‘Whatever moves, connects. Whatever connects, changes. And it’s when the time tumbler, attractor or some other function sways or warps planned or predictive channelling of information that connectivity becomes truly exponential and weird.’ — John Kelsey

In single-panel works such as Language Islands and At the Crossroads, Willats exchanges the sun-like circle of the Omni Directional Search Engine Drawings for a big X of crossed data streams. Circularity is not missing in these models, however: clockwise and counterclockwise movements are indicated by arrows floating outside the diagram’s central X. Each ‘crossroads’ is composed of many flowing and interconnected coloured dots. And, where the two channels cross in the middle, we see increased communication between the dots, new connections being made. The flow of data represented in these works proposes a meta language that might emerge in communication and intermixing between ‘language islands’.

But, in another drawing from the same year, The Reconnection, instead of forming a crossroads, the two data streams run parallel to each other, with a time tumbler positioned between the isolated flows. Here, increased interconnectivity results from a data stream’s proximity to the time tumbler, where the flows respond to its nearby energy or communicating influence. In both schemes, it’s where the A to B routes are disrupted that complexity increases. Whatever moves, connects. Whatever connects, changes. And it’s when the time tumbler, attractor or some other function sways or warps planned or predictive channelling of information that connectivity becomes truly exponential and weird. Wherever movement within the model becomes available to the time tumbler’s sway, we see connectivity as it ‘could be’. Images of monolithic city architecture, meanwhile, form a schematic backdrop to the abstract network, like an archaeological layer representing a time when social life was still contained by brute urban planning. But, of course, the new networks are also planned. – John Kelsey