‘Cultural Dope’ is the first book of Michael Stevenson’s Profiles in Serene Velocity (schematic class notes for MC510/CS183). ‘Cultural Dope’ is published on the occasion of Serene Velocity in Practice MC510/CS183, at Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Melbourne, Australia 22 May – 6 July 2019. Three books will come together as Profiles in Serene Velocity (with Witte de With, Rotterdam; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin), published by Sternberg Press in 2021.

‘Cultural Dope’ draws on records of two protagonists’ classroom material; John Wimber who instructed the course MC510 Signs & Wonders at the School of World Missions (Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California), and Peter Thiel who taught the course CS183 Startup at the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, California for a single semester in 2012. These voices are accompanied by a chorus of student voices from various colleges and high schools in New Zealand’s Taranaki region, and punctuated with excerpts from Lucy A. Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions, the problem of human machine communication, published by Xerox at the Palo Alto Research Centre, 1985.