Exploring How Meaning, Movement, and Knowledge Organize Across Minds, Bodies, and Systems
I study how people learn, adapt, and coordinate — whether through movement, dialogue, rhythm, or collaborative inquiry. My work focuses on the interaction between lived experience, representational structure, and information change, and on understanding how clarity emerges when familiar questions are reframed, and how confusion dissolves when structure becomes visible.
I am an independent researcher, educator, and co-founder of danceScape — a community where movement builds confidence, connection, and resilience.
Across all of my work — from dance and teaching to artificial intelligence and physics — I investigate a single recurring failure mode:
Systems rarely break because they lack capability.
They break because coordination collapses when scale, speed, or abstraction increases.
Much of my research is concerned with diagnosing when confusion, paradox, or breakdown arises from representational mismatch — specifically, when:
- scalar descriptions (quantity, speed, accumulation)
are applied to - phase-dominant phenomena (coordination, rhythm, boundary alignment, coherence over time)
When this mismatch occurs, systems can remain technically correct while becoming experientially incoherent.
This diagnostic perspective underlies the Tang Papers — an open, citable collection of working papers and public essays that examine how representational mismatch, time, and coordination produce coherence, breakdown, and reorganization across domains. The work is intentionally organized to make critical distinctions visible before naming tools for applying them. Collectively, the Tang Papers form an open, independent research program focused on diagnosing representational and coordination failures across scientific, technical, and human systems, using a framework called Phase–Scalar Reconstruction (PSR).
Everything else on this page — biography, dance, AI, physics, and organizational experience — is context for how that diagnostic lens was formed, tested, and refined.
My Journey
From my early training in mathematics and business to a life shaped by dance, embodiment, and cross-domain curiosity, my path has been less about specialization and more about integration.
I began with formal study in mathematics (B.Sc., McMaster University) and business (MBA, Schulich School of Business). This analytical foundation later informed how I approached learning, communication, and systems across very different contexts.
Before founding danceScape and pursuing independent research, I spent nearly a decade working in marketing and communications within the software industry. My role involved translating complex technical ideas into press releases, trade-magazine articles, marketing literature, and public-facing narratives — often across organizational, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.
Having grown up in Malaysia and later emigrated to Canada, I navigated multiple linguistic and representational contexts early in life: Cantonese, Hakka, and British English in childhood; Canadian English and French in school; and later American English through cross-border corporate work. Some of these fluencies have faded with time — much like my early classical piano training at the Royal Conservatory of Music, which remains conceptually understood but no longer accessible through performance.
These experiences sharpened my awareness of how meaning persists, transforms, or disappears depending on context, timing, and representation — an awareness that continues to shape both my teaching and research.
During my competitive ballroom career, I also worked on the early digital infrastructure for provincial and national DanceSport organizations in Canada, at a time when competitive ballroom dancing was actively seeking Olympic recognition. That effort ultimately stalled amid broader controversies surrounding judged sports — particularly in the wake of high-profile scandals in figure skating during the 1980s and 1990s. Being close to those debates sharpened my sensitivity to the limits of formal scoring, the tension between qualitative judgment and quantitative legitimacy, and the representational challenges that arise when human performance resists clean measurement.
Alongside this, I have been a lifelong observer of competitive sport, especially tennis — from the contrasting styles of the Borg–McEnroe era and the Evert–Navratilova era through the modern generations of Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Alcaraz and today’s emerging athletes. Recreational play and long-term spectatorship reinforced an intuitive appreciation for timing, anticipation, and rhythm under pressure.
In business, these sensibilities converged during the early email era of the 1990s, when seed funding enabled me to leave corporate software marketing and found danceScape — an inflection point that further shaped my interest in non-linear decision-making, alignment, and opportunity.
Over time, this work led me to questions that sit at the edges of multiple domains:
- Why do people struggle to find rhythm — even though they already coordinate speech and movement every day?
- Why do familiar problems feel harder when we treat them as quantities instead of structures?
- How does dialogue — between people, or between humans and machines — reflect deeper patterns of anticipation and alignment?
These questions became the seeds of my current research agenda.
Dance, Teaching, and Community
Together with my wife and business partner, Beverley Cayton-Tang, I have had the privilege of helping thousands of learners discover confidence through movement.
Our work has been grounded in:
- Ballroom and Latin dance instruction
- Practice parties and social dance events
- Wedding dance coaching
- danceTONE cardio fitness
- danceFLOW qigong / tai chi training
Our work has been featured in national and international media, including television, wellness programming, and public movement initiatives. What matters most to us, however, is not visibility — but the people who show up, try again, laugh, and discover something new about themselves.
danceScape remains a living community where rhythm becomes confidence, movement becomes resilience, and learning becomes belonging.
Independent Research & Inquiry
Alongside this lived practice, since October 2025 I have pursued independent, non-institutional research into how representation, temporal structure, and coordination inform learning, cognition, and collaborative inquiry.
Collectively, this work forms part of an independent Phase–Scalar research program — published as open-access preprints — that constitutes the research backbone of the Tang Papers.
Key research contributions include:
- Rhythm–Information Time Principle (RITP) — a framework for understanding time as observer-dependent rhythmic grouping of information change
- Phase–Scalar Reconstruction (PSR) — a diagnostic method for identifying representational mismatch across domains
- Boundary-Augmented Phase–Scalar Reconstruction (PSR-B) — a physics-restricted diagnostic audit protocol for isolating representational sources of apparent contradiction
Importantly:
- These frameworks are descriptive and methodological, not claims about physical ontology
- PSR-B is compatible with formal physics reasoning but does not propose new physical laws
For complete access to publications and citations, visit the research archive.
A Note on Timing
The consolidation of this research program coincided with a significant personal transition. My father passed away on October 28, 2025, and the weeks that followed — while preparing for his Celebration of Life on December 12 — became a period of unusual clarity and integration.
Long-standing interests in learning, coordination, representation, and time did not originate in this moment. Rather, they converged and stabilized during it. The work presented here reflects that consolidation — not as an emotional response, but as a structural alignment that made the trajectory of inquiry unmistakable.
A Note on Philosophy
I believe that many breakdowns in understanding — across learning, collaboration, decision-making, and communication — arise not from lack of information, but from how information is represented and coordinated.
Shifts in framing often unlock insight faster than the accumulation of data.
This perspective has grown out of both lived practice and disciplined inquiry. It is quietly practical, deeply human, and intentionally modest in claim.
Clarification of Scope
References to lived practice, movement, or teaching experience describe how questions were formed and tested in real-world settings. Formal research claims, methods, and diagnostics are published independently as open-access preprints and are evaluated on their own methodological grounds. No inference from embodied practice to technical or scientific conclusions is implied.
Research Context
Formal research papers and citations associated with this work are curated separately at robert-tang.com/research
Let’s Continue the Conversation
I’m interested in collaboration with:
- researchers in cognitive science, AI, and systems theory
- educators and curriculum designers
- technologists exploring human–machine coordination
- writers and storytellers interested in how knowledge forms
Please reach out via email: