Xin Wei Sha

The author has been has been mixing realities for many years. In his paper "Ethico-aesthetics in t* performative spaces" he outlines his history of theoretical and critical discussions, that are enlightening and contextualising
in many ways. Coming from a mathematics background, his take on the use of scientific ideas and technology in the arts is somewhat distinct yet related
to the papers in this volume. He uses the term "media choreography" as a term that attempts to describe MR environments not as databases and rule systems,
but rather as dynamics and quasiphysics. This ties in nicely with some of the concepts thrown around in the discussions of Digital Physics in the Data Ecologies Workshop: attempting to build quasi- or pseudophysical environments.

Sha concentrates mainly upon (approximations of) continuous systems rather than accepting / working with / exploiting discrete systems. He is, however, aware of the differences between these things, which not all practitioners in these fields are. One language point that remains pertinent is the use of the expression "co-structure" rather than "interact" when referring to the behaviour of visitors and systems in complex MR environments. There is no turn taking involved, it is much more a case of the visitors and the environment taking part in a collaborative structuring of the media architecture in an inter- twined and simultaneous collection of actions. His closing comments, where he forcefully holds the term "play" to be distinctly different from the ideas of ("the carcass of") "game" are a rallying call to all those who continue to believe that there is and should be an important difference between the two.

In this essay I discuss a genre of responsive environments in which computationally augmented tangible media respond to the improvised gesture and activity of their inhabitants.  I propose that these responsive environments constitute an apparatus for experimentally investigating questions significant for both performance research and philosophical inquiry.  The responsive environments were designed as sites for phenomenological experiments about interaction and response, agency, and intention under three conditions: (1) the participants are physically co-present, (2) each inhabitant is both actor and spectator, (3) language is bracketed.  The last condition does not deny language, but focusses attention on how an event unfolds without appealing solely to textual or verbal communication.  As such, these environments constitute performative spaces whose media -- sound, visual field, acoustics and lighting, objects and furnishings -- can be reproducibly conditioned, and in which actions can be rehearsed or improvised.  I describe the apparatus of these performative spaces in enough detail to be able to address certain phenomenological questions about the continuum of intentional and accidental gesture in the dynamical substrate of calligraphic media : continuous fields of video and sound or other computationally animated materials, continuously modulated by gesture or movement.  I suggest that emerging forms of calligraphic media present an alternative to linguistic pattern for the articulation of affectively charged events, practically and  theoretically interrogating the status of narrative in the construction of theatrical events.

(A translation from a polemical article in Italian by Fernando Zalamea published by Il Foglio Quotidiano on 23.12.2015.)  World philosophy has been stuck for decades in a scientific vision that cannot explain reality any more.  Thus we must get beyond Kant and reawaken thought and culture.

One can use mathematics not as an instrument or measure, or a replacement for God, but as a poetic articulation, or perhaps as a stammered experimental approach to cultural dynamics. I choose to start with the simplest symbolic substances that respect the lifeworld’s continuous dynamism, temporality, boundless morphogenesis, superposability, continuity, density and value, and yet are independent of measure, metric, counting, finitude, formal logic, syntax, grammar, digitality and computability – in short, free of the formal structures that would put a cage over all of the lifeworld. I call these substances topological media. This article introduces elementary topological concepts with which we can articulate material and cultural change using notions of proximity, limit, and change, without recourse to number or metric. The motivation is that topology furnishes us with concepts well-adapted for poietically articulating the world as stuff, rather than objects with an a priori schema. With care, it may provide a fruitful approach to morphogenesis and cultural dynamics that is neither reductive nor anthropocentric. I will not pretend any systematic application of the scaffolding concepts introduced in this article. Instead, I would see what fellow stu- dents of cultural dynamics and cosmopolitics make of these concepts in their own work.

