Mood Organ is a video projection work developed from O’Neill’s research around the reciprocal dynamic between viewers of popular media and the content they consume. Media such as films and TV often aim to connect with viewers emotionally, and information about what engages viewers becomes capital within media networks. When viewers respond emotionally they might be considered to be performing affective labour. Tears provoked by an emotive scene are evidence of this work within an affective economy. Fluids and information are linked within the body, which is in itself a conduit. O'Neill's video installation Mood Organ explores this analogous circuit of liquid, information and emotion, considering how emotional power is generated and circulated by media technology.

This work was first presented in the group exhibition ‘Line of Sight’, a show by Glasgow School of Art Design School staff Paul Maguire, James Houston, Kimberley O’Neill and Jen Sykes, presented in the Reid Gallery at GSA.  The exhibition explored the perceived role of communications technology, and what role we could be perceived to play in its future. The title of the exhibition, Line of Sight comes from a term used in the theory of radio transmission to describe when the receiving antenna is just able to see the transmitting antenna, with the works in the show exploring communication of perceptual information in tacit interactions and the psychological reproductions of circuits of information. The four artists open up a dialogue addressing both the contemporary and historical relationships to technology and how technology is perceived both as a device and a medium to work with.

(Exhibition text commissioned by Jenny Brownrigg)