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.

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.

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. * Andrew Pickering, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Philosophy, Exeter University, UK *