Canada Research Chair

SHA XIN WEI, Ph.D. was trained in mathematics at Harvard & Stanford Universities, and is Associate Professor in Fine Arts and Engineering & Computer Science. Dr. Sha's primary interests lie in critical studies of media arts, science, & technology. His theoretical work explores gesture, distributed agency and materiality in kinetic and body-based media, and in responsive environments. Present areas of experimental focus include movement art and poetic architecture.

After 12 years of work in scientific simulation, geometric visualization, distributed multimedia, and human-computer systems architecture, in 1996, Sha co-founded Pliant Research with colleagues in Xerox PARC and Apple Research, and in 1997 the Sponge art group. In 2001 at Georgia Tech, he founded the Topological Media Lab for experimental phenomenology and media art. In 2004-2005, he was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History of Science at Harvard and the Program in Science, Technology, & Society at MIT. In 2009-2010, he was a Visiting Scholar in French & Italian at Stanford University.

Sha's international projects include the series of TGarden responsive media spaces, Hubbub speech-based urban installations; calligraphic video Membranes; WYSIWYG soft wearable gestural instruments, and the Frankenstein's Ghosts performance project. This work has been supported by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Canada Fund for Innovation, Creative Work Fund, SSHRC, FQRSC, FQRNT, Hexagram, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Editor of AI and Society & the Experimental Practices Book series at Rodopi Press, he is writing a book on poiesis in topological matter.

areas of expertise: Critical studies of media arts and sciences, responsive environments, realtime media, technologies of performance.