Movement, and in particular, gesture are arguably essential aspects of engendering human experience.  But rather than taking "the body" or "cognition" for granted as conceptual starting points, we attend to the substrate matter in which gesture takes shape and place.  An experimental approach to such questions motivates the exploration of responsive, and in particular, computational media created for sustaining experientially rich, improvisational activity.  This book explores rehearsed as well as unrehearsed activity in distributed, continuous fields of responsive media -- topological matter.  This philosophical and interdisciplinary investigation reworks our understanding of embodiment and the formation of subjective experience.  The investigation also puts in play notions such as interaction, responsive media and performativity, contributing to contemporary exchanges between art and philosophy.  This draws on emerging techniques in computational video, realtime gestural sound, sensors, and active textiles, as well as experimental techniques in performance, movement, and visual arts.  It also offers insights and inspirations for designers, media artists, musicians, movement artists, architects, researchers in multimedia, interaction design, interactive and responsive environments, architecture, science and technology studies, philosophy and cultural studies.

(English follows)

Le Topological Media Lab est à la fois un atelier et un centre de recherche; il a pour objectif de procéder à l’étude expérimentale des modalités gestuelles, performatives et corporelles de l’expression dans un environnement numérique interactif. Fondé à Atlanta en 2001 et transféré à Montréal en 2005, il fédère divers types de pratiques collectives, dont un atelier de création artistique, une compagnie de théâtre et un laboratoire de recherche sur les nouvelles technologies. Depuis six ans, au prix de nombreux tâtonnements, le Topological Media Lab permet un échange fragile entre des disciplines très différentes qui évoque peut-être la conversation cosmopolitique chère à Isabelle Stengers. Les expériences qui y sont menées ont pour but d’aborder, sur le mode empirique, des questions éthico-esthétiques, par exemple les problématiques relatives au mouvement corporel (intentionnel ou accidentel, collectif ou individuel) ou encore les relations entre le mouvement et la mémoire du corps ou la mémoire de l’espace. L’un des soucis qui guident en permanence le travail du Topological Media Lab consiste à aborder la question de la nouveauté en termes topologiques, matériels et poétiques, dans une perspective éthique mais non anthropocentrique. Dans cet article, je m’attache à étudier quelques-unes des modalités d’une pratique conçue en termes de “recherche-création.”

ENGLISH:

Two decades ago, Felix Guattari pointed to the heterogeneous machines around us: material, semiotic / diagrammatic / algorithmic, corporeal, mental / representational / informatic, libidinal / affective, and asked whether we could construct machines that act "transversally" across those machines.   For nine years, the Topological Media Lab has been working as atelier-laboratory transversal to computer science, performing arts, and more recently architecture and the built environment, generating insights and techniques in the domain of new media and responsive environments.

My question is to what extent can we instantiate such transversal machines as novel technologies of performance, and as novel performance practices outside conventional marked settings for performance?

Complementary to this, I also describe the political economy of running such an atelier-laboratory that has evolved as an alternative social economy which seems particularly relevant in the context of the current economy.  (This last is joint work with Niklas Damiris and Doug McDavid.)

This is the second of a two-part essay on art research and artistic practice modeled after scientific laboratory practice as well as the pre-industrial atelier.

This contributes to the STS literature on the recent hybridizing of laboratory practice with art practice that we have seen with the development of art practices that rely more systematically not only on black-boxed emerging technologies, but also on the institutional practices that give rise to those technologies.  Contexts include ATT Bell Labs E.A.T., and Xerox PARC's Artist residencies.

Recently, terms like "material computation" or "natural computing" in foundations of computer science and engineering, and "new materiality" in cultural studies signal a broader turn to conceptions of the world that are not based on solely human categories.  While respecting the values of human-centered design, how can we begin to think about the design of responsive environments and computational media while paying as much attention to material qualities like elasticity, density, wear, and tension as to social and cognitive phenomena?  This question understands computation as a potential property of matter in a non-reductive way that plausibly spans formal divides between symbolic-semiotic, social, and physical processes.  Full investigation greatly exceeds one brief paper.  But we open this question in the concrete practices of computational sound and sound design.

In this essay I discuss a series of art installation cum
performance events called TGardens. These tangible environments'computationally augmented media respond to the improvised gesture and activity of theirinhabitants. They were designed as phenomenological experiments about interaction andresponse, agency, and intention. I describe the architecture of these performative spacesin enough detail in order to be able to address certain phenomenological questions aboutagency and the continuum of intentional and accidental gesture in the dynamical substrateof
calligraphic media without grammatical superstructure.

