Sharon Irish, Project Coordinator with the Center for Digital Inclusion, has received funding from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art  to return to the UK for research on her book project, Stephen Willats, 1970-2012: Coded Landscapes, Cybernetic Towers, and Urban Journeys.  She will be based in London for about six weeks in the spring of 2015, also working in archives in Middlesbrough and Oxford.

The cybernetically-informed art that Stephen Willats pioneered in urban settings across the U.K. bridged conceptual and computer art, multi-media and participatory projects, and time-based performances and planning critique. Long intrigued by the dynamics of human interaction, Willats provided structures in his art for self-organization of participants. Willats consistently questioned the roles of artists and audiences in relation to the social environments within which they lived. Reading widely in phenomenology, linguistics, communication and art theory, Willats absorbed and adapted ideas that he then used to construct machines and models for learning, challenging uni-directional thinking.