Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art: Experiments in Cybernetics and Society(Int. Lib. of Modern and Contemporary Art)

Sharon Irish’s 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 punk clubs, middle-class enclaves like Harrow, and warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, to investigate their current conditions and future possibilities. Irish’s study demonstrates the power of Willats’ 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:
TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgments i Introduction: New Functions for Art Practice in Society 1 Chapter One: Inputs and Outputs 17 Omni-Directional Artist 19 Control Magazine 21 Centre for Behavioural Art 21 Cognition Control 23 Decision-Making: Toward `Visual Meta-Language Simulation’ 23 Pedagogical Processes 27 Man from the Twenty-First Century 29 Modelling the Social 31 Social Modelling in Edinburgh 35 Meta Filter 38 Chapter Two: Mutually Bound 56 Of Concept Frames 57 From a Coded World 60 A `New Reality’? 62 Willats in East London 63 Sorting Out Other People’s Lives 64 Inside an Ocean 65 Chapter Three: The Art of Sociotechnical Systems 75 Toward a `Depleted, Disillusioned New Reality’ 75 The Ideological Tower 77 Vertical Living 79 Brentford Towers 83 Art Creating Society: Curating the Oxford Symposium and the Mosaic Series 87 Personal Islands 89 Chapter Four: Observing Everyday Systems 103 Participatory Reception 104 Working within a Defined Context 106 Social Practice, Defined Context, and the Multi-Homeostat Problem 108 Living with Practical Realities 109 Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Aesthetics 111 `Objects of Creative Release’ 116 Back to the Wasteland 118 Chapter Five: Open-Ended Urban Systems 128 Middlesbrough and The Transformer 128 Marble Arch to Oxford Circus, London: Freezone 130 Simulation in Sheffield 133 South London: Changing Everything 136 A Pivot in Scale: Data Streams 138 Conclusion: Compromise not Compliance 155 Sources 163 List of Illustrations 183

About the Author :
Sharon Irish is an Affiliated Lecturer at the School of Information Sciences, the University of Illinois. She is also a project coordinator in the Center for Digital Inclusion. Her research focuses on the intersections of urban and architectural space, contemporary art, systems and cybernetics. Since 2001, she has been an Advisory Editor for Technology and Culture, the international quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology. She obtained her PhD in Art History from NorthWestern University in 1985.