Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art

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.

Sharon Irish is a Research Affiliate in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 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 2013-16, 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.
sharonirish.org

List of figures Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: new functions for art practice in society A cybernetics primerCybernetics goes socialA social practice primerChapter overview 1. The Omni-Directional Artist Heuristic tools on the move< Control Magazine Homeostat diagramsCooperative decision-making: Visual Meta Language SimulationPedagogical processesMan from the Twenty-First Century 2. Modelling the Social Cognition ControlCentre for Behavioural ArtConstructing social resources and social modelsWest London Social Resource ProjectSocial modelling in EdinburghMeta FilterArt and social function 3. Mutually Bound Of concept framesFrom a Coded WorldA 'new reality'?Willats in east LondonSorting Out Other People's LivesInside an OceanArt for Whom? 4. The Art of Sociotechnical Systems Toward a 'depleted, disillusioned new reality'The Ideological TowerVertical LivingBrentford TowersArt creating society: curating the Oxford Symposium and the Mosaic SeriesPersonal Islands 5. Creativity in Self-Organization Participatory receptionWorking within a defined contextDefined context, social practice, and the multi-homeostat problemLiving with practical realitiesDo-It-Yourself (DIY) aesthetics'Objects of Creative Release'Back to the Wasteland 6. Open-Ended Urban Systems Middlesbrough and The TransformerMarble Arch to Oxford Circus, London: FreezoneSimulation in SheffieldSouth London: changing everythingA pivot in scale: data streamsOxford community data streamData stream portrait of London Conclusion: On Giving Up and Compromise Feedback and multiple futuresOpen systems and participationThinking with cyberneticsCompromise not compliance Notes Select Bibliography Index