Sha Xin Wei

Introduction

Sha Xin Wei is Professor and Director of the School of Arts, Media + Engineering in the Herberger School for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University . He is also the founder and the director of the Synthesis Center at Arizona State University.

Sha works in the critical study of media arts and sciences, and experimental responsive environments. His work concerns the phenomenology of performance, phenomenology of differential geometry, and the technologies of performance, focusing on topological media. To inform this work, he studies issues related to gesture and performance, temporal patterns, sensors and active fabrics, computer-mediated interaction, dense sensing, continuous realtime time-based media, and writing systems.

Career

Dr. Sha was trained in Mathematics at Harvard and Stanford Universities.

Following his studies in Mathematics, for more than a decade Sha worked in the fields of scientific computation, mathematical modelling, 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 three-year workshop on Interaction and Computational Media at Stanford University.

In 1997, Sha co-founded Pliant Research with colleagues from Xerox PARC and Apple Research Labs, dedicated to designing technologies that individuals and organizations can robustly reshape to meet evolving socio-economic needs.

In 1998, he co-founded the Sponge art group in San Francisco in order to build public experiments in phenomenology of performance. With Sponge members and other artists, Sha directed event/installations in prominent experimental art venues, including Ars Electronica (Austria), V2 (The Netherlands), MediaTerra Greece, Banff Canada, and Future Physical United Kingdom. He has also exhibited media installations at Postmasters Gallery (New York) and at Suntrust Gallery (Atlanta).

He obtained an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2001 on differential geometric performance and the technologies of writing in Mathematics, Computer Science, and History & Philosophy of Science at Stanford University.

In 2001 - 2004, Sha was Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In 2001 Sha established the Topological Media Lab for the study of gesture and improvisation of collectively meaningful movement from both experiential and computational media perspectives at the Graphics and Visualization and Usability Center in the College of Computing.

From 2005–2013, Sha served at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada as the Canada Research Chair in Media Arts and Sciences and as Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Computer Science. In 2005 he became the Director of Hexagram’s Active Textiles and Wearable Computers Axis. During his time at Concordia University, he directed the Topological Media Lab as an atelier for the study of gesture, distributed agency, and materiality with application to the phenomenology of performance and the built environment.

Sha has been a visiting scholar or faculty in History of Science at Harvard University as well as the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Centre for Modern Thought at Kings College Aberdeen, History and Philosophy of Science & Department of French and Italian at Stanford University.

He is a member of the editorial boards of the Artificial Intelligence and Society Journal, the Experimental Practices book series and the Architectural Intelligences book series with Rodopi Press, Inflexions, FibreCulture, and the International Journal of Creative Interfaces & Computer Graphics.

Creative works

Sha’s art research includes the TGarden responsive environments (Ars Electronica, Dutch Electronic Art Festival, MediaTerra Athens, SIGGRAPH), Hubbub speech-sensitive urban surfaces, Membrane calligraphic video, Softwear gestural sound instruments, the WYSIWYG gesture-sensitive sounding weaving, Ouija performance-installations, Cosmicomics Elektra, eSea Shanghai and the IL Y A video membrane, Einstein's Dreams time-conditioning instruments, and Q Is for Quicken sounding paper. He has collaborated with choreographer Michael Montanaro and the Blue Riders ensemble to create a stage work inspired by Shelley's Frankenstein, with experimental musicians, dancers and responsive media.

Honors and awards

Sha’s works with Sponge members and other artists have been recognized with awards from major cultural foundations, such as the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, the LEF Foundation, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Creative Work Fund (New York), and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Organizations

Pliant Research, San Francisco (1997 -2001); Sponge art group, San Francisco (1997 - 2002); Interaction and Media Group, Stanford (1995 - 1997)); Topological Media Lab, Georgia Tech, Atlanta (2001 - 2005); Topological Media Lab, Concordia University, Montreal (2005 - 2013); Synthesis Center, ASU, Phoenix (2014–present)

Publications

Book: Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2013

Special Issue: Poetic and Speculative Architectures in Public Space, AI & Society 26.2, Springer-Verlag, May 2011.

Navid Navab, Doug van Nort, Sha Xin Wei, “A Material Computational Approach to Gestural Sound,“ NIME, London 2014.

“Sha, Xin Wei, Adrian Freed, Navid Navab, “Sound Design As Human Matter Interaction,” Computer-Human Interaction, Paris 2013.

“Topology and Morphogenesis”, Special issue on Topologies of Multiplicity, ed. Celia Lury, Theory, Culture, and Society, 2012.

"Concerted knowledges and practices: an experiment in autonomous cultural production," AI & Society 27, in 25th Anniversary Volume, A Faustian Exchange: What Is To Be Human in the Era of Ubiquitous Technology, London: Springer-Verlag, 2012.

"The Atelier-Lab as a Transversal Machine?" Revue française d’études américaines 128.2, in spécial issue on Les études américaines à l’ère des médias numériques, 2011, pp. 62–78.

Sha Xin Wei, Michael Fortin, Navid Navab, Tim Sutton, “Ozone: Continuous State-based Media Choreography System for Live Performance,” ACM Multimedia, Firenze, October 2010.

“Prospective Architectures of Enchantment,” 70 Jähren Festschrift for H.J. Schweizer, 2009.

“Using the Body’s Intuition of Matter via Calligraphic Video,” Inaugural Issue of the International Journal of Creative Interfaces and Computer Graphics, 2009.

Sha Xin Wei, Michael Fortin, Jean-Sebastien Rousseau, “Calligraphic Video: A Phenomenological Approach to Dense Visual Interaction,” ACM Multimedia, Beijing China, 19-24 Oct 2009.

“Poetics of Performative Space,” in Cognition, Communication and Interaction: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Interactive Technology, ed. S Gill, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2007.

Doug Van Nort, David Gauthier, Sha Xin Wei, Marcelo M. Wanderley, “Extraction of Gestural Meaning from a Fabric-Based Instrument,” ICMC International Computer Music Conference Proceedings, 27–31 August 2007.

David Birnbaum, Freida Abtan, Sha Xin Wei, Marcelo M. Wanderley, “Mapping and Dimensionality of a Cloth-based Sound Instrument,” Proceedings of Sound and Music Computing (SMC), Lefkada Greece, 11–13 July 2007.

“Poetics of Performative Space,” AI & Society 21.4, in 20th Anniversary Birthday Issue: From Judgement to Calculation, June 2007, pp. 607–624.

“Whitehead and Poetical Mathematics,” In Deleuze, Whitehead and the Transformations of Metaphysics. eds. Andre Cloots & Keith A. Robinson. (Belgium: KVAV, 2005), pp. 107–116.

“The TGarden Experimental Performance Project,” Modern Drama, Volume 48, Number 3, Special Issue: Technology, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Fall 2005, pp. 585–608.

"Differential Geometrical Performance and Poiesis." Configurations 12.1 (Winter) (2004): pp. 133–60.

with Yoichiro Serita, Jill Fantauzza, Steven Dow, Giovanni Iachello, Vincent Fiano, Joey Berzowska, Yvonne Caravia, Delphine Nain, Wolfgang Reitberger, Julien Fistre, “Expressive Softwear and Ambient Media,” in Adjunct Proceedings of Ubicomp 2003, pp. 131–136.

“Continuous Sensing of Gesture for Control of Audio-Visual Media,” with Giovanni Iachello, Steven Dow, Yoichiro Serita, Tazama St. Julien, Julien Fistre, in ISWC 2003 Proceedings, pp. 236–237.

“Resistance Is Fertile: Gesture and Agency in the Field of Responsive Media,” in Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape, Two-Part Special Issue, Summer 2002, pp. 439–472.

Lenoir, Tim; Sha Xin Wei. "Authorship and Surgery: The Shifting Ontology of the Virtual Surgeon." From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature. Ed. Henderson, Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple: Stanford University Press, 2002. 283-308; 415-19 notes.

with Maja Kuzmanovic,“From Representation to Performance: Responsive Public Space,” Proceedings CPSR Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing, Seattle Symposium (DIAC 2000).

James Ze Wang, Gio Wiederhold, Oscar Firschein, Sha Xin Wei, “Content-Based Image Indexing and Searching Using Daubechies’ Wavelets,” Int. J. on Digital Libraries 1.4 (1998) 311-28.

“Wavelet-Based Image Indexing Techniques with Partial Sketch Retrieval Capability.” with James Ze Wang, Gio Wiederhold, Oscar Firschein, Advances in Digital Libraries (1997).

“MediaWeaver and Networked Scholarly Workspaces.” Multimedia Systems Journal 6.2 (1996) 97-111.

External links

• Sha Xin Wei, academia.edu
• The Synthesis Center
• The Topological Media Lab
• The School of Arts, Media and Engineering, ASU
• The Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, ASU