(PhD Dissertation, Stanford Mathematics 2001)
What sort of geometric creation and performance can or cannot be supported in a writing technology that spans freehand sketching, manipulable graphics, text, symbolic computation and simulation? How do we work with and gain intuitions about supposedly abstract things like a Riemannian manifold or an infinite-dimensional function space by manipulating material marks using chalk, pencil or computer? How do we exteriorize thought using the technologies of writing and sketching when it is about processes or objects that could not be embedded in a naive space-time?

I analyze in detail what differential geometric work can or cannot be performed easily in a hybrid medium provided by a generalized multi-modal writing and sketching technology. The critical part of this project is informed by insights from literary and performance studies as well as the mathematical sciences. Focusing on differential geometry through the lens of practice, I examine a-linguistic semiotic usage, and through the lens of phenomenological investigation, I examine how geometers work with continuous, smooth, or infinite structures and processes.

This investigation promises both pragmatic as well as conceptual results. Concretely, this study provides a design for future technologies of mathematical writing that will better augment the working practices of differential geometers.  Conceptually, my proposed materialized phenomenological view of mathematics as a performance practice eliminates three problems in philosophy and in critical studies of symbolic systems: (1) how do we represent continuity and smoothness using discrete symbolic systems? (2) how do we represent infinite things or processes? (3) why do symbolic systems have explanatory or generative power? These conundrums have occupied philosophers of mathematics, and have driven some to propose strict finitist or radically fictionalist theories of mathematics. Moreover, approaches to their resolution underwrite all the technologies that serve mathematical practice today, so these problems fundamentally affect the design of technologies for the working mathematician as well.

"Introduction

Computer science and software engineering has adopted the term ‘‘architecture’’ to describe the composition of large, complex sets of interoperating code that often contain multiple concurrent operations. ‘‘Software programmer’’, ‘‘software engineer’’, and ‘‘systems architect’’ denote an increasing scale of experience and ability to carry out systemic analysis and design. The status accorded to the software architect mimics in some ways the status accorded architects proper. On the lee-side of the tipping point where more media attention is paid to computer media and informatic technologies than to 20c media of cinema, radio, and television, it is easy to forget the enormous capital and power bound up in the industries of our physical built environment, and the intellectual and social prestige worn by its designers, the architects.

This issue of AI & Society focuses on the encounter between the new potentials for architectural environment, the design of the built environment, and the emerging computational media and built environment. By convention, we can date the contemporary epoch of this encounter between computational technoscience and the art of the built environment back to the origin of the MIT Media Lab in the School of Architecture, now given a global currency with the advent of sensor-equipped ‘‘smart’’ buildings, computationally augmented materials, and everyday nanotechnology. While participant in the creative research into some of these mixtures of new media and architecture, we take this opportunity to lay out a critical and poetic perspective as well.  We have invited artists and researchers to reflect critically on this recent history, and take stands, or draw attention o alternative approaches.

In the modern and post-modern eras, architects have adopted large conceptual frames to house and motivate large capital projects: Le Corbusier and modern urbanism; Peter Eisenman and deconstruction; Rem Koolhaas and shopping centers; Bernard Cache, Greg Lynn, and the Deleuzian fold, and so forth. One may question the degree to which these architects inhabited the conceptual terrains from which they extracted these notions. And even if they did traverse those territories comfortably, one can ask how the notions they extracted really worked in the material and social operation of the built structures that were justified by appeals to those concepts. Resetting a gemstone on a tiara however lovely, nonetheless leaves behind all the supra-humanly rich, glacial processes of the earth from which it was taken. To take one example, to reduce Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold (Deleuze 2006 (1988)) to two-dimensional surfaces in Euclidean three-space seems to be a rather formal interpretation of Deleuze’s concept of the fold, a concept which has an ontological, aesthetic as well as geometric character (and although a geometry, like anything made by us humans, can be interpreted from an esthetic point of view, geometry is as much dynamics and proof theoretic structure as esthetics). Deleuze’s fold has as much to do with a boundless process of ornament, of Baroque excess, as it does with interpenetration between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Even more subtly, as Tirtza Even has observed, things can have variable and varying degrees of existence with respect to one another, and so Deleuze’s fold takes an ontological meaning as well as formal one.

