Xin Wei Sha | Arizona State University (original) (raw)

Sha Xin Wei Ph.D. is Professor at the School of Arts, Media + Engineering and directs the Synthesis atelier for transversal art, philosophy and technology at Arizona State University. He is a professor at the European Graduate School in Philosophy, Art and Critical Theory; Fellow of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems; and Senior Fellow of Building21 at McGill University.

Dr. Sha's research concerns topological approaches to poiesis, play and process. His art and scholarship range from gestural media, movement arts, and realtime media installation through interaction design to critical studies and philosophy of technology. Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford, Sha pursues speculative philosophy, experimental art, and visionary technologies that are reciprocally informed.

He publishes in experimental philosophy, media arts, science and technology studies, and computer science, including the book Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter (MIT).

Art

Sha’s art includes the TGarden playspaces, Hubbub speech-sensitive urban spaces, Membrane calligraphic video, Softwear gestural sound instruments, the WYSIWYG gesture-sensitive sounding weaving, Ouija performance-installations, and kinetic / light sculpture responding to movement and gesture, such as Cosmicomics Elektra, eSea Shanghai, the IL Y A video membrane Stanford/Berkeley, and Time Lenses Beall Center, and Palimpsest Paris. With Montanaro, Sha created media instruments for a stage work inspired by Shelley's Frankenstein. In collaboration with Khintirian, Ingalls, and Laurin, he created the Serra vegetal life environment.

Sha co-founded Sponge San Francisco to create public experimental experiences. Sha (co-)created installations in prominent venues: Ars Electronica Austria, Dutch Electronic Art Festival, MediaTerra Greece, Banff Canada, Future Physical UK, Elektra Montréal, and eArts Shanghai, and the Musée des arts et métiers Paris, Postmasters Gallery New York, San Francisco Exploratorium, Suntrust Gallery Atlanta, and SIGGRAPH. These works have been recognized by awards from major cultural foundations such as the Daniel Langlois Foundation; LEF Foundation; Creative Work Fund; and Rockefeller.

Technical research

Dr. Sha’s technical research include realtime, continuous mapping of features extracted from environmental or ensemble activity into parameters modulating the expressive improvisation of gesture in dense, palpable fields of sound, structured light, and animated materials. He has published in areas of tangible interfaces, human-computer interaction, and wearables (Ubicomp, ICMC, Sound Music Computing), calligraphic media (ACM Multimedia), movement (MOCO), responsive environments (CHI, TEI).

History

Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford, Sha worked more than 12 years in the fields of scientific computation, mathematical modeling, scientific and differential geometric visualization.

In 1995, he extended his work to network media authoring systems and media theory leading the Interaction and Media Group at Stanford. In 1997, he co-founded Pliant Research with colleagues from Xerox PARC and Apple Research Labs, designing technologies that people and organizations can adapt to meet evolving social aspirations. In 1999, Sha joined Interval Research to work on machine learning and computer vision.

After obtaining an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2001 at Stanford on differential geometric performance and the technologies of writing in Mathematics, Computer Science, and History & Philosophy of Science, Sha joined the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center in the College of Computing, where he founded the Topological Media Lab, dedicated to the study of gesture, distributed agency and materiality with application to performative and environmental experience.

In 2005-2014, Sha was the first Canada Research Chair in media arts and sciences, and Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts Department at Concordia University Montréal, advising PhD’s in Individualized Studies and Humanities Special Program. He directed the wearables / active textiles axis Hexagram Centre for Research-Creation.

Sha's work has been supported by the Canada Fund for Innovation, Hexagram, Concordia University, Social Sciences Humanities Research Council, Le Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies, and Le Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture; the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Academy of Sciences, and the United Nations.

In 2020, he established Weightlesstudio, an atelier for design and prototype engineering of enriched environments, as a portal between transversal research-creation and the private and public sectors.

Sha serves as an Editor for AI & Society Journal, and on the Governing Board of Leonardo.
Supervisors: Tim Lenoir, Rafe Mazzeo, and Terry Winograd
Phone: +1-650-815-9962
Address: Stauffer-B Room 255
950 South Forest Mall
Tempe Arizona 85281

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