Happiness Engine questions the legacy of religion. Taking the form of an on-street secular confessional, the project allows the public to experience confession in a neutral space, thereby making evident the conceptual architecture that Catholicism inscribes, such as ‘the soul’, and provoking a re-examination of the use and value of this architecture in contemporary society. The idea is to facilitate an exploration of ways of thinking that are hidden in plain sight while relieving the psychological burdens these ways of thinking are sometimes partly responsible for. The work is not adopting an explicitly critical position in relation to religion, Catholicism, or the ritual of confession. Rather, as well as looking at how ideas about the soul remain implicit, and what these ideas do, the project is also concerned with the value of the idea of a soul and what is lost when faith in the divine is abandoned.

Happiness Engine will be piloted at Body&Soul Festival in Ireland in 2022. The installation will be created by Fionn Brookes and Peter Montgomery and the booth will be staffed by trained psychologists.