Sha Xin Wei
This week’s dispatch features an interview with Sha Xin Wei about his work with the Topological Media Lab (TML) and Synthesis, and about his book, Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter.
Taking a great deal of inspiration from the everyday practices that have sustained and nurtured experimental theatre troupes, Xin Wei’s work is about more than doing art, philosophy, and science; it is also about making worlds that condition different ways of doing art, philosophy, and science. TML and Synthesis, as two projects in world-making, are creative projects in their own right, and they ought to be attended to with as just much curiosity as one gives to the specific artistic, philosophical, and scientific projects that TML and Synthesis have produced and hosted.
Below is the full audio recording and a partial transcript of my interview with Xin Wei. The audio recording features opening and closing music by Horseman, Pass By.
Sha Xin Wei:
Hi, my name is Sha Xin Wei and I’m the director of the Synthesis Center or, preferably, just “Synthesis”, at Arizona State University (ASU), and, until recently, I've also been the director of the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at ASU. Before that, for almost ten years, I was directing this other experimental group called the Topological Media Lab (TML), first in Atlanta and then, for most of the time, in Montreal, Canada, where that group is still flourishing.
Muindi Fanuel Muindi:
I want to talk a bit about Synthesis and the Topological Media Lab and the ways in which those particular “spaces” or “groups” or “organizations”, whichever you'd prefer to call them, are different from conventional research labs. Also, one word that I like to investigate is the word “atelier” which you often use to refer to both Synthesis and TML.
Xin Wei:
So, I remember there was book by Hakim Bey, called Temporary Autonomous Zones, that was very popular among certain networks of more anarchist-oriented folks between culture and politics. I remember that book was being, you know, handed around…
… And then, when it came time for me to engage in my own academic life after my PhD — which was basically a degree in mathematics — I really wanted to incorporate the informal work I was doing in experimental theatre and my political activism into my academic life. But my card said PhD in mathematics, and inside that was doing work with computers and emerging technologies.
So, [the question was,] “How to bundle that motley stuff together?”
Clearly there was a lot of stuff that I wanted to do, but that I couldn't do with my own hands. I, myself, didn't have the techniques to pursue some of the questions I was asking — and we’ll talk more about these questions later.
So, on one side, I was thinking about my experiences in experimental art projects which were, at that point, completely outside the academy with anarchist artists, media artists, hackers, and people like that. On the other side, [I was also thinking about] my formal training, a PhD in mathematics with an interest in philosophy and history of science.
[To bring all of these things together], that was why I started this lab called, Topological Media Lab at Georgia Tech.
Partly it was to harvest the “aura” that comes with “scientific labs”. Although, it must be said, this was back in 2000, and the “lab” didn’t have as much currency as it does today in art and humanities circles. But even back then, I said, “I want to start a lab.”
But my job, my first appointment was in the school of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech, LCC, which was basically a cover for the English department at the time. Basically, the people there were teaching English, cultural studies of science, and new media studies. I was their first “monster” hire in this new space [of mathematics and engineering], so I said well, “I want to build a lab.”
Leaving aside the material parts — you know, how much space and computers, et cetera — my idea was to start a lab that could produce knowledge, like a scientific lab, but would use, from the get-go, ways of thinking from experimental theatre. We were right from the very beginning, thinking about how to make techniques for heightening experience, using all the power of new technologies. […] But, what’s more, the lab would also be explicitly interested in philosophical questions, from the get-go, like “what is a gesture”—that was one of the first questions we asked. So, a lab for studying gesture, incorporating both techniques from phenomenology, [from theatre,] and from computer science—that was the beginning of the Topological Media Lab.
The word “lab” was a political choice [at the time], and not until much later did I start thinking about the limitations of that: the best practices from art studios and from science and engineering labs both have their limits. And so, I said, I would prefer to use the word “atelier” to label what we're really trying to create, because that [term] was more porous.
On one hand, the [atelier] was something other than an academic organization, it was a craft oriented organization. And craft included philosophy and theory for me—philosophy and theory are crafts. […] But the atelier was not only an extra-academic organization, it was also a social way of organizing work that was pre-capitalist and this infused a kind of political dimension to it. The atelier was a pre-capitalist form of productive work that harnessed all these highly skilled people and guilds of such skills to produce works much bigger than what any one person could produce.
Muindi:
That's really lovely, and I and I'm thinking about that in a number of different ways.
So, there were, of course, the technical and theoretical questions that you had in mind. Then there were these “realms of practice” that you were interested in: the practice of the mathematician, the practice of the computer programmer, the practice of the technologist more generally, and then the practice of the experimental theater troupe.
