Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art: Experiments in Cybernetics and Society

Longlisted for the Historians of British Art (HBA) Book Prize 2022 This book on Stephen Willats pulls together key strands of his practice and threads them through histories of British cybernetics, experimental art, and urban design. For Willats, a cluster of concepts about control and feedback within living and machine systems (cybernetics) offered a new means to make art relevant. For decades, Willats has built relationships through art with people in tower blocks, underground clubs, middle-class enclaves, and warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, to investigate their current conditions and future possibilities. Sharon Irish’s study demonstrates the power of Willats’s multi-media art to catalyze communication among participants and to upend ideas about “audience” and “art.” Here, Irish argues that it is artists like Willats who are now the instigators of social transformation.

Table of Contents:
List of figures Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: new functions for art practice in society A cybernetics primer Cybernetics goes social A social practice primer Chapter overview 1. The Omni-Directional Artist Heuristic tools on the move < Control Magazine Homeostat diagrams Cooperative decision-making: Visual Meta Language Simulation Pedagogical processes Man from the Twenty-First Century 2. Modelling the Social Cognition Control Centre for Behavioural Art Constructing social resources and social models West London Social Resource Project Social modelling in Edinburgh Meta Filter Art and social function 3. Mutually Bound Of concept frames From a Coded World A ‘new reality’? Willats in east London Sorting Out Other People’s Lives Inside an Ocean Art for Whom? 4. The Art of Sociotechnical Systems Toward a ‘depleted, disillusioned new reality’ The Ideological Tower Vertical Living Brentford Towers Art creating society: curating the Oxford Symposium and the Mosaic Series Personal Islands 5. Creativity in Self-Organization Participatory reception Working within a defined context Defined context, social practice, and the multi-homeostat problem Living with practical realities Do-It-Yourself (DIY) aesthetics ‘Objects of Creative Release’ Back to the Wasteland 6. Open-Ended Urban Systems Middlesbrough and The Transformer Marble Arch to Oxford Circus, London: Freezone Simulation in Sheffield South London: changing everything A pivot in scale: data streams Oxford community data stream Data stream portrait of London Conclusion: On Giving Up and Compromise Feedback and multiple futures Open systems and participation Thinking with cybernetics Compromise not compliance Notes Select Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Sharon Irish is a Research Affiliate in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. From 2001 to 2020, she served as an Advisory Editor for Technology and Culture, the international quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology and, from 2013 to 2016, as an organizer for FemTechNet. She has published a monograph on the U.S. architect Cass Gilbert and another book on the California-based feminist artist Suzanne Lacy. She received her Ph.D. in art history from Northwestern University in 1985.

Review :
Change and exchange—Sharon Irish has given us an insightful, nuanced and sympathetic account of Stephen Willats’s cybernetic art and social practice, growing from the maelstrom of the 1960s to the present, unsettling the balance of present and future, artist and participants, galleries and worlds along the way.