User:XWSha/sandbox

Sha Xin Wei is a Professor and Director of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering in the Herberger Institute 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.

Career

Dr. Sha is interested in the architecture of responsive media spaces and the critical study of Media Arts and Sciences. 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, sensors and active fabrics, temporal patterns, computer-mediated interaction, geometric visualization, and writing systems.

Prior to accepting his current position at Arizona State University, from 2005–2013, Dr. 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.

During his time at Concordia University, he directed the Topological Media Lab, a studio-laboratory for the study of gesture, distributed agency, and materiality with application to the phenomenology of performance and the built environment, which he founded at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center in the College of Computing when he joined the research faculty there in conjunction with his faculty position in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture.

Following his formal studies in Mathematics, Dr. Sha dedicated more than 12 years working in the fields of scientific computation, mathematical modeling, and the visualization of scientific data and geometric structures, but 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, Dr. 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, Dr. Sha 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, Dr. 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).

In 2004-2005, Dr. Sha served as Visiting Scholar in History of Science at Harvard University as well as the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), writing about agency, materiality, performance, and topological media. In 2005, Dr. Sha became the Director of Hexagram’s Active Textiles and Wearable Computers Axis.

Teaching

In his teaching career, Dr. Sha’s graduate courses combine critical studies of computation and technology with studio work in responsive environments and live events. Dr. Sha’s major art research work includes the TGarden responsive environments, Hubbub speech-sensitive urban surfaces, Membrane calligraphic video, Softwear gestural sound instruments, and, most recently, kinetic sculpture and low resolution displays responding to movement and gesture.

Creative works

Dr. 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, and Einstein's Dreams time-conditioning instruments. Dr. Sha 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.

History and schooling

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

Honors and awards

Dr. 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 (established 1997) Sponge art group, San Francisco (established 1997) 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)

In addition to contributing to the body of literature with his own work, Dr. Sha is a co-editor of the Artificial Intelligence and Society journal, the Experimental Practices book series (Rodopi Press), FibreCulture, and the Creative Interfaces & Computer Graphics journal.

Selected publications

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.

Other 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), "Whitehead's Poetical Mathematics" (Configurations, 2006), and "TGarden As Experimental Performance" (Modern Drama).