navigating cities and infrastructures that are centuries deep? How can media conduct value as well as fact? What will computational media become in 10 or 20 years? How will we create environments that are not complicated, but rich?
Credits: Connor Rawls, Pete Weisman, Brandon Mechtley, Garrett L. Johnson, Yanjun Lyu, Megan Patzem, Emiddio Vasquez. Thanks to the TEDxASU team.
A talk at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community at Arizona State University. Learn more at ted.com/tedx
(The attached PDF has three images from original manuscript not in the published version.)
turning over a new leaf, offers a moment to think over what seems to work, and what i'd like to try to realize in a phd program that accommodates creative practices from arts and performing arts as modes of knowledge-making: what in canada has been termed research-creation. to make it worth the institutional work, such a degree program should be distinguished from a masters degree, from professional design / architecture training, and from an mfa art program. it should have its own worth. so here are some thoughts that may serve as the base for a phd program that i would like to establish. i am very deliberately modeling my standards from the humanities phd because i think the arts & humanities provide us the most generous, ample and fertile space of practice in the university as we've inherited it from bologna and padova 700 years ago.
https://synthesiscenter.net/
https://topologicalmedialab.net/
Sometimes, more often in recent years, I’ve taken to asking students and colleagues, why do you do what you do? Although that question is not the same as, “Why we live?” it is not unrelated because I think how we live would be part of my own response to the question, why we live. The quality of life is perhaps a more fruitful question than the meaning of life, so popular in an earlier era of the 20th century, more enamored of epistemology’s charms. It’s a phenomenological question about the experience of life, but I would like to answer it in a poetic way in the context of contemporary and emerging technologies of performance, where performance is construed generously beyond the domains of performing and performance arts.
One may aspire to do philosophy in the mode of poetry again, a Laozi multiply transposed. But didn’t Plato throw out the poets from the Republic because they operated in the realm of the fictive imitative, thrice-removed from the truth, and therefore were not to be trusted with the proper affairs of the polis? I’m writing this as an exercise in philosophy in the mode of art, trusting that it can be done, that it matters not only what we say or do, but how we say or do it. I’m wagering that both truth effects and ethico-aesthetic passions can be accommodated in the same breath, the way mathematicians construct truths. However, mathematicians are not scientists, because their theorems do not claim anything about the “real world.” Therefore they do not write under the sign of empirical truth. Mathematicians prove theorems true or false within propositional systems that they themselves construct. Therefore their constructions are works of imagination. Writing neither under the sign of truth nor of fiction, mathematicians create truths via imaginative processes that can be regarded as poetic processes.
It is in this spirit that I would propose to explore some questions refined from crude, concrete, and technical craft, refined over the years into what would typically be considered philosophical questions…
See https://www.solutionsforpostmodernliving.org/world-building-blog/sha-xin-wei
“Topological and Responsive Media”
Digital Media Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Rhode Island School of Design
Providence, Rhode Island, USA
9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theater and Engineering 1966
Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal Canada
23 March 2007
and Kings College London & Le Collège international de philosophie Paris
8 February 2024
The theme for this colloquium — indeterminacy and play — serves as an invitation for speculative propositions and gestures from different genealogies of thought and cultural or historical fields. We hope that the theme is compact enough to inspire definite responses, and indeterminate enough to leave open how and what participants join to a polyphonic conversation, a chorus of distinct voices.
In the first seminar of the series, I’ll describe a few modes of open-ended development from biology, sociotechnology, and time-based, movement-based art. Then I’ll ask how we feel our way in such modes. I’ve shared a few references in the “01 Indeterminacy and play/references” folder, just to provide a few tangible buoys but without any claim to adequacy for what I’ll present, nor mastery of the seas from which I plucked them!
When we reach the limits of our mastery, how do we go on? How can we use computational media technologies as instruments to augment collective creative, enactive sensemaking by hybrid metabolic, social, and symbolic ensembles? Richly illustrated with examples from Synthesis and the Topological Media Lab.
Podcast: Interview with Sha Xin Wei about Synthesis @ ASU and fusion research + creation. Recorded 8 November 2019, at Building21 / McGill University, Montreal Quebec Canada. With Ollivier Dyens, Damian Arteca, Rebecca Brousseau.
