This is a Test takes its name from the Emergency Broadcast System messages that aired across American televisions from 1963 to 1997. These alerts were intended to prepare the public for national emergencies, but for many—especially immigrant families like mine—they instilled something quieter but more lasting: a background sense of anxiety and a low hum of alertness that shaped how we moved through the world. The project draws on that metaphor to consider what it means to grow up with a constant feeling that something could go wrong at any moment.

The work brings together stills from Hi8 video footage I recorded as a child, some as early as age four, with contemporary photographs and images I manipulated through old tube televisions. This layered approach speaks to my ongoing interest in the role of the screen as both a transmitter of culture and a tool of control. For my parents, who immigrated from Indonesia to San Francisco in the 1970s, the television was a window into the idea of America long before they arrived. It shaped their expectations and understanding of a place they had never been. For me, the screen became a site of both learning and disorientation. It became a space where I began to internalize what it meant to be “American,” and where I also began to feel the tension of that expectation.

While the project is rooted in personal history, it also speaks to broader themes of assimilation, familial distance, and the pressures of adapting to a culture that often asks for erasure in exchange for belonging. In many ways, This is a Test is about that negotiation—what is lost, what is carried forward, and how control doesn’t always arrive through force but through repetition, suggestion, and the quiet enforcement of norms. Foucault’s idea of the disciplinary society is a key reference here: a world in which systems of surveillance, conformity, and internalized control shape not just our behaviors but our self-perception.

As political rhetoric in the U.S. continues to question who belongs and who does not, the questions at the core of this project remain urgent. The Emergency Broadcast System was framed as a safety measure, but it also modeled a type of obedience, a test of whether we’d listen when the time came. For many immigrants, that feeling never left. The test never ended.