The Emergency Broadcast System interrupted American television from the 1960s through the 1990s. It was built to warn the public in the event of a nuclear attack. What aired was a sustained tone, a test pattern, and a flat voice delivering procedural information. No emergency was ever named. The result was uncertainty, a sense that life in America could change at any moment.

This Is a Test associates that feeling with the experience of my parents, who immigrated from Indonesia, and with the uncertainty immigrants like them have felt, and still feel, in the United States. The project brings together photographs often manipulated on television screens and Hi8 video stills drawn from 35 years of my family’s recordings, made for the same screen that broadcast the tests.

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