Roundtable on Ecologies of Practices

Featured Guest

Sha Xin Wei, PhD, Professor and Director of the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University; Director of the Synthesis Center

Introduction

Lori Bergen, Founding Dean of the College of Media, Communication and Information at CU-Boulder

Host

Teri Rueb Professor and Department Chair, Critical Media Practices

CU Roundtable Participants

Mark Amerika Professor of Art and Founding Director of Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance, IAWP

Laura Devendorf Assistant Professor of Information Science, Director of the Unstable Design Lab

Michelle Ellsworth Professor, Theater and Dance and Interim Director of the Center for Media Art and Performance CMAP

Erin Espelie Assistant Professor, Critical Media Practices, Co-Director of NEST - Nature, Environment, Science, Technology Studio for the Arts, Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts

Jorge Perez-Gallego Scholar in Residence, Astrophysics, Critical Media Practices and NEST

Fernando Rosario-Ortiz Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, Program Director of EVEN

Format

We will explore, in particular, approaches to knowledge production that require collective work, pursuing inquiries that exceed one person’s capacities, and approaches that cut across disciplines. Sha Xin Wei will bring examples of such research streams from Synthesis, including: movement and gestural media, multi-scale rhythmanalysis, vegetal life, and alter-eco: alternative ecologies and economies. Roundtable participants and audience members will be encouraged to join in the conversation.

This is the third event in the Ecologies of Practices Symposium, which also includes a workshop, a public lecture and a closing reception.

Funded by CMCI and a Roser Grant from the CU Center for Humanities and Arts. Organized by the Department of Critical Media Practices in the College of Media, Communication and Information (CMCI) with kind support from Nature, Environment, Science and Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts, Center for Media Art and Performance (CMAP), Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP), CMCI Studio, EVEN and ATLAS.

Background:

Sha Xin Wei’s overarching research is “a philosophical investigation that is conducted in a poetic mode of installation or event-based art and technology.” His collaborative practice weaves together, traverses through, and resists disciplinary methods that operate as doctrine, arguing that “poesis precedes theory-building, and theory-building precedes methodology, because methodology repeats a process that no longer generates knowledge. Therefore the arts and humanities play a central role in creating fresh knowledge.” In this, he embodies a media practice about practice–in essence, a critical media practice. Through several decades of collaboration he has combined forces with diverse actors to form what he refers to as“ecologies of practices” that simultaneously organize and disassemble conventional research assemblages of the university. As a new department that seeks to build a culture of heterodoxy within media art practice, Xin Wei’s research not only speaks to the pedagogical aims of Critical Media Practices, but to the broader aims of working together with our peer practitioners in media, art, environment and technology across the university to collaborate as a mode of inquiry in itself, as much as one that may yield singular products.