Returning to architecture’s appeal to rationalizing system builders, perhaps one of the most cogent analyses of the Western ‘‘will to architecture’’ appears in Kojin Karatani’s Architecture As Metaphor in which he identifies the ‘‘irrational choice to establish order and structure within a chaotic and manifold becoming’’ (Karatani 1995, 17). To take another exterior critical vantage point, as Barbara Hooper put it in her essay, ‘‘Urban Space, Modernity, and Masculinist Desire’’: ‘‘Among the knowledges, sciences, and powers producing the geopolitical order of hegemonic modernity, architecture contributes two important elements: the idea that built forms alter human consciousness and behavior, thereby transforming nations and populations; and the provision of a method for materializing this order’’ (Hooper 2002, 55).

Despite their diversely post-modern status, Lynn, Eisenman, Koolhaas nonetheless represent architecture as a major key: high profile, high touch, and capital-intensive. Even the most well-intentioned urban design can have its imperial inflection. Of course the designerly surface of such architectural discourse, oriented to the photograph and the plan, bears little resemblance to the richly and locally conditioned work of architects of everyday spaces, or to the experiments by artists who play with super-corporeal spatial relations in the built environment. I have in mind artists like Gordon Matta-Clark, Arakawa and Gins, or 10 9 15 but also emerging artists like Anne-Maria Korpi and Flower Lunn, speculative designers like Karmen Franinovic, and counter-architectural groups like DARE-DARE.

By excising gigantic solids from house, warehouses, and other abandoned buildings, Matta-Clark deconstructed the syntax of domestic and private architectures (Matta-Clark 2007). However, he did more than conduct a semiotic investigation of the formal algebra of modern architecture in industrial and post-industrial spaces. It was also a phenomenological inquiry into the essence of an astrologically oriented space of ritual, transferred to derelict and banal buildings in eidetic variations that he conducted with his own body. But in further gesture, the bravura, the e«lan with which he cut a multi-story slit in a derelict warehouse to follow the moon casting itself into the waters of the river was an act not merely of analysis, but of poetry.

Madeline Gins is also a poet, with a more literary imagination, who has toyed with architectural discourse by haunting it with aspirations to philosophy (Gins and Arakawa 2002). But by calling for a crisis ethics repudiating the universal belief in mortality, is Gins and Arakawa proposing a program or simulacrum of a program? Their concepts encoded as thought experiments encoded as koan’s: snail house, perceptual landing spot, and most evocatively: organism that persons, encapsulate a wealth of related notions poetically derived (and here I intend to pun on the Situationists) from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and many other erased sources. "

About 20 years ago, the ecology of media art practices proliferated in two domains: those that attached themselves to high technology labs or companies likeXerox PARC, and those that took advantage of personal computing to form collectives only loosely coupled to academic institutions or disciplines. In this essay, I closely examine the diverse epistemic cultures and diverse technical, political, and generational interests in such ‘‘cyber-anarchist’’ networks. I sketch the economy of knowledge in recent media arts and technology communities of practice in the wake of Open Source. I use as my lens the experience of creating a responsive media space called theTGarden, with a collective that gathered more than 26artists and engineers from 11 institutions and 7 nations.

This Stanford technical report compares the Multimedia Distributed Database (MMDD) distributed media system -- later renamed MediaWeaver -- with the then emerging World Wide Web, Portfolio, Hyper-G, as well as the reigning standards for structured multimedia such as SGML, Hy-Time, PREMO. It also discusses MMDD's relation to the emerging class of scripting environments designed for highly interactive media-rich environments such as Script-X, and the class of scripting environments including Hypercard, Supercard, Director, and Flash.

An 1994 version of distributed, object-orientedm multimedia asset management, relational database, authoring, and filtering architecture. Later called MediaWeaver, it was designed to accommodate multiple schemas (ontologies) over the media content that could be updated at any moment by the user. It also allowed radically different ways to edit and view the material on any networked operating system (except Windows), using any mixture of commercial or custom-written application. Its object-oriented multi-layered media proxy model accommodated arbitrary media types, including yet to be invented media formats.

We describe a prototype testbed for responsiveenvironments built for free, improvisatory play. Thedemonstration installations are built using elements of thenext generation of the media choreography system built for the TGarden project: real-time video and real-time soundsynthesis engines, signal-bearing and image-bearing wovenmaterials, fabric-based wireless sensors.

