Michael Stevenson – Serene Velocity in Practice: MC510/CS183, 2017-2026
Michael Stevenson – All Across the Country, 2026
Michael Stevenson – A Parable for Old & New Wineskins, 2026

Serene Velocity in Practice: MC510/CS183 brings together three classrooms linked by a walkway. It takes its title from Ernie Gehr’s 1970 film, in which a corridor appears to extend without end. Across these spaces, the work traces how ideas move from classroom to policy and from belief to governance. The first reconstructs MC510: Signs & Wonders, taught by evangelical pastor John Wimber at Fuller Theological Seminary from 1982 to 1985. In practical clinics, students learned techniques of healing and exorcism, testing whether spiritual power could be taught and passed on. The second reconstructs CS183: Startup, Peter Thiel’s 2012 Stanford course. The billionaire investor and right-wing donor cast founders as exceptional figures capable of building a future beyond democratic restraint. The third examines how economic grievance following the 2008 global financial crisis converged with evangelical plans for institutional control, tracing it through the rise of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. That evangelical ambition finds its most vivid sculptural expression in seven wineskins in varying states of collapse, invoking the biblical parable in which new wine bursts old skins as it ferments. The installation casts this promise of renewal as a threat: democratic institutions become spent vessels to be replaced by a Christian political order.

Working with archival materials, models and spatial dispositifs, Michael Stevenson examines how economic, technological and ideological systems take form and circulate.