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.

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.

Douments two of Willat's large scale projects, one in West London, the other in Edinburgh.

Grant Kester discusses the disparate network of artists & collectives united by a desire to create new forms of understanding through creative dialogue that crosses boundaries of race, religion, & culture.

The essays in this collection explore the extraordinarily rich networks of international artists and art practices that emerged in and around London during the 1960s and ’70s, a period that saw an explosion of new media and fresh attitudes and approaches to making and thinking about art. The contributors to London Art Worlds examine the many activities and movements that existed alongside more established institutions in this period, from the rise of cybernetics and the founding of alternative publications to the public protests and new pedagogical models in London’s art schools. The essays explore how international artists and the rise of alternative venues, publications, and exhibitions, along with a growing mobilization of artists around political and cultural issues ranging from feminism to democracy, pushed the boundaries of the London art scene beyond the West End’s familiar galleries and posed a radical challenge to established modes of making and understanding art. Engaging, wide-ranging, and original, London Art Worlds provides a necessary perspective on the visual culture of the London art scene in the 1960s and ’70s. Art historians and scholars of the era will find these essays especially valuable and thought provoking. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Elena Crippa, Antony Hudek, Dominic Johnson, Carmen Juliá, Courtney J. Martin, Lucy Reynolds, Joy Sleeman, Isobel Whitelegg, and Andrew Wilson.

Often controversial and sometimes even shocking to audiences, the work of California-based artist Suzanne Lacy has challenged viewers and participants with personal accounts of traumatic events, settings that require people to assume uncomfortable positions, multisensory productions that evoke emotional as well as intellectual responses, and even flayed lambs and beef kidneys. Lacy has experimented with ways to claim the power of mass media, to use women’s consciousness-raising groups as a performance structure, and to connect her projects to lived experiences. The body and large groups of bodies are the locations for her lifelike art, revealing the aesthetics of relationships among people. In this critical examination of Suzanne Lacy, Sharon Irish surveys Lacy’s art from 1972 to the present, demonstrating the pivotal roles that Lacy has had in public art, feminist theory, and community organizing. Lacy initially used her own body—or animal organs—to visually depict psychological states or social conditions in photographs, collages, and installations. In the late 1970s she turned to organizing large groups of people into art events—including her most famous work,The Crystal Quilt, a 1987 performance broadcast live on PBS and featuring hundreds of women in Minneapolis—and pioneered a new genre of public art. Irish investigates the spaces between art and life, self and other, and the body and physical structures in Lacy’s multifaceted artistic projects, showing how throughout her influential career Lacy has created art that resists racism, promotes feminism, and explores challenging human relationships.

Annotation Telematic Embrace combines a provocative collection of writings from 1964 to the present by the preeminent artist and art theoretician Roy Ascott, with a critical essay by Edward Shanken that situates Ascott's work within a history of ideas in art, technology, and philosophy.