A seminar course with a
studio-laboratory component.
Course Description:
The seminar introduces graduate and
advanced undergraduate students to art research engaging computational media
and experimental technologies of performance. It is designed to be a Ph.D. seminar introducing the
research questions and approaches that motivate the Topological Media Lab's art research (see http://topologicalmedia.net). We explore:
the
emergence of bodies, objects or events in fields of active matter;
performance
vs. representation; and
diffused
or hybrid agency.
Discussions and projects will spring
from critical readings in philosophy, art, performance, and computer science.
In studio-laboratory, students have
an opportunity to engage these questions by making tangible media or a
responsive installation individually and in pairs. Students are expected to be versed already
in some media or computational craft, and be willing to (1) write essays about
theoretical research questions, and (2) acquire and work with a complementary
craft with such questions in play.
The readings are extremely
challenging. Students must be willing to grapple creatively with them,
and to respond in writing and material form.
Prerequisites:
Examples of prior experience can
include: any studio art, including woven or nonwoven materials, print-making;
dance; musical performance, electronic music and sound design; technical
theater; realtime computational, especially Max, MSP or Jitter; programming
microprocessors and sensors; pattern recognition or physics simulations. (e.g. Languages
of Programming,
and Tangible Media and Physical
Computing) Those without concrete expertise but with strong theoretical
interests may petition the instructor.
Administrative Matters:
Anyone interested should contact
Sophie Genereux <design@vax2.concordia.ca> of Design Arts so that she can
keep track of the class list and make a waiting list, if necessary. Since it is a multidisciplinary course,
the prerequisite is a combination of advanced undergraduate Fine Arts and
Computer Science courses. For more
details about prerequisite, please contact Dr. Sha at <sha@fas.harvard.edu>. Any CSE graduate student who wants to
take this course for credit should submit a special request to Halina
Monkiewicz<halina@cs.concordia.ca> of Computer Science.
About the professor:
Dr. Sha Xin Wei, a new Canada
Research Chair with a joint appointment at Fine Arts and Computer Science, will
be teaching this seminar course in the winter term in the Department of Design
Arts.
Sha Xin WeiÕs practice
ranges from collaboratively built responsive environments to gesturally nuanced
sound and video media. These
works explore how people create playful relations with one another in the
presence of dense, continuously evolving responsive media. Since 1997, Sha Xin Wei has worked with
the art research group, sponge, which he co-founded in San Francisco to produce
public experiments in phenomenology.
Major
projects include the TGarden play spaces, Hubbub public speech-painting, and
the Sauna urban immersion installations. Sha Xin Wei has embarked on the Softwear Instruments
project which explores how subjects emerge Ï fields of gesture in sensate,
gestural, media-saturated fabrics and other active materials. Also, Sha has conceived the
Membrane series of calligraphic live-video lenses for marveling the other in
movement. Collaboratively
and individually, Sha has exhibited event/installations in prominent
experimental art venues including Ars Electronica Austria, V2 The Netherlands,
Banff Canada, and Postmasters New York. These works have been recognized by awards by major
cultural foundations such as the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science
and Technology and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Dr. Sha has degrees in
mathematics from Harvard and Stanford Universities, and since 2001 has taught
computational media and critical studies of techno-science at the Georgia
Institute of Technology. In
2004-2005, he is a Visiting Scholar at MIT's Science, Technology Studies
program, and in the Department of History of Science at Harvard
University. He directs the
Topological Media Lab, which he founded to carry out research in experimental
phenomenology and technologies of performance.
See Syllabus for details