This notion of self-respon­si­bility meant that the artist would need a model of practice where there was an inter­con­nec­tion between the audience, the language, the meaning, the inten­tion, and the context and presen­ta­tion. This meant that the strate­gies that the artist employed, or should we say, the artwork, was a result of the inter­con­nec­tions between these things. When you think about, it the audience is more impor­tant than the artist. It was that real­iza­tion which I had about 1958 when I was devel­oping my first models of feedback. The artist was in a rela­tion­ship with someone else, the audience, and it was the audience that created the vali­da­tion—well it actually created the exis­tence of the work of art.

According to Anthony Hudek, “It is … Control’s function as a self-deter­mining infor­ma­tion network, instead of its content, that makes it truly cyber­netic”: while being about networks, the magazine also repre­sents a network in itself. Willats’ choice of title, Control, signals this depar­ture from tradi­tional models of edito­rial authority, seeking instead to develop a concep­tual practice deter­mined by the networked rela­tion­ships of coor­di­nating agents. Artists’ publishing served as a key means of actu­al­izing these ideas. The magazine has always been self-published, self-funded, and free of adver­tising, while also attaining a broadly inter­na­tional reach.