The Performance of Information Flows in the Art of Stephen Willats

In the 1970s artist Stephen Willats wanted to explore participation and interaction within an art context. He viewed participation and interaction as ways to help those involved in art gain control of their environments. With that in mind, he created the means to collect, sort, code, process, and use data to foster exchanges, essentially performing information flows using computers to help examine social systems. Willats expanded his art beyond any particular fixed object to stress the process of change. Meta Filter and the Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project enacted exchanges of information among groups, instantiating Willats’s cybernetic way of thinking.