Control. Stephen Willats. Work 1962 69 23 January to 30 March 2014, Raven Row London

22 x 28cm as new, shrinkwrapped exhibition catalogue. This is the first survey of work by Stephen Willats from the sixties. Willats (born and lives in London) was introduced to art as a teenage gallery assistant in 1958 and by 1962 was producing advanced artwork. He embraced the transdiscipli?n?arity of the time, juggling the roles of social scientist, engineer, designer and artist, and developed an art about social interaction, using models derived from cybernetics, the hybrid post-war science of communication. As well as the clothing and furniture made in 1965 when he briefly described himself as a conceptual designer , Willats s earliest sculptural series of Manual Variables is haptic and interactive. These are shown alongside early issues of Control, the still-operating magazine he founded in the same period. Its title is a provocation, invoking the cybernetic idea that people can take control of their environments, thereby deflecting the controls of a dominant hierarchy.