News Archive
Making Stuff Up: A Talk by Professor Sha Xin Wei - 18th October
Friday 18 October, 11.30-1.00, B.0.06 Social Sciences
All welcome
One can use mathematics not as an instrument or measure, or a replacement for God, but as a poetic articulation, or perhaps as a stammered experimental approach to cultural dynamics. I choose to start with the simplest symbolic substances that respect the lifeworld’s continuous dynamism, temporality, boundless ontogenesis, superposability, continuity, density and value, and yet are independent of measure, metric, counting, finitude, formal logic, syntax, grammar, digitality and computability, in short, free of the formal structures that would put a cage over all of the lifeworld. I call these substances topological media.
This paper introduces topological media with which we can articulate material and cultural dynamics using notions of proximity, limit, and change, without recourse to number or metric. Topology can furnish us with concepts well-adapted for poietically articulating the world as stuff, rather than objects with an a priori schema. With care, it may provide a fruitful approach to ontogenesis and cultural dynamics that is neither reductive nor anthropocentric. I will not pretend to any system of scaffolding concepts. Instead, I would prefer to learn what fellow students of cultural dynamics and cosmopolitics might make of these modes of articulation in their own work.
Bio: Sha Xin Wei, Canada Research Chair, media arts and sciences; Associate Professor, Concordia University, Montréal. Sha directs the Topological Media Lab, an atelier for the phenomenological and computational study of gesture and materiality in responsive environments. Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford, Sha has worked in mathematical modelling, simulation, and multimedia. He has been faculty or visiting scholar at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Aberdeen, University of California. Sha is an editor of AI and Society; Rodopi’s Experimental Practices in Art, Science, and Philosophy; and FibreCulture. His book, Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter, is being published by MIT Press in 2013.