Stephen Willats: Meeting of Minds

Softcover | 14.7 x 21 cm | 28 pp

Control Magazine | 2006 

This booklet documents the making of the work, Meeting of Minds, developed during 2005 with residents of the Sefton Park Tower Blocks in Liverpool. The work was then presented in the foyers of the buildings in which they lived.

The primary audience of the work were residents in the Sefton Park estate, and so the work was referenced to the language and meaning of the surrounding environment as seen by the residents themselves. To achieve this connection a small group of residents, a symbolic group, were to be actively involved in developing the language and meaning of the work. The location for presenting the work was to be the foyers of the very tower blocks that residents lived in, so the connection with the surrounding familiar environment was an important one in motivating attention and helping access to what was displayed there as people came in and out of the blocks.

The work asked its audience to transform their perception of everyday reality with its associated set functions and attached pre-determined meanings, and to create a parallel reality of an imagined self organised meaning. A symbolic journey that started at the base of a central tower block and then went into the adjoining Sefton Park wandering along various paths, past well known landmarks such as a bandstand, small zoo, statue of Eros etc. leading to the Palm House. This was to be a journey that all the participants in the symbolic group would take, using a super 8 cine camera and a simple photographic camera to record items, signs, objects etc. that they could transform into something else.

Stephen Willats
Since the early 1960s, Stephen Willats has situated his pioneering practice at the intersection between art and other disciplines such as cybernetics, advertising systems research, learning theory, communications theory and computer technology. In so doing, he has constructed and developed a collaborative, interactive and participatory practice grounded in the variables of social relationships, settings and physical realities.