Sha Xin Wei
Professor and Director, School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
25 March 2019 • Gammage • ASU
1984 ushered in the personal computer, 2004 social media. But our mediated lives are more complicated and brittle than ever. Can we turn from piling up the internet of things to navigating cities and infrastructures that are centuries deep? How can media conduct value as well as fact? What will computational media become in 10 or 20 years? How will we create environments that are not complicated, but rich?
A talk at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community at Arizona State University. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
Science Colloquium on Time, European Graduate School ( egs.edu ) June 22, 2019
We explore the relation between the rhythmic aspect of lived experience and ‘bodies’ in ‘movement’ through inhomogeneity, via abductive, radically empirical, experimental studies of lived experience. With these examples in hand, we use the consideration of rhythm to propose (1) a field-like or textural approach to the co-articulation of subjects and objects, and (2) duration not as an abstract index or independent parameter of which action is merely a function, but as an effect of activity and observation. What’s at stake is a nuanced example of how sense emerges in the textural dynamics of lived experience.
Thanks to work with Garrett L. Johnson.
https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/amewelcome
SLSA Keynote Video
10 November 2017 • ASU
Maybe our temporality -- our lived experience of duration, change, rhythm -- is as anthropomorphic as narrative and music, but can we think temporality non-anthropocentrically, letting go of the conceit that we are the most important beings in the world?
How can we imagine textural media shaping not by pre-given forms of literature, architecture, computer science, data science, or molecular biology, but by a ceaseless, boundless play of forces, tensions, fields, and processes? And how can we pursue this as an empirical practice, not only speculative but enactive? This opens the door for alchemical experiments, by which we mean ethico-aesthetic conditionings of experience that transmute the very materials and methods employed. We'll explore these questions drawing from alchemical experiments with timebased media and vegetal life.
http://litsciarts.org/slsa17
Replacing thought by algorithm, gesture by mechanism, organism by golem
European Graduate School, Saas Fee
25 June 2018
A preliminary discussion.
See follow-up talk 19 Aug 2918
http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/papers/slides/leonardo_alchemy
https://www.leonardo.info/convening?reset=1&id=115
Pursuing fundamental inquiries such as movement as thought, textural rhythm, non-anthropocentric art, ethico-aesthetic experiment, calls for neither juxtaposing nor opposing the arts and sciences, but fusing and transmuting them. Five centuries ago, alchemy was a practical and symbolic art, regarding bodies and materials always suffused with ethical, vital and material power. Under the prism of the Enlightenment, alchemy split into the practical (e.g. engineering or medicine), the scientific, and the art of the imaginary. Synthesis@ASU fuses these arts as a second-order alchemy, transmuting our own disciplined ways of doing things, with care.
What is thought in the age of digital information, algorithm, and machine learning, neural networks?
A talk by Sha Xin Wei at the European Graduate School, 19 August 2018
Presentation at Performances, Lectures, and Screenings in Media Art (PLASMA) speakers series
2 April 2018
presented by the Department of Media Study, University of Buffalo
Thanks to Teri Rueb, Tony Conrad, Paige Sarlin
http://mediastudy.buffalo.edu/plasma/plasma/
https://youtu.be/liRljnNU9Jw
http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/papers/slides/slsa2017
Maybe our temporality -- our lived experience of duration, change, rhythm -- is as anthropomorphic as narrative and music, but can we think temporality non-anthropocentrically, letting go of the conceit that we are the most important beings in the world?
How can we imagine textural media shaping not by pre-given forms of literature, architecture, computer science, data science, or molecular biology, but by a ceaseless, boundless play of forces, tensions, fields, and processes? And how can we pursue this as an empirical practice, not only speculative but enactive? This opens the door for alchemical experiments, by which we mean ethico-aesthetic conditionings of experience that transmute the very materials and methods employed. We'll explore these questions drawing from alchemical experiments with timebased media and vegetal life.
http://litsciarts.org/slsa17
Sha Xin Wei is Director of the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University in Phoenix, USA. His research interests are essentially interdisciplinary; he focuses on topological media, visualisation technologies, intersections between mathematics and humanities, and the critical study of media arts and sciences.
What would be a mode of articulation in which to think temporality more idiomatically? I pose topological dynamical systems as a potential source of modes of articulation of intersubjective or even ensemble gesture. What sorts of mathematical gesture are enabled by such embodied, enactive articulation?
