My name is Mark O’Connor. It’s the name I was given, born into — but it’s not the name I create under.

There are already Mark O’Connors established and building reputations in music, poetry, and visual art. To keep that name would be to risk confusing identities, and losing signal. I needed something distinct — not to erase myself, but to make my practice legible on its own terms.

So I renamed myself mo.sys, a system file.

It sounds minimal, but the reference is dense. “mo” are my initials but also reference modus operandi, a method, a pattern, a signature approach. In computing, .sys files are system files — hidden by default. They’re foundational. These are the drivers, the boot loaders, the core instructions that tell an operating system how to behave, how to boot, how to communicate with the outside world — keyboards, displays, audio, memory. They sit deep in the system. Often overlooked. But remove the wrong one, and the whole thing collapses.

That’s the metaphor.

My work interrogates systems: how we move through them, how they structure experience, how they fail or enslave or endure. Political systems. Media systems. Ritual systems. Naming myself mo.sys puts that interest front and centre. It turns the artist’s name into a file path — an instruction set, a ghost in the machine.

There’s also a more human echo. Phonetically, it becomes “Moses”, a reference to my lived life and themes I have yet to explore in my work, a religious layer. I was raised in a Christian household and schooled by Capuchin monks. My childhood was full of rituals and silences, surveillance and shame. Ireland’s church was already crumbling under scandal by then. The experience left behind a kind of residual theology — not belief, but shape: obedience, redemption, hidden sins, whispered commands. The same structures you now find in algorithms, media platforms, and feedback loops.

So this isn’t just a pseudonym. It’s a framework. A provocation.

mo.sys is a system file. A name built for bootstrapping identity in a fractured world.