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

Description

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. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: New Functions for Art Practice in Society A Cybernetics Primer Cybernetics Goes Social A Social Practice Primer Chapter Overview Chapter 1: The Omnidirectional Artist Heuristic Tools on the Move Homeostat Diagrams Cooperative Decision-Making: Visual Meta Language Simulation Pedagogical Processes Man from the Twenty-First Century Chapter 2: Modeling the Social Cognition Control Centre for Behavioural Art Constructing Social Resources and Social Models Art and Social Function Chapter 3: Mutually Bound Of Concept Frames From a Coded World A “New Reality”? Willats in East London Chapter 4: The Art of Sociotechnical Systems Toward a “Depleted, Disillusioned New Reality” “Art Creating Society”: Curating the Oxford Symposium and the Mosaic Series Responsive-Ability in East London Chapter 5: Creativity in Self-Organization Participatory Reception Defined Context, Social Practice, and the Multi-Homeostat Problem Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Aesthetics “Objects of Creative Release” Back to the Wasteland Chapter 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 Conclusion: On Giving Up and Compromise Feedback and Multiple Futures Open Systems and Participation Thinking with Cybernetics Compromise Not Compliance Notes Bibliography Index