The Topological Media Lab, is an atelier and academic research center for the experimental study of gestural, performative, and embodying expression in responsive media environments.    Established in Atlanta USA in 2001 and transplanted to Montreal Canada in 2005, the atelier amalgamates the collective practices of an art atelier, a theatre company, and an engineering research lab.  Over the past 6 years, a delicate, ungainly ecology of practices has flourished that may resemble the cosmopolitical conversation of which Isabelle Stengers has written. Its experiments constitute stammering empirical, ethico-aesthetic ventures into questions such as the spectra of intentional and accidental, or collective and solo corporeal movement, and the relation between movement and body-memory or room-memory. One fundamental stream of inquiry that this atelier has sustained over the decade is a topological, material, poetic, humane but non-anthropocentric approach to the question of novelty.  I consider some working ethos constituted in the institutional economics of "recherche-création".

Since 1984, Graphical User Interfaces have typically relied on visual icons that mimic physical objects like the folder, button, and trash can, or canonical geometric elements like menus, and spreadsheet cells. GUIs leverage our intuition about the physical environment. But the world we inhabit can be regarded as made of stuff as well as things. In order to make interfaces from this point of view requires a way to simulate the physics of stuff in realtime response to continuous gesture, driven by behavior logic that can be understood by the user and the designer. We argue for leveraging the corporeal intuition that we learn from birth about heat flow, water, smoke, to develop interfaces at the density of matter that leverage in turn the state of the art in computational physics.

https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/ozone


This paper describes Ozone, a new media choreography system based on layered, continuous physical models, designed for build- ing a diverse range of interactive spaces that coordinate arbitrary streams of video and audio synthesized in realtime response to continuous, concurrent activity by people in a live event. We aim to build rich responsive spaces that sustain the free improvisation of collectively or individually meaningful, non-linguistic gesture. Ozone provides an expressive way to compose the potential "land- scape" of an event evolving according to the designer’s intent as well as contingent activity. A potential-energy engine evolves su- perposed states over simplicial complexes modeling the topological space of metaphorical states.

The globalization of markets is accelerating a rapid decrease of diversity in the social, biological and cultural habitats, due to the economic imperative of proprietary interests such as communication technology industries and transnational ‘life industries’. Physical public spaces as arenas for a wide range of interaction and social change are losing even their symbolic importance as the global marketplace has shifted from commonly accessible public markets to dispersed and abstract omnipresent networks. Those physical spaces that remain have largely become ornamental simulacra of common living space - voids in our urban space only nominally accessible to the public. In the late twentieth century, city after city built financial or government districts that appear vital during the business day, but become vast deserted canyons lined with dead facades after hours. To call the city’s voids deserts would do injustice to the harsh vitality of ancient desert habitats. Wastelands might be a more appropriate name for these voids.

There is another kind of wasteland, the wasteland of monoculture. Here we are migrating a term in reverse from biotechnology to the condition of modern urban spaces. Even more fundamentally, the very activities that are acceptable in public have become more and more regulated with the reduction of public, or better, collective urban space to spaces of consumption.

We do not venture a political economic analysis in this paper. It is not economic Reality but the imaginary that we propose to grow in the heart of our cities. How might we do this? By seeding the city’s empty spaces with ‘weeds,’ by cracking the crystal lattice grids of the urban space and filling the cracks with accidents of speech, of unruly, untamed image and animate fabric — weedy sociality.

Vaster than Empires and More Slow: Vegetal Rhythm and Poiesis in Topological Matter

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

Leonardo Convening 3-4 November 2018, San Francisco
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.

Synthesis @ ASU, a nexus for fusion research-dreation
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

SLSA 2017 Keynote Abstract:

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 at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. June 17 2017. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought.

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 sort of thought-gestures would be enabled by marks that themselves vary according to conditions (time)?  Temporality, Gesture and Topological Dynamics

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.

Keynote at
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.

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.

DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER), 19 May 2016, Keck Center, Washington DC.

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?

slides for talk Rhythm and Textural Temporality: An Approach to Experience Without a Subject and Duration as an Effect
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.

