ASU Faculty Member Publishes Transformative Work in the Area of Interactive and Experiential Media and Arts

Sha Xin Wei, the new director of the School of Arts, Media + Engineering in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, has just published a book with MIT Press titled Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter. MIT Press says of the book: “In this challenging but exhilarating work, Sha Xin Wei argues for an approach to materiality inspired by continuous mathematics and process philosophy. Investigating the implications of such an approach to media and matter in the concrete setting of installation- or event-based art and technology, Sha maps a genealogy of topological media—that is, of an articulation of continuous matter that relinquishes a priori objects, subjects, and egos and yet constitutes value and novelty.”

Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University writes of the book: “Sha Xin Wei moves fluently between ontological speculation and the pragmatics of designing digital environments; he is equally at home discussing the abstractions of topology and the aesthetics of interactive performance. He embraces the digital while moving beyond its limitations. 'Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter' offers us the vision of a world rich in experiences and meanings: a common world that we share, as Alfred North Whitehead once put it, with ‘a democracy of fellow creatures.’

And George E. Lewis, MacArthur Fellow and Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Columbia University, writes: “Sha's conception of topological media presents a radically interdisciplinary and ardently humanistic view of the complex relations among sound, vision, technology, aesthetics, agency, and ethics. Challenging conventionally ocularcentric media discourses, this book demonstrates the centrality of play to the realization of a new generation of responsive artworks that consummate the heretofore secret love between interactivity and improvisation.”

Sha is new to Arizona State University, having previously been the Canada Research Chair in New Media and a professor of critical studies of media arts and sciences at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. There Dr. Sha directed the Topological Media Lab, which he founded in 2001.

For more on Director Sha Xin Wei and the School of Arts, Media + Engineering, go to ame.asu.edu

Public Contact: 
Felicity Snyder
Research + Graduate Program Manager
480.965.0964
fsnyder@asu.edu

Media Contact:
Felicity Snyder
Research + Graduate Program Manager
480.965.0964
fsnyder@asu.edu