I start by recapping the approach and concerns of the "Differential Geometric Performance and Poiesis" essay
https://www.academia.edu/963369/Differential_Geometrical_Performance_and_Poiesis
to contextualize the speculations about "dynamical articulation" and rhythm.
The Idea of Place, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 5-7 May 2017
What makes a locus particular among all loci? In other words, what conditions a place? Against the apparatus of measurement from number to pattern recognition, we know that “adjacent possibles” and unintended consequences always emerge in the ceaseless play of the world. “Eppure si muove,” to adapt from Galileo.
I’ll suggest modes of articulation inspired from continuous topology, non-computable dynamics, and non-reduced biology that respect the incommensurate, that may offer some insight into the conditioning of common space as a shared event. This is a radically empirical practice.
In particular I’ll show work on rhythm and vegetal life.
http://video.dma.ucla.edu/video/sha-xin-wei-topological-media-software/206
DMA, UCLA • 7 May 2003
The Topological Media Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology studies gesture and embodied use of hybrid computational-physical materials at multiple scales. We are investigating how to build, inhabit and use sensate or active matter, combinations of computational systems and physical materials that are sensitive to environmental features or to our activities, and respond by changing their form or appearance. Our experimental design uses continuous media such as cloth and non-woven materials, video projection, radio and sound fields. The experimental aspect of this work proceeds at two scales. The micro scale concerns topological responsive media, which includes time-based media and computationally-augmented fabrics. The macro scale concerns the architecture of responsive media spaces, which includes augmented reality, sensor-based interactive environments, projected and ubiquitous media. We describe the Topological Media Lab's recent work in gesture and performance, realtime media choreography, responsive media and softwear instruments or wearable media.
Sha Xin Wei's practice ranges from complex, collaboratively built installations to realtime video and wearable sound textures that respond to gesture. These works explore the relations people create with one another in the presence of dense, continuously evolving responsive media. Since 1997, Sha has worked with the art research group, sponge, which he co-founded in San Francisco to produce public phenomenological experiments. Major series of projects include the TGarden play spaces, Hubbub public speech-painting, and the Sauna urban immersion installations. Sha is now embarking on the Softwear Instruments project which explores gesture and subject fields using sensate, gestural, media-saturated fabrics. Sha has degrees in mathematics from Harvard and Stanford Universities. Sha teaches computational media and critical studies of techno-science as an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Sha's research in the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center and the New Media Center concerns gesture and agency in the presence of hybrid material, and how we shape, inhabit, design sensate or active matter.
The civil rights movement and the politics of identity succeeded in institutionalizing some of the most progressive social ideas of the century. But three generations on we’re still faced with a profound question: Even if each social group — identified by say ethnicity, gender, or religious affiliation — were to gain its due, why should a member of one social group care for someone in another? Why should I care about you?
Is there something more primordial to politics? What is the source of solidarity not just those like yourself, but for those unlike yourself?
Let me sketch a few ingredients with which we might find a way to explore these questions, in a way that respects the richness of ethical, aesthetic as well material aspects of shared experience.
These ingredients include taking a step back from assuming we know what we think we know about what is a body, a human, a gesture, language. This is the essence of a scientific attitude. But how can we step with care beyond Newtonian matter and account non-reductively for memory, dream and imagination? A second ingredient would be the notion of paying attention to lived experience. But what is experience when we think of shared experience, and experience that takes the nonhuman into account as we must if we are to survive beyond our current anthropocene epoch? A third ingredient would be experiment — but what is experiment that pays attention to feeling and value as well as fact and data?
The advances of glassmakers in the 15c and 16c made legible astronomical phenomena that were literally invisible and therefore outside the bounds of medieval experience and therefore theory. Considering that and many other examples from the history of techne (which is art + engineering), how will we make new instruments and apparatuses together with new phenomena that constitute the art and science of empathy and care?
Conference: RHYTHM AS PATTERN AND VARIATION: POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND ARTISTIC INFLECTIONS
Goldsmiths London 23 April 2016
Professor Stuart Hall Building
Conference with Pascal Michon, Paola Crespi; Peggy Reynolds, Julian Henriques, Vesna Petresin et al.