How can we experience via rhythm?
Date: Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Location: West Lounge, Royal Victoria College
Convener: Sha Xin Wei, Professor, School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Director, Synthesis Lab,
(Arizona State University)
This project studies how biological and social complex systems evolve, cohere, disintegrate, and most importantly generate novel pattern via a special attention to rhythm (as described as the variation of material = energy + matter + media).
How do value-producing socio-technical processes synchronize, blend, diverge, interfere with one another?
How do new phenomena — innovations, tactics, inventions — emerge, not merely as functions of the conditions at a single event nor even a set of discrete events, but from novel patterns and their rhythms?
We invite you to join us for this experiment in transdisciplinary conversation, facilitated by Sha Xin Wei, and also to informally launch a new collaborative space, "Building 21", for sharing ideas at McGill.
This event is part of a greater project that you may explore in more detail here.
Wine and light refreshments will be served.
Registration is required for this event. Please confirm your participation using the following link:
https://goo.gl/forms/Zg5MnNEemZU5MnMf2
Sha Xin Wei is Professor and Director of the School of Arts, Media + Engineering at Arizona State University. He also directs the Synthesis Center for transversal art, philosophy and technology at ASU, and is a Fellow of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems.
Dr. Sha's core research concerns a topological approach to poiesis, play and process. His art and scholarly work 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 Universities, Dr. Sha has pursued speculative philosophy, experimental art, and visionary technologies that are reciprocally informed to equal depth and poetry.
In 2001 Sha established the Topological Media Lab as an atelier for the study of gesture and materiality. From 2005-2013 as Canada Research Chair in media arts and sciences and Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal, he led the TML creating responsive environments for ethico-aesthetic improvisation.
Sha has published in the areas of philosophy and media arts, science and technology studies, performing arts research, and computer science, including the book Poiesis, Enchantment and Topological Media (MIT Press).