"Public life - Towards a politics of care. Bodies. Place. Matter" Symposium, Vienna, 17-18 April 2015.  Organized by Prof. Elke Krasny, Ass. Prof. Sabine Knierbein & Prof. Rob Shields

Venue: Studio Building, Multi-Purpose Space (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Lehargasse 8, 1060 Vienna) and Mobiles Stadtlabor, (TU Wien, Resselpark / Karlsplatz,1040 Vienna)

In the book — The Nature of Order — architect Christopher Alexander called for a physics 􏰛􏰉􏰃􏰋􏰌􏰔􏰆􏰜􏰁􏰖􏰖􏰄􏰍􏰆􏰁􏰌􏰓􏰆􏰊􏰁􏰒􏰉􏰄􏰆􏰥􏰆􏰒􏰁􏰆􏰦􏰕􏰋􏰌􏰈􏰠􏰁􏰏􏰆fusing matter and value a la Spinoza rather than matter formed only by geometry (Einstein) or number (Pythagoras). With makers and theorists I 􏰄􏰧􏰕􏰒􏰈􏰍􏰄􏰆􏰖􏰅􏰄􏰆􏰘􏰉􏰁􏰒􏰋􏰖􏰋􏰄􏰃􏰆􏰈􏰛􏰆􏰜􏰁􏰖􏰖􏰄􏰍􏰆􏰎􏰈􏰌􏰃􏰖explore the qualities of matter construed this way—as laden with value, to borrow Bilgrami’s phrase. I transmute Whitehead’s axiom of process philosophy, “How an entity becomes constitutes what the entity is,” to move from a concern about values of objects to concerns about value-generating or value-signifying processes.

Classical theories oscillate between preconstituted subjects perceiving, reasoning about, and acting on preconstituted objects. Sidestepping this, I consider objects, subjects, values, and relations all co-constituting each other in the ever-changing stuffs of which they are made. One key feature of this account is plurality: there can be boundlessly 􏰜􏰁􏰌􏰙􏰆􏰗􏰄􏰒􏰓􏰃􏰆􏰈􏰛􏰆􏰕􏰈􏰖􏰄􏰌􏰖􏰋􏰁􏰒􏰚􏰆􏰨􏰌􏰈􏰖􏰅􏰄􏰍􏰆􏰋􏰃􏰆􏰖􏰄􏰧many fields of potential.  Another is textural natality—perceived as poiesis.

We will see how value can arise out of the superposition of dynamic fields without requiring us to reconstitute particular subjects, or follow a totalizing telos.􏰆 This relies on a triple conceptual shift: (1) from objects to continuous (non-discrete) material fields — “stuff”, (2) 􏰃􏰎􏰍􏰄􏰖􏰄􏰪􏰆􏰜􏰁􏰖􏰄􏰍􏰋􏰁􏰒􏰆􏰗􏰄􏰒􏰓􏰃􏰆􏰫􏰆􏰬􏰃􏰖􏰉􏰛􏰛􏰭􏰏􏰆􏰮􏰯􏰪􏰆 from objects to processes, (3) from values as predicates to processes that produce value. Under this conceptual sea-change, developing a textural 􏰁􏰎􏰎􏰈􏰉􏰌􏰖􏰆􏰈􏰛􏰆􏰎􏰁􏰍􏰄􏰆􏰁􏰃􏰆􏰁􏰆􏰓􏰙􏰌􏰁􏰜􏰋􏰎􏰁􏰒􏰆􏰗􏰄􏰒􏰓􏰆 of intensities offers an approach to the poetic and poietic articulation of publics that is perhaps, most vitally, non-anthropocentric.

http://skuor.tuwien.ac.at/en/research/kongresse-tagungen/phd-symposium-vienna-17th18th-april-2015

These are the slides sans narration from a TED-style talk by
Sha Xin Wei at CyberSalon, LB1 146 Brick Lane London, 11 Nov 2015 "Reclaim AI".
Most experience, is noncomputable, undecidable, tacit, yet it can be mediated by computational media like any other modes of matter. We move away from data-based, rule-based systems and homunculi. We move from signifiers, which cannot contain meaning in themselves, to the _stuff_ of signs and how they are created and nuanced. We move from robots as proxy humans to the stuff of which semi-autonomous systems are made: oil, financial flows, institutions, legal code, coded logic, innumerable human co-agents -- infrastructure.
Celebrating Satinder Gill's new book: Tacit Engagement, Springer-Verlag 2015.
cybersalon.org/reclaim-ai
synthesis.ame.asu.edu/
topologicalmedialab.net/

