Micheál O'Connell / Mocksim
Where's the Algorithm?

Micheál O’Connell / Mocksim

Where’s the Algorithm?

20 October to 19 December 2026

Studio open to the public on Wednesday and Saturday

Critical tech. artist Mocksim’s plan is to locate all the algorithms he can find. They begin with Abū Ja‘far Muhammad ibn Mūsa al-Ḵwārizmī, inspired by Indian mathematics and the thousand-year-old Agnicayana ritual, pass through the likes of George Boole, Skibbereen’s Percy Ludgate, Donegal’s Kay McNulty, not to mention Katherine Johnson and the ‘Hidden Figures’ gang in the USA. Many now live inside AI, emails, maps, surveillance and nudging software. Others are not digital at all but appear as rules, routines, scripts and habits. People talk about algorithms all the time, but what, and where, are they? It’s time someone got on the case. No better man for the job than Mocksim!

Residency aims and objectives:
The residency will involve collecting algorithms, unpacking how they work, getting some of them running, and observing how something so abstract connects with lived experience.

Fit with wider practice:
The project connects directly to Mocksim’s long-standing interests in ‘systems interference’ and what he has described elsewhere as ‘artificial stupidity’. Algorithms are treated here not necessarily as metaphors or hidden forces but as operational systems that can be examined, tested, and misused. As with earlier projects, the emphasis is on working with existing structures rather than inventing new ones, and on paying attention to how digital flows, rule-based processes, laws and bureaucracies feed back on heavier physical reality and everyday life.

Public and community engagement:
The residency will include a talk, a walk, and potentially a workshop/class. The walk may focus on identifying algorithmic behaviour in the built environment. The workshop, to be developed during the residency, would most likely combine a discussion about everyday algorithms with a class on numerical methods, using calculus and second-order ordinary differential equations to explore feedback, stability, and change. Activities are intended to welcome both general audiences and those with specialist interests without avoiding complexity.

Biography
Finding the absurd in everyday, often dysfunctional technologies and systems, and messing around with them, are key activities. There is a performative aspect to the interventions. Afterwards Mocksim exhibits photographic and video material, selected digital or physical readymades. Past work was presented or performed in established locations (like Matt’s Gallery and the Whitechapel, London and Crawford/CiT Wandesford Quay in Cork); an early series Contra-Invention was part of Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles; and he often works with artist-run, project and off-site spaces.

An Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon Commissions Award facilitated the production of new work for a solo exhibition, System Interference, at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in 2022, which then travelled to Wexford Arts Centre and finally to Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, completing in February 2024. Philosopher of aesthetics John Roberts wrote a book addressing the significance of this work in the context of technology art generally, entitled Art, Misuse and Technology: Micheál O’Connell’s ‘System Interference’ (2022). Since 2025, new experiments, discussions and collaborations have generated further work.

Artist quote:

‘Deliberate or incidentally coded systems have existed long before computers. Algorithms are not confined to machines.’

mocksim.org

@mocksim

Image above: Have a great time. Cool! Grand. (2019), Digital, Typography and photo composite on corrugated plastic, 244 x 366 cm. Installed Skibbereen. Photo credit: John Halpin.

Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre acknowledges the financial support of The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon in making these residencies possible