Xin Wei Sha

Sha Xin Wei, Ph.D., is Professor and Director of the School of Arts, Media + Engineering at ASU. Sha also directs the Synthesis Center for responsive environments and improvisation with colleagues in AME and affiliate research centers in Canada, UK, France, and the USA.

From 2005-2013 Dr. Sha was the Canada Research Chair in media arts and sciences, and Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Computer Science at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. From 2001 to 2013 he directed the Topological Media Lab, an atelier-laboratory for the study of gesture and materiality from computational and phenomenological perspectives. Dr. Sha's core research concerns ethico-aesthetic improvisation, and a topological approach to ontogenesis and process philosophy. With the TML, Sha has created responsive environments for ethico-aesthetic improvisation.

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 Einsteins Dreams time-conditioning instruments. 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.

Sha co-founded the Sponge art group in San Francisco to build public experiments in phenomenology of performance. With Sponge and other artists, Sha has directed event/installations in prominent experimental art venues including Ars Electronica Austria, DEAF / V2 The Netherlands, MediaTerra Greece, Banff Canada, Future Physical United Kingdom, Elektra Montréal, and eArts Shanghai. He has also exhibited media installations at Postmasters Gallery New York and Suntrust Gallery Atlanta. These works have been recognized by awards from major cultural foundations such as the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology; the LEF Foundation; the Canada Fund for Innovation; the Creative Work Fund in New York; Future Physical UK; and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Dr. Sha’s areas of technical research include the realtime, continuous mapping of features extracted from gestural instruments (such as woven or non-woven fabrics) into parameters modulating the continuous synthesis of video, sound, and physical or software control systems. This technical work supports the expressive improvisation of gesture in dense, palpable fields of sound, video and structured light, and animated materials.

Sha Xin Wei was trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford Universities, and worked more than 12 years in the fields of scientific computation, mathematical modelling and the visualization of scientific data and geometric structures.

Dr. Sha has been Visiting Scholar in History of Science at Harvard University, and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, History of Science and French and Italian Literature at Stanford, Centre for Modern Thought Kings College Aberdeen. In 2013-14, he is the Intel Fellow at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

He is a North American editor of AI and Society, and an editor of the European-based Experimental Practices book series (Rodopi Press), and International Computer Journal of Creative Interfaces & Computer Graphics, FibreCulture and Leonardo. He founded the online journal Transmutations for critical studies of performance, media arts and technology. Dr. Sha has served on engineering-scientific review committees, including SIGGRAPH, Computer Human Interaction, ACM Multimedia, New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Smart Graphics, as well as art and technology review boards for the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, Canada Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Canada Council for the Arts, and Fondation Daniel Langlois. MIT Press published Dr. Sha's book, Poiesis, Enchantment, and Topological Matter in 2013.