But the one thing that I think is most interesting here is the problem of organizing people who come from very different [practical and theoretical] backgrounds and spaces, and getting these people to communicate and to work with one another.
Xin Wei:
It's a very, very, very fundamental problematic, this question organization, and there are a lot of thoughts here that were that were actually in-mind — that were not accidents or afterthoughts, but in-mind when we were starting up these kinds of experiments.
One question was, for example, the question of political organization, like the notion of “the party”.
At that point, I was married to an Italian and we had a very long, important relationship. Her father was a militant labor organizer, in fact, one of the few of the older generation of the PCI, the Partito Comunista Italiano, that was respected by the Young Turks of ’68. She came out of that radical tradition in Germany and Italy, etc. She said to me, “There's no politics in America.” A lot of Europeans who were radicals of that generation felt that, and I think that they we're actually correct in certain sense, you know…
We can't go too far into that, but the question I had in mind here was, “What is the group? What is the party?” [In Europe] you had people who were born into these kinds of organizations and there were generations and generations, and a sense of history, personal and collective history.
There was nothing like that for [the left in the United States] you know. Political organization here was topical. So, I was very much an activist, you might say, but that activism was very much based on issues: US policy in Central America, labor issues, immigration, blacks in prisons, Angela Davis. This was all fine. But the question [looking towards the European radicals] was one of durability. Ultimately, what difference is going to make two or three generations down the line. What kind of organization could produce that kind of durability over generations and yet not be tyrannical. So, the issue of intentional collectivity came up, and of observing what could go wrong in intentional collectives. So, I was interested in question of organization from this angle and ways of making a difference that way.
And then, also, I was noting how “theory people” talking about Deleuze and Guattari and questions of “philosophy as practice” didn't seem to have much connection with that kind of [organized] politics, in the political activism that I knew back then. That still seems to be the case: in some ways, they are really quite like oil and water.
Then, of course, there is another kind of slipping or slippage: the epistemic culture problem. This is much more familiar.
So, with my theater friends, for instance, we were talking about are building this kind of responsive environment, called the TGarden, and we had this poetic vision for what it could be. For that vision to come to fruition, we needed computers to be able to tell where people were when walking around freely in space, and we wanted them to be able to interact with one another not as well defined bodies—where my body in here and yours begins there—but, instead, to think of the people, the room, and stuff being porous to one another in every sense of porosity—including symbolic porosity, affective porosity—so that they might become “entangled” with one another.
Well, we went to the computer scientists with this problem, and they said, “Oh, just put some LEDs on top of everybody's head. Or, let them wear these cables that will connect them to these computers at the base station.”
And we said, “God no! That would destroy the experience!”
They were trying to solve a problem of identifying where people were located by figuring out coordinates (x,y,z), using pre-established techniques. We were saying that those techniques are not viable in the environment we envisioned. But this viability question was completely incomprehensible to them.
On the other hand, the dancers involved in the project were saying, what's so hard about this technical problem, we know where we are. [And taking the computer programmers side, I’d say,] yes, you know where you are, but the computer has no idea where you are it's actually quite hard to make the computer know where you are in the sense that you know where you are.
Those are practical questions that came up, but the way that I was thinking about it, these could turn into philosophical questions. I'll give you one example where that happened: with the notion of interaction — like I waive my hand and the machine makes something happen in response.
How do you make that kind of interaction happen? By using sensors and cameras and algorithms, etc. With this comes the thought that, well, we need the computer to interpret the intention is of the human being, meaning if I waive my hand, the computer knows that it means either open the door, or come hither, or goodbye.
The engineer here will take one interpretation of a gesture for granted and will say, “Here's how you do it.”
And I say, “Well, actually, there are other contexts where that is not what that gesture means.”
And then, the engineers say, “How hard can it be to distinguish between different meanings for the same gesture.”
And I say, “Well, it is 2,000-year-old problem! The meaning of a gesture is a multi-millennial problem. It's a hard problem: one that philosophy has not yet solved. So, maybe, it is a problem that we can’t solve with engineering in just to like two months, right?”
So, that was my attitude. […] If these practical problems can be, in a mathematical sense, generalized to questions that can be recognized as philosophical problems, then we can get a sense of what is an easy problem, what is a hard problem, and what is a problem that we shouldn’t even try to solve.
The Topological Media Lab was set up to create a kind of bouncing back and forth between practical problems and philosophical problems. But the move from the practical to the philosophical and back was not meant to create solutions but, rather, to create design attitudes – different ways to approach the practical problems…
