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.

* A unique approach to architecture, modern buildings analysed by occupants * Demonstrates an art practice intervening actively in people's lives * Fascinating insight into Willats' 30-year career * Documents projects from cities including Berlin, London, New York

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.

"... Analyses of social forms of artistic production and descriptions of a number of projects by Willats. Along with the original text, this edition features archival images and a specially written introduction by the artist" -- from Occasional Papers website.

This is the first full-length study about the British artist Roy Ascott, one of the first cybernetic artists, with a career spanning seven decades to date. The book focuses on his early career, exploring the evolution of his early interests in communication in the context of the rich overlaps between art, science and engineering in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. The first part of the book looks at Ascott’s training and early work. The second park looks solely at Groundcourse, Ascott’s extraordinary pedagogical model for visual arts and cybernetics which used an integrative and systems-based model, drawing in behaviourism, analogue machines, performance and games. Using hitherto unpublished photographs and documents, this book will establish a more prominent place for cybernetics in post-war British art.

By the late 1960s cartographic formats and spatial information had become a regular feature in many conceptual artworks. This volume offers a rich study of conceptualisms’ mapping practices that includes more expanded forms of spatial representation. The book presents twelve in-depth case studies that address artists’ engagement with matters of space at a time when space was garnering new significance in art, theory and culture. The chapters shed fresh light on an evident ‘spatial turn’ that took place from the postwar to the contemporary period, revealing how it was influenced by larger historical, social and cultural contexts. In addition to raising questions about conceptualism’s relationship to the world, the contributors illustrate how artists’ cartographies served as critical sites for formulating their politics, upsetting prevailing systems and graphing new, heterogenous spaces.