I want my work to interrupt all entanglements of the society of spectacle; to release through an engaging experience its hold on our natural vitality of connection and choice.

About the project, September 2007

Disconnection - connection

As a cultural inquirer and visual artist, I am asking questions about our relationship to reality. The material system in which we live is dedicated to controlling us by encouraging us to disconnect from everything natural. It effectively sells us on a seductive manufactured reality, which includes reassessments of time, memory, place and body.

Chronic disconnection can occur when the affects of this prolonged encounter are layered one on another. Core beliefs and memories can become so challenged that ones sense of 'the real' becomes blurred. The gap between the prescribed material reality and the REAL natural world can become too wide to bridge comfortably.

Even if you are not generally experiencing a feeling of CHRONIC disconnection, or alienation, you may occaisionally recognize a mild insistent encroachment; a constant pressure stressing your sense of natural reality and the holistic qualities that make us most human. Feelings of disconnection can blurr lines of real connection and intimacy and dull any impulse toward creative activity. At its most extreme, disconnection becomes so pervasive that our powers of observation are shut down. We resign ourselves to alientation or isolation. The Wicked Engine of Connected Desire wants to help examine the sources of this trend and help reverse it wherever it occurs.

The Wicked Engine is formed of connection and collaboration with people and place and will be- come a complex container of that collective, noticed reality; an experiential blend of visual art, connective intention and a potent location.*

The Wicked Engine's process of activating will allow for synchronicity and improvisation to infuse it with life. This collective witnessing has the capacity to change the physical place and people it interacts with in unpredictable, subtle, sustainable ways. We are participating in a mystery. Your stories, concerns and memories, will become the heart of the Wicked Engine's ability to reclaim meaning and defy disconnection with our connected desire.

*(The Redstone Building which houses THE LAB gallery, is the old SF Temple of Labor a witness to the days when physical labor for the common good was honored as a sacred task).

Corey Hitchcock