Xin Wei Sha

How can we design material structures as ambients to human and other living organisms, co-articulating themselves together with their hosted life? This approach to architectural design incorporates from the outset a processualist concern with dynamic, flux, change, transformation, which may seem at odds with the classical concept of architecture as the quintessential art of static form. Nonetheless it constitutes a pragmatic and radically empiricist engagement with both concept and practice; design for change in multiple scales and registers is the mandate of our time of anthropogenic climate change. Informed by recent theoretical biology but also plant science and general ecology, I consider some essential characteristics of metabolic processes: irreducible materiality, protentive and retentive temporality, multi-scale / multi-dimensional rhythm, reflexive sense-making, extended criticality, anti-entropy, and most importantly, open-ended non-prestatability.

(The attached PDF has three images from original manuscript not in the published version.)

A letter to prospective doctoral students

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/

Michel Serres said that history is the propagation of effects, saying in his conversations with Bruno Latour, “we experience time as much in our inner senses as externally in nature, as much as le temps of history as le temps of weather,” characterized more by turbulence than by Euclidean geometry. Setting out from Serres’ nautical meditation on noise, guided by Giuseppe Longo’s and interlocutors’ characterization of the random as a function of theory and measure, one can distinguish the random from the non-schematizable noisy. How do we think given the noisy dynamics of the world? Bernard Stiegler’s epiphylogenetic technologies and Gilbert Simondon’s transindividuating technics prepares considering thought as collective as well as individual activity. After sallies into algorithmic technology to establish its limits, we consider how epiphylogenetic thought develops in the presence of indeterminacy. We return to noise not as a simple veil between the discernible and indiscernible, but as a constitutive aspect of the complexification and enrichment of developmental ontologies, an enrichment co-articulated by epiphylogenetic imagination and technics.

The indeterminate is more than the unpredictable — after all classical chaotic systems are deterministic, more than the infinite, and as Jackson Pollock argued with a drunken flick of the wrist, more than the random.  But rather than define indeterminacy, let’s consider how ever-evolving world exceeds every pre-given measure or category, and how experience exceeds every expectation.  Yet experience helps: we feel our way into ever-proliferating experience the way that vines feel their way into the crevices of weathering brick.  So how should we not only affirm un altro mondo è possibile / another world is possible, but experimentally vary the conditions of some ontogenetic processes that co-articulate our world?

This paper presents An Experiential Model of the Atmosphere, a responsive media environment including multi-surface video projection and ambisonic audio feedback in which participants can fluidly interact with an idealized model of atmospheric dynamics, using the presence and motion of their bodies to force convection, condense and evaporate moisture, and manipulate atmospheric pressure gradients. We use this model to explore steering of computational models of complex systems that can span gamuts of single to multi-body interaction, local to global spatial scales, short-to long-term time scales, and abstract representations to immersive, felt environments. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Mixed / augmented reality; Gestural input; Collaborative interaction; • Applied computing → Performing arts; Media arts;

In a TGarden responsive media space, people dressed in costumes and sensors move freely to improvise living patterns of image and sound. Both the experience and the production subscribe to notions of autonomy and flexibility. Our question is to what extent ideals consonant with Open Source, latent in the design of the technology and of the collaborative consortium, also could serve to pattern the social embedding of such play space technologies in ambient economies. In addressing this question, we must come to terms with diverse epistemic cultures, diverse technical and political and generational interests, and the economy of knowledge capital in the intersection of art and technology.

We present a suite of approaches to how ensembles of people, technical objects, and processes can co-construct events that make ethico-aesthetic sense to the participants. The intents and techniques range from creative uses of gesture-following, vibro-tactile feedback or whole body interaction in performance, to using wearables, and responsive environments to study the dynamics of rhythm, sense and affect.

An approach to instrument conception that is based on a careful consideration of the coupling of tactile and sonic gestural action across the layers of physical and computational material in coordinated dynamical variation. To this end we propose a design approach that not only considers the materiality of the instrument, but leverages it as a central part of the conception of the sonic quality, the control structure, and what generally falls under the umbrella of "mapping". This extended computational matter perspective sca�olds a holistic approach to understanding an "instrument" as gestural engagement through physical material, sonic variation, and somatic activity.

Why this book?