Ozone is a rich experiential media choreography system based on layered, continuous physical models, designed for building a diverse range of interactive spaces that coordinate arbitrary streams of video and audio synthesized in realtime response to continuous, concurrent activity by people in a live event. We aim to build rich responsive spaces that sustain the free improvisation of collectively or individually meaningful, non-linguistic gesture. Ozone provides an expressive way to compose the potential "land- scape" of an event evolving according to the designer’s intent as well as contingent activity. A potential-energy engine evolves superposed states over simplicial complexes modelling the topological space of metaphorical states.

https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/ozone

The main scientific goal of this Residency is to gain insight into (1) temporal texture via relational (not ego-centered) productions of correlated patterns of dynamics and change, and (2) transitions in continuous, multivalent states and embodied agency.

Q Is for Quicken Final Presentation
15 August 2014
Sha Xin Wei
Intel Research Fellowship
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design

The goal is to create a poetically composed essay in the physical form of manipulable sheets of material that feel like paper but can emit speech-quality sound modulated by touch and pressure.  We  will make a limited edition of a 14-page essay “Q Is for Quicken” realized as a printed object in which the content of some pages is heard, not read.  This work’s magic comes from sheets of physical paper that speak or sing when handled or touched.  A design goal is to break the gimmicky limit of greeting card + sound on a chip, and discover more poetic gestural modulation of paper animated by sound / haptic transducers and touch sensing.

As part of the Fellowship PhD researcher Chris Wood (Queen Mary  University London) and Sha Xin Wei taught a workshop on Paper and Sound in April 2014.

A non-anthropocentric approach to apperception, which builds leisurely on point-set topology and topological dynamics, tours through computer vision and robotics in the Sony Computer Science Lab in Paris, and lands provisionally in Jean Petitot's fibre-bundle approach to Husserlian phenomenology of perception.

An elementary introduction to some primordial mathematics after Deleuze and Serres:  point-set topology, dynamical systems, differentiable manifolds, and fiber bundles.

Talk at Metalithicum, 22 May 2014, Einseldeln Switzerland. Hosted by Very Bühlmann and Ludgar Hovestadt, Laboratory Applied Virtuality, ETH Zurich.

Schiller said that we’re most fully human only when we play. Humans and animals have been playing a lot longer than videogames have been around. What’s the difference between playing and gaming? What can we do with games and technology by learning from how we’ve played for centuries?

https://vimeo.com/86337788

David Morris (Chair, Philosophy) and Sha Xin Wei (Canada Research Chair New Media, Director of Topological Media Lab) talk about a collaborative seed project exploring human memory's relation to how the body moves and inhabits a place.  Video by Jason Hendrik.

Recherche-Création

In 2005, at a symposium on Whitehead and Deleuze in Brussels, I ventured that what I was trying to do with poietic (and thus neither instrumental nor truth-deciding) mathematics was to find some articulations adequate to life. Stengers responded, only physics is adequate to life. Over the years, this comment has remained on my list of challenges to explore. It may be fruitful to interpret this term “physics” in Stengers’ sense of ecology of practices, and also to fashion a material, lower-case mathematics that is sympathetic to poetic expression. Stengers’ cosmopolitics provides a more ample space within which to articulate both.

In our atelier for “recherche-création,” the Topological Media Lab, a delicate, ungainly ecology of practices has grown up over the past five years that may bear some marks of the sort of cosmopolitical conversation of which Stengers has written. Its experiments constitute stammering empirical, ethico-aesthetic ventures into questions such as the spectra of intentional and accidental, or collective and solo corporeal movement, and the relation between movement and body-memory or room-memory. One implicit thread that this atelier has sustained over the decade is a topological, material, poetic, humane but non-anthropocentric approach to the question of novelty. I consider the cosmopolitical aspects of the amalgam of experiment and art.

http://rewired.uchri.org/faculty/sha-xin-wei/

with / avec Roger Malina, modérateur - moderator
Martine Époque Denis Poulin Marc Côté Éric Raymond Dominic Létourneau Sha Xin Wei David Morris Leila Sujir Maria Lantin

Interventions in videos:
01 - David Morris, 21:26, Sha Xin Wei 23:42;
02 - Sha Xin Wei 3:55
03 -
04 - David Morris @ 08:26 - 11:04