‘The Omni Directional Search Engine Drawings revisit Willats’ early-1960s interest in “omni-directional thought” while deploying an extreme degree of abstraction reminiscent of his very earliest works.’ — John Kelsey

The Omni Directional Search Engine Drawings revisit Willats’ early-1960s interest in ‘omni-directional thought’ while deploying an extreme degree of abstraction reminiscent of his very earliest works. There is no other content in these drawings beyond colour, shape and line. The series also seems to depart from the linear sequences of Willats’ multi-channel data streams and the step-function logic of previous works. These new models have a more New-Age look, organised around a dominant circular form. Like a planet or a sun, the ‘engine’ emits concentric, vibrational pulses from a central energetic ground zero. Here, Willats models a ‘search’ that radiates outwards in all directions at once. These new diagrams could almost be psychedelic mandalas, visually not so far from Op Art. Erased or exploding clocks? Conceptually close to Willats’ Strange Attractor and Time Tumbler works in their speculative modelling of non-linear, multi-dimensional journeys, the Omni Directional Search Engine Drawings seem to model a new, freer way of moving within a network, a less predictive and more chaotic route from A to B…

The Omni Directional Search Engine Drawings seem to conceptualise a still-unrealised generative AI programme. As speculative applications of omni-directional thought, these works point the way to a coming computer network that learns to function at the level of human intuition, propelling us into revelatory future states. The dots in these diagrams might represent computers or humans or, more likely, a self-organising system that includes both. In conversation, Willats told me that the circle is like a ‘ball of thought’. Everything goes into it, and everything comes out – only differently. This AI will be biologically assisted. It will be community-controlled and operated, with everyone involved. And this is how we will conjure our most missing visions, as if pulling our future selves out of a black hole.