Textural Sensemaking
4.30 – 6 pm Wed 29 January 2025 Dalhousie LT2, University of Dundee
Or online here.
A seminar for the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy. Sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy and the AHRC project Energy: A Philosophy of Practice.
Lightning… distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it.
(Deleuze, Difference and Repetition)
What opens up when we shift from a logic of objects and predicates to operators, transformations, contingency and open-ended development; from experiencing in terms of form and substance to enacting ‘the force that thru the green fuse…’; from a priori atoms and egos to topological distributions and other modes of contingent
textural subjectivation? Drawing from some elementary notions such as wú (無), líubái ( 留白), as well as non-discrete topology, I’ll propose some consequences for a textural
approach to the emergence of sense, with practical consequences for the arts of conditioning events such as architecture and theater.
Bio: Sha Xin Wei, Professor at the Schools of Arts, Media + Engineering and Complex Adaptive Systems, directs the Synthesis Atelier for transversal art, philosophy and technology at Arizona State University. He has been a professor at Concordia University as director of the Topological Media Lab, at the European Graduate School and the New Centre for Research & Practice. Sha’s core research concerns processualist approaches to ontogenesis and poiesis. Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford University, his art and scholarly work range from gestural media, movement arts, and real-time media installation through experiential design to critical studies and philosophy of technology. Sha has published in philosophy, media arts and sciences, experimental music and performance, science and technology studies, computer science, and human computer interaction, including the book Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter (MIT). He is an associate editor for AI & Society and serves on the Governing Board of Leonardo.