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…

In this paper, we describe an experimental approach to the study of coordinated group activity (ensemble) through the development of a responsive media system and enacted movement-based research. Interested in how ensembles emerge, we take into account the material conditions of phenomena associated with coordination and entrainment. To this end we share about the development of a responsive media system and as well as a series of movement experiments with the system. As a unframing tactic, we suspend ontological assumptions which occlude, mask, or ignore relation and event as emergent and unprestateable. This tactic belies both our observations of event as well as the design of responsive behaviors in the media environment apparatus. Our investigations yielded insights for us about embodied experience with respect to technicity.

Muindi Fanuel Muindi: "Taking a great deal of inspiration from the everyday practices that have sustained and nurtured experimental theatre troupes, Xin Wei’s work is about more than doing art, philosophy, and science; it is also about making worlds that condition different ways of doing art, philosophy, and science. TML and Synthesis, as two projects in world-making, are creative projects in their own right, and they ought to be attended to with as just much curiosity as one gives to the specific artistic, philosophical, and scientific projects that TML and Synthesis have produced and hosted."

See https://www.solutionsforpostmodernliving.org/world-building-blog/sha-xin-wei

ABSTRACT The TGarden is a genre of responsive environment in which actor–spectators shape dense media sensitive to their movements. These dense fields of light, sound, and material also evolve according to their own composed dynamics, so the agency is distributed throughout the multiple media. These TGardens explore open-ended questions like the following: what makes some time-based, responsive environments compelling, and others flat? How can people improvise gestures without words, that are individually or collectively meaningful? When and how is a movement intentional, or collectively intentional? This paper introduces what has been at stake behind the experimental work: subjectivation, moving from technologies of representation to technologies of performance, and the potential for ethico-aesthetic novelty.

In this essay we explore extensive modes of enactive engagement among humans, physical and computational media richer than the modes represented by classical notions of interaction and relation. We make use of a radically material and a potential-theoretic account of event to re-conceive ad hoc, non-pre-schematized activity in responsive environments. We can regard such activity as sense-making via dehomogenization of material that co-articulates subjects and objects.

Typically video-conferencing technologies focus on provide 1-1, person to person links, usually showing the heads and shoulders of the speakers seated facing their cameras. This limits their movement and expects foveal attention. Adding people to the conversation multiplies the complexity and competes for visual real estate and video bandwidth. Most coronal meaning-making activity is excised by this frontal framing of the participants. This method does not scale well as the number of participants rises. ! In our approach to augmenting collaboration and learning, we take a different tack. Instead of projecting people to remote spaces, we make furniture and objects that effectively exist in two (or more) locations at once. We ask, how can such shared objects provide a common site for ad hoc activity in concurrent conversations among people who are not co-located but co-present via audio?

Chapter 3, pp 101-124
Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practice
ed. Paola Crespi, Sunil Manghani

Rhythm requires variation of matter – in a perfectly homogeneous experience of a perfectly homogeneous world there can be no rhythm.    Furthermore, rhythm as a feature of experience (rather than an abstract pattern) arises from a body encountering variation in matter – in other words, movement.  Running your finger across the ridges of the sea shell, you feel irregular pressure on your skin that you can interpret as a rhythm — a pattern of irregular variation of sensation correlate with your movement.  Stopping your finger’s movement you would feel no variation.  If the shell were perfectly smooth, you also would feel no variation.  So corporeal movement and irregularities in matter are necessary to rhythmic experience.  Notice that corporeal movement compounds the body as a necessary ingredient in having this experience.  Feeling through the body, via embodied engagement is a deep component of the experience. 
However, variation of matter and corporeal movement, while elemental as ingredients of a sense of rhythm, do not exhaustively capture its essence.  Rhythm as a temporal pattern in experience lies beyond or in between sense perceptions.  One gets to a sense of rhythmic pattern via perception, but rhythm itself is not sense data; to borrow phenomenological vocabulary, it is not perceived but apperceived.

