Simulated Walks and Coded Landscapes: Stephen Willats' "Freezone"

Research Affiliate Sharon Irish will present "Simulated Walks and Coded Landscapes: Stephen Willats' 'Freezone.'"

My book, Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art: Experiments in Cybernetics and Society, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2021. Willats’ social practice art aimed to create frameworks in which people could cooperate and come to agreement. Willats’ 1997 “Freezone” was a computer-mediated installation that simulated a walk along Oxford Street, a busy shopping area in central London. Pre-pandemic Oxford Street was packed with all sorts of people, signage, buildings, traffic, and urban furniture. Willats organized about a dozen colleagues to capture images, audio recordings, and texts as they walked along sections of the route. Each collaborator had a different device—Super 8 camera, tape recorder, video camera, pencil and paper—to collect varied impressions. Willats then created grids of imagery and text to provide context for the place (Oxford Street) while people interacted with his installation and tried to agree on codes (descriptive terms) for various fictional scenarios. Willats' work had several parts: the kiosks in front of which people stood each held a computer processor and monitor, along with a keypad for selecting words listed on the panels to each side of the kiosks. A light box on the far wall tracked the joint progress as the operators (as the participants were called) collaborated to move together in the simulated walk. The walk only "progressed" if the operators agreed on what was occurring in the grids displayed on the computer screens. Giving a nod to the title of his work, Willats wrote: “The work provides a territory which is mutual, and free for participants to explore the potential of the transformations and exchanges between them.” “Freezone” was intended to help people consider the massive information inputs that swirled around them in the city.

Questions? Contact Gaozheng Liu