A Workshop with Sha Xin Wei
Sha Xin Wei is Professor at the Schools of Arts, Media + Engineering and Complex Adaptive Systems, directs the Synthesis Atelier for transversal art, philosophy and technology at Arizona State University. He has been a professor at Concordia University, at the European Graduate School and the New Centre for Research & Practice. Sha’s core research concerns processualist approaches to ontogenesis and poiesis. Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford University, his art and scholarly work range from gestural media, movement arts, and real-time media installation through experiential design to critical studies and philosophy of technology.
Hapticality
A workshop which created, through structured improvisation, energetic understandings of hapticality – feeling the world through others – and developed capacities for, as Erik Bordeleau put it, “perceiving a world peopled not with things but with forces, not with subjects but with powers, not with bodies but with bonds”.
Textural Sense-making
What opens up when we shift from a logic of objects and predicates to operators, transformations, contingency and open-ended development; from experiencing in terms of form and substance to enacting “the force that thru the green fuse…”; from a priori atoms and egos to topological distributions and other modes of contingent textural subjectivation? Drawing from elementary notions such as wú (無), líubái (留白), as well as non-discrete topology, Sha proposes some consequences for a textural approach to the emergence of sense, with practical consequences for the arts of conditioning occasions, such as architecture and theater.