The reader may find it completely obvious that rhythm is not to be found “out there,” to be represented by sense or sensor data, but rather is a feature of lived experience, and thus inextricably part of phenomena rather than data.  But in the age of zombies, it’s useful to refer to much more extensive arguments such as Merleau-Ponty’s scientific meditations on temporal experience.  He writes: “We are not saying that time is for someone, which would once more be a case of arraying it out, and immobilizing it. ...We must understand time as the subject and the subject as time.”  [Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 491]
Departing from cognitivist and phenomenological projects, we keep in play various commitments to particular notions of subject, body or time.    This methodological attitude draws from both pragmatism’s radically empirical approach (to borrow from William James) and Husserl’s injunction to attend to the phenomena themselves.  This we start from neither theoretical abstractions like time or numbered metric nor imperceivable mechanism, but rather from lived experience.  This suspension, or keeping in play, of abstractions like subject, body, or time lies at the heart of a pragmatist empiricist method.

This approach to rhythm that we describe also suspends commitment to a particular notion of the anthropic subject, whether phenomenological, psychological or cognitive.  In this sense, it shares with pragmatists and process philosophy and some aspects of contemporary materialism after Deleuze the proposition of experience without a subject.

The operations that produce beings outside nature can themselves be quite ordinary, quotidian, even rational. We can extend our world by amalgamating “monsters” – beings against and therefore outside nature – not by taming them or by exhibiting them in cages, but by enlarging our social, technical, political, epistemic practices to include them.

This chapter focuses on specific practices in twentieth- and twenty-first-century mathematics of articulating, barring, taming, and operating with what mathematicians widely call mathematical monsters (Wagner; Kucharski; Feferman; Cooper; Poincaré). We can regard these practices as examples of what more generically can be called problematization, a powerful mode of propositional thought shared by mathematicians and speculative philosophers.

Transcript of 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.

turning over a new leaf, a maple leaf, offers a moment to think over what seems to work, and what i'd like to try to realize in a phd program of art research. 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.

i propose to start with a few brilliant, talented, dedicated artist-researchers who might write exemplary dissertations, indexed by striking experimental works. they will be radically different from one another, they will be risky, they will not be vocational. that's why i'm speaking with a few people, some of whom i've known for many years, who i respect and cherish for what they've already done with their lives, about coming together with me in this new place. and although this will be a considerable tax on my capacities, i think it will be valuable to discover the diversity, depth and power that phd level art-research might achieve.

this note is a letter to these prospective students.

The strength of contemporary art practice is how diversely art is made today. Contempo- rary art practice includes (1) object-making by artisans based on inherited folk knowledge, (2) commercial work in all media by professionals in global or globalizing markets, (3) ob- jects and performances created for galleries, private collections, or venues sponsored largely by private wealth, (4) works subsidized by public money for public display, and (5) non-reproducible events or objects made by collectives for particular places and situa- tions. Art practice extends beyond any such list, so we focus here mainly on North Amer- ican art practices situated in contemporary economies. To practice art necessarily in- cludes the question of how one makes a living doing such creative cultural work. The sit- uation in Quebec and Canada has unique qualities, so contemporary art practices differ substantially from those other economies.

Alfred North Whitehead’s most concise characterization of philosophy of process appeared early in his major work, Process and Reality : “How an entity becomes constitutes what the entity is.” In that spirit, I reverse the phrase, Relational Interfaces, which privileges the ”interface” as a sta- ble object, and consider instead the sociotetchnical conditions and the ethico-aesthetic relations in which interfaces may be invented. Here, by interface, I’ll understand a set of stable, formed material-corporeal-symbolic relations between people and their machines, used to coordinate their activity. In particular, I set this in the context of collective research-creation that happens in the milieus pioneered by the Synthesis Center since 2014 in the USA, and earlier the Topolog- ical Media Lab (2001-2005 USA; 2005-2013 Canada).

