Mocksim's Work

Gavin Buckley speaks with Systems Interference Artist Micheál O'Connell about his background with art as well as his latest pursuits.

Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre Podcast: Micheál O'Connell

Background:

It turns out that it is possible to use supermarket self-checkout machines to buy nothing. The artist interacted frequently with the machines in this way during a three month period. Over one hundred of the receipts, recording these non-transactions, were collected. This is a recording of one interaction.

See also:
Film: https://vimeo.com/126480392
Book: http://artsproducts.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/less.html
Audio: https://soundcloud.com/mocksim/self-checkout-interaction

Self Checkout Interaction (Long)

Contemporary art relies on an expansionist, modernist ideal and still progresses through a critique of earlier forms of democratisation. But beneath this democratic drive, lurks a creeping crisis. Under neoliberalism, criticality has become a zone of value production. A self-deprecating irony, exposing and re-enacting this position of impotence, is one of the few gestures left in the arsenal of critical art. Against this irony, this book pits overidentification. This term has been taken to mean a kind of parodic mimicry of institutional power. Using a broad tapestry of sources, from political philosophers to art theorists, from post-Marxist critiques of labour to ethnographic studies, it proposes an interpretation of overidentification that does not collapse into ironic posturing. The authors differentiate this from bad faith flirting with taboo aesthetics by focusing on practices grounded in a genuine identification with power that ushers the kind of excess implied by overidentification. It is these forms of overidentification that destabilise the metastasis of liberal-democracy. Staging forms of critique not so readily absorbed into the structure of the present, these subversive performances herald a future beyond the democratic paradox.

Larne Abse Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London. She works as a lecturer in History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She is the author of What We Do Is Secret Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (2023) and Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (2022). She has published in journals and magazines including Art Monthly, New Socialist, Tate Papers, Third Text, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.
 
John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton and leader of the Research Cluster ‘Art Philosophy and Social Practice’. His books include Photography and its Violations, (2014); Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, (2015); and The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech, 2002).
 
Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London-based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. They are the authors of Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and Sound Strategies: Music as Ideological Apparatus (forthcoming, Strange Attractor | MIT, 2025). They work as lecturers in Art at University of the Arts London, the University of Reading and the Royal College of Art.

Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital Book Launch

Recording of a short exchange with one supermarket staff member who was trying to help. They wanted to confiscate a receipt which had been obtained through use of the newly installed self-checkout machines to buy nothing. 'There's nothing on it?'

See also:
Film: https://vimeo.com/126480392
Book: http://artsproducts.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/less.html
Audio: https://soundcloud.com/mocksim/self-checkout-1

Transcription:

Can I keep that?
Yes you may.
There's nothing on it.
I know yea.
It's quite interesting to see a zero.
Okay?

There's Nothing on it?

For the past four decades, politician and activist Mick Barry has done things his way - informing his approach to politics, and life in general, has been a keen and wide-ranging interest in music of all sorts, from growing up listening to glam rock, punk and new wave, to a life spent among counter-cultural figures in Ireland and further afield.

Mick Barry - The Mick Barry Radio Hour - Episode 1

Compilation of songs from "A Cow in the Water". Find us on Facebook...   https://www.facebook.com/acowinthewater/

Sneeze

Peg Or Two

Hector

Rasher

Program saved onto cassette for ZX81, way back

ZX81 Example

A discussion between Huw Bartlett and Micheál O'Connell (recorded on their mobile phones) about Joseph Young's exhibition The End of Listening in 2011.  Transcription of part of it here: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/1051236 

Joseph Young Review 26 Jan 2011

John Peel pronouncing Micheál

Welcome to Furtherfield's new podcast - a cultural discussion grounded in news from where we are

When the lockdown hit the UK a couple of weeks ago we asked contributors and lurkers on Furtherfield's Netbehavour email discussion list how they were doing.

We received reports from every continent and this inspired us to create this podcast. Some of them have record their reports for us too and we will hear from them in a minute.

All of this reminded us that while we may be confined to our homes by the Coronavirus emergency we still have access to thriving networked cultures from around the world. So this podcast is a conversation with many voices from the ground to explore how the collaborative-imaginative fieldwork of artists, techies and activists is informing how we organise, imagine and build solidarity, good health and post-capitalist realities. Working together and supporting others to do the same.

This new podcast includes your news from where you are, interviews, reviews, readings to explore how people want to live in our globally-connected world now. 

It includes news from Helen Varley Jamieson, Rob Myers, Isabelle Arvers, Tacira and Edward Picot; conversations between myself and Cassie Thornton, and Ruth Catlow and Cade Diehm, an audio essay by Jaya Klara Brekke, a review by Regine Debatty and a Poem by Jeremy Hight.

Sounds from Ouch Those Monkeys, Ethernet Orchestra, Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter, Luke Damrosch, Stewart Home. 

Cover Art by Sajan Rai - for The Treaty of Finsbury Park

https://www.furtherfield.org/news-from-where-we-are-the-furtherfield-podcast/


Contributors' Links

Cade Diehm and Ruth Catlow
https://newdesigncongress.org 
https://furtherfield.org  
https://newdesigncongress.org/library/NEWDESIGNCONGRESS-20190410-The-Treaty-of-Finsbury-Park-2025.pdf

Cassie Thornton 
https://feministeconomicsdepartment.com
https://thehologram.xyz

Edward Picot 
https://drhairy.org

Helen Varley Jamieson 
https://creative-catalyst.com 
https://upstage.org.nz

Isabelle Arvers
https://isabellearvers.com

Jaya Klara Brekke 
https://jayapapaya.net 
https://distributingchains.info

Jeremy Hight 
https://instagram.com/jeremy_hight

Régine Debatty 
https://we-make-money-not-art.com/about

Rob Myers 
https://robmyers.org

Tacira - Support public health workers and videomakers in the front line of Covid-19 in Brazil.
https://apoie.bombozila.com/projetos/nafiladosus https://https://vimeo.com/401500909


SOUNDS

Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter, Luke Damrosch 
https://discogs.com/Alan-Sondheim-Azure-Carter-Luke-Damrosch-LIMIT/release/9945452

Antonio Roberts 
https://hellocatfood.com

Ethernet Orchestra
https://ethernetorchestra.net/

Stewart Home 
https://stewarthomesociety.org

News From Where We Are #1

Misguided meditation. Denise Kehoe

Mocksim Radio Interview Cork October 2012

John Peel pronouncing Micheál

Mocksim

Related tracks