Sha Xin Wei
PhD Mathematics Stanford 2001, Synthesis founding director (2014-), TML founding director (2001-2013), Canada Research Chair in New Media (first art CRC in Canada, 2005-2013), founded and led Interaction and Media Group Stanford Humanities Center (1995-1998), sponge art group, and Pliant Research (from Apple Research Group, Xerox PARC). Sha’s creative and theoretical work concerns topological approaches to poiesis, play and process. With TML and Synthesis he has pioneered responsive environments for ethico-aesthetic improvisation, gestural & movement-based realtime timebased media informed by critical studies of technology and and process philosophy. Sha’s career at Stanford in the 1980’s and 90’s includes serving as the first generation programmer and project lead for the Lisa and Macintosh computer (inventing the first object-oriented ecosystem simulation combining lattice and agent-based model, first color applications, first Chinese and Sign Language / hypermedia + interactive video, and the Mediaweaver distributed multimedia system), human-computer system architect, and on the Mathematica Advisory Board of Wolfram Research.
Oana Suteu Khintirian
With over twenty years of experience in filmmaking, from editing to writing and directing, Oana Suteu Khintirian is a well versed experimentalist and researcher who uses cinematic modes of thought to further human knowledge. Her research-creation projects encompass academic writing and creative work crossing path with the humanities and sciences. Rooted in the artistic practice, but informed by khintirian’s scientific and mathematical education, her creative and reflective work draw a tightly interwoven portrayal of a world animated by movement and governed by change.
Todd Ingalls
Todd Ingalls is a media composer who works with interactive performance and experiential media systems. He is currently Professor of Research and Assistant Director of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University where he also serves as Assistant Director. His research focuses on gestural communication and embodied media interaction, affect in music, and algorithmic media composition as well as novel mediated environments for stroke and Parkinson’s disease rehabilitation. He is involved with Synthesis Center and the Mixed Reality Rehabilitation group at AME.
Omar Faleh
Omar AL Faleh is a responsive media designer and developer with a background in architecture, arts, and computer science. Omar’s work is focused on designing playful, engaging, performative, and immersive media spaces where interaction is neither scripted nor assumed, and media is constantly reinterpreting the definitions of space and body. His work range from building interactive installations, to media scenography for theatre and dance, and media design for interactive exhibition spaces.Omar’s affiliations include the Topological Media Lab and Hexagram at Concordia University, the Synthesis center at Arizona State University, and currently the MAGNET research space at New York University. His work was shown at The Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts, Place des Arts, and the Canadian Olympic Commission in Montreal. He also worked on pieces that were shown at the Today’s Arts festival in the Netherlands, The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Arizona State University theatre.
Julian Stein
Julian Stein is a media-artist based in Los Angeles, CA who creates performances and installations that examine cross-modal relationships between the sonic and the visual, primarily through expressions of sound, video, and light. His work focuses on intuition and present experience, demonstrating musical applications of the everyday in both composed and realtime environments.
Elizaveta Solomonova
Elizaveta is an interdisciplinary cognitive scientist focusing on sleep, dreaming, contemplative studies and social neuroscience. She has completed her M.Sc. in Psychology and her Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy at the University of Montreal under the supervision of Dr. Tore Nielsen and Dr. Sha Xin Wei. She has worked at the Center for Advanced Research for Sleep Medicine and at Concordia University’s Topological Media Lab. Elizaveta is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychiatry at McGill University where she works on sleep, delusions and epigenetics, and on neurophilosophy of social cognition and contemplative experience. She is also an affiliated research scientist at the YHouse, a New-York based interdisciplinary institute for study of mind.
Nina Bouchard
Nina Bouchard is a multidisciplinary artist living in Montreal. Over the last years, she has been seeking to illustrate what surrounds her through the photography, video and writing. Her photos and videos, often abstract, suggest silhouettes, reflected landscapes that express a nostalgic universe. Her writing explores similar worlds where words, sounds, images and emotions are refined, in a constant search for the essence of things. This approach aims to capture a moment, to extract a frame, a word or an image that suggest more than show.