Research in the arts is quite different from research in engineering, which turn is different from scientific research. It is more akin to the humanities in its attention to the particular rather than the systemic, but it creates knowledge via aesthetic as well as critical inquiry, and engages material and embodied experience as well as concepts. Like other modes of research, art research generates portable knowledge: it generates insights , how-to's, why's that can be shared by more than one individual; what is learned in the context of one art project can be applied in a different one. Like research in other domains , art research has its own archive, but whereas historians use textual archives, and anthropologists use materials gathered in fieldwork, art research's "body of literature" is the body of prior works and the critical commentaries surrounding them. Like other research, art research is open-ended, we cannot declare in advance what is the "deliverable": if we already know the answer, then we would not need to do the research. Art research is not the same as art practice. Why should that be the case? Not every artist shares her working knowledge with her peers, nor need she do so. Art practices range widely, and a large part of their vitality comes from their autonomous ways of making. Ethics of art research vs. art practice. In art research, experienced artists mentor less experienced artists not solely to realize the principal's design in work-for-hire relationship, but as potential peers. To be clear, although art research is informed in an essential way by practice , it is not practice: it is reflection upon practice. Practically speaking, the fruits of art research are not presented in galleries, theaters, or other exhibition venues, nor are they directly or necessarily for art production. Mentoring in art research has the quality of individual mentoring in the humanities predicated not on grant projects but on persons. Still, art research differs from other modes of research in significant ways. There is no single model, but speaking generally, art research generates questions, it opens up frames of reference , and rigorously investigates questions concerning value (vs. fact), desire, and imagination. Art research can amplify social, cultural commentary but along aesthetic and poetic as well as critical dimensions. And art researchers can open up discourse about society or culture, but rather than promoting a particular methodology, it can draw general knowledge from the creation of concrete, and particular things or events. Indeed, an invaluable aspect of art research is that it rigorously investigates the cultural and human imaginary the way that philosophy investigates social and individual knowledge: by constructing precise and memorable questions about what perhaps may have been taken for granted.

SC is a modular suite of software designed to allow designers to compose the behavior of a responsive media environment evolving in concert with contingent activity in a physical space. The media can be rich and fairly eccentric: projected video, spatialized audio, theatrical lighting — generally fields of structured time-varying light and sound, as well as water, mist, animated objects etc. The behavior of the responsive environment evolves according to prior design as well as contingent activity.1 A key condition is that everything happens in real-time, in concert with the activity of the inhabi- tants of the responsive environment. SC supports rich and thick experiences with poetic, symbolic, and scientific effects.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's skepticism about the expressive scope of propositional language, Jacques Derrida's critique of logocentrism, generalized via semiotics to all forms of representation, and Judith Butler's analysis of the performativity of gender motivate the turn to performance as an alternative to representation.  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 will 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.    The central question, however, is how can ambient and its inhabitants co-articulate an event, or in a related phrasing, what are the dynamics of a meaning-making event?  The techniques I employed in a new kind of dynamics for temporal media and people to co-articulate an event were essentially an energetic dynamical system not in the stratum of physical bodies and objects but in the stratum of metaphor, or more precisely of state of event.  Modelled after statistical physics of continuous media, this sort of dynamics differs radically from fixed scores and timetracks, from boolean logic, and also from aleatory techniques.  Moreover, the dynamics allows unbounded multiplicity and continuous overlapping state, profoundly distinct from digital logic and graph-theoretic logic.  Eppur si muove.

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. "

Session 1 of a seminar convened by Cécile Malaspina and Sha Xin Wei
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!

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, and Montevil.

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.

https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/b21podcast
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.

I ➛ We ➛ World
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

https://youtu.be/vI0--cgZTRY
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/keynoteslsa
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 Slides
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 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p43UjrLfC5E
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.

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/

https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/ozone
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/environments
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.

Rather than ask what kinds of things there are, or what are things made of, one can ask how do things come to be, and how do things turn into the substrate from which they emerge? After giving a brief account of a topological approach to dynamics, I interpret Jean Petitot’s construction of the apperception of a thing as the result of constituting processes. Along the way I provide some topological concepts as handholds for Gilbert Simondon’s qualitative, processualist concepts of individuation.
.
Talk at 23 May 2014, Einsiedeln Switzerland, convened by Vera Bühlmann, Ludger Hovestadt, CAAD ETH Zurich
and chapter in Metalithikum V: Coding As Literacy

http://appliedvirtualitylab.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/computation-as-literacy-self-organizing-maps

http://appliedvirtualitylab.wordpress.com/

Talk: https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/apperception
Discussion: https://vimeo.com/413040124

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

Talk at Metalithikum V Coding As Literacy Symposium, 22 May 2014, Einseldeln Switzerland. Hosted by Very Bühlmann and Ludgar Hovestadt, Laboratory Applied Virtuality, ETH Zurich.

http://appliedvirtualitylab.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/computation-as-literacy-self-organizing-maps/

http://appliedvirtualitylab.wordpress.com/

Talk: https://vimeo.com/synthesiscenter/topology
Discussion: https://vimeo.com/413063988

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