Stephen Willats is a conceptual artist who has pioneered ideas about the role and position of art since the 1960s, tackling themes that remain topical today, such as communication, social engagement, participation, co-creation, and self-management.
Willats couldn’t relate to the notion of art as based on a single object or person. He felt that the canon of art and artists circulating among the elite of the day had become too detached from society. Art that overlooked the public mind was created and exhibited in a way inaccessible to them, bored him. He found it lacklustre and uninspiring.
The evolution of his oeuvre resembles a timeline on which various pieces are, in fact, the testimonies or results of an investigation into the relationships between people, buildings, and urban settings. Willats marshals methods from cybernetics, e.g. feedback and the control of information flows within organic and mechanical systems. He also distilled his aesthetic vocabulary, working method and formal model from cybernetics. In the past, Willats called himself a conceptual designer to emphasise his work as an artist. At the time, his works were mainly viewed as practical tools. The public had to be able to interfere with his works, to modify them according to personal taste and discretion. 

Continue reading here the full biographical text written by Dirk Elst.