(Interactive Kinetic Installation, forschungascampus dahlem, Berlin, 2025 – developed from earlier version, Milton Keynes, 2018) texts, carbon fibre, plastic, steel, chain and gears, wood.

Participants crank a handle, moving a complex constellation of sculptures made from book pages.

The video (below) tells you a bit about the work. I’m trying to grapple with the extremes of both individualism and collectivism, and our failure to balance them, as well as commodification, particularly of the self.

It builds on the themes of the earlier version (2018), which centred upon the individual’s role as a consumer, and our vulnerability to manipulation into unwitting participation in wider systems.

However, in the latter version, toxic individualism is recast as the commodification of identity itself. It tries to tackle our weird present symbiosis of ultra-individualism with authoritarian ultra-collectivism.

Both versions touch (with a degree of cynicism) on some of the complexity surrounding socially-engaged art, because the artist somewhat tricks the audience into taking part.

Please consider the 2025 iteration as the definitive version.

I regard the newer, 2025 rendition as more mature work, because it’s less didactic, allowing openness for nuance and complexity.  

I started playing with these ideas initially in 2017 and prototyped a small version as part of  Dark Games at ArtOmi. I then received an Arts Council England grant to develop it into a fully-realized interactive installation, shown in 2018 in Milton Keynes Library, (More about this version of the piece below.)

I also held a sold-out event in association with the exhibition, in which I spoke about consumer capitalism and Dr. Jason Hickel talked about economic degrowth. (There is much here that is pertinent and incisive, yet also some of what I said feels anachronistic – even a few years later the world is a vastly different place, and the growth of my own wisdom and values in the interim makes something in the sensibility feel distant to me now.). You can watch the event in its entirety below, or you can hear me talk about the piece specifically at 4m 44s.

About the 2018 iteration:

The Constantly Moving Happiness Machine was conceived as a sort of enacted metaphor for the individual’s relationship to, and participation within, global consumer capitalism. It explores our role – particularly the grey area of consent – as consumers.

Participants are seduced by the artist into turning the crank because they are charmed by the motion of the pleasing objects – a desire is gratified, just as it is when buying things we want.

At the same time the participant is unknowingly part of something more sinister – animating a wider machine. The books from which the pretty things are constructed are ideological texts whose ideas underpin market fundamentalism (mostly Ayn Rand texts).

I’m fascinated by the tacit consent we give to our subconscious being manipulated by advertising and PR, shaping us into compliant consumers. In essence, the artist is tricking the participant to take part in a consensual colonization of their subconscious.

I was particularly fascinated by the moment around the ‘20s, as described in Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self, where a deliberate and cynical decision was made to use the ideas of Freud to manipulate us into subconsciously attaching desires to objects we didn’t need, in order to create a consumer-driven economy.

The title comes from a speech by President Hoover in 1928, addressing a group of newly-minted ad- and PR-men: “You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines. Machines which have become the key to economic progress.”

Paul Mazur, Lehman Brothers (bank), 1927: “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America – man’s desires must overshadow his needs”

Freud’s Nephew, Edward Bernays, coined the term ‘Public Relations’: “I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. (And) Propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it, so what I did was try to find some other words so we found the words ‘Counsel on Public Relations’”.

With thanks to Clive Doherty, Ellie Stout, Michelle Herriman, Dr. Jason Hickel, Rosemary Hill, Ewan Hutcheson, Kevin McConway, and Adam Curtis.