Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art

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.

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.

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