In half of this exhibition, the now octogenarian Stephen Willats does the internet. A series of watercolour, text, and photographic collages map abstractions like search engines and social networks with the artist’s familiar arsenal of arrows and diagrams. He orders fragments of time, matter, and space into data packets on one side of the flow chart and puts them to use on the other. The most alluring of these images have no trace of the human. The currents are orderly and the possibilities are endless. None of this theory is true, of course, but it’s hard not to look.

The illusion is troubled by the rest of the show which reprises Willats’ hits from the 1970s. There, social practice meets semiotic analysis. The artist’s time-and-motion studies of homemaking, street life, and the corporate boardroom are celebrated as potent critiques of social relationships that play contrary to the exuberance of late capitalism. Unnervingly, the method of this inquiry is the same as in Willat’s network suite. This forces a reconsideration of the seminal work’s value as ‘data’ and foregrounds its form.