The Emergency Broadcast System interrupted American television from the 1960s through the 1990s. It was built for one purpose: to warn the public in the event of a nuclear attack. What aired was a sustained tone, a test pattern, a flat voice delivering nothing. No emergency was ever named. That was the point. The interruption itself created the fear, and it kept people watching, aware that the screen was always watching back.

This is a Test lives there.

The project brings together Hi8 video stills drawn from 35 years of my family's recordings and photographs I made between 2019 and 2024. My family recorded itself the way many immigrant families did, trying to hold onto something while reaching toward something else, using the same screen that defined what American life was supposed to look like. Extracted and stilled, those recordings become something else. They show my family moving through assimilation while the culture around them decided, continuously, whether they belonged.

The screen was never neutral. It broadcast an image of America and asked everyone watching to measure themselves against it. My family was on both sides of that, behind the camera and in front of the screen, documenting a life while a system decided what that life was worth.

Looking at these images means occupying the same position the television always created, someone receiving a signal, deciding what it means, determining what fits and what does not. The static and degraded video are not just aesthetic choices. They are the condition. Belonging was never transmitted cleanly. It arrived distorted, partial, requiring the viewer to fill in what the signal dropped.

As political rhetoric targets immigrant communities and demands they justify their place in America, this project traces where that demand comes from. The Emergency Broadcast System and today's political discourse use the same logic. Tune in. Pay attention. Here is what belongs here, and here is what does not.

This is a Test is about what it costs to be seen through someone else's screen, and what gets decided in the static.