Technics and the human intersect at the (ob)scene of the disaster, to paraphrase from Ulmer's review lecture. The proliferation of (policies mandating) standardized testing is a critical site through which we are engineering our own becoming.
The heuretic method, coupled with the CATTt readings for this particular project, suggests that we locate a precise visual detail from the (mediated) material of our disaster, and that we treat this detail as a mise-en-abyme for an epiphany (or at least a punctum feeling) we have about the disaster.
In my case, the clip-art images of children that conventionally appear on FCAT practice tests and worksheets struck my as a promising visual detail.
The aesthetic of these images (low-res, black & white) seems to reflect something about the political/bureaucratic institutions that commissioned them: from a technical standpoint, these clip-art images are the most efficient design for circulating unchanged from the national or state Department of Education to the copiers and scanners of each and every school in the region. As such, the images are designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of technical capabilities--they are settled upon a design which can be read by and agreed with (exactly reproduced) by even the most rudimentary copy machine. Moreover, on a more enigmatic level, the clip-art aesthetic elicits, from me, an eerie sense of correspondence between the design of the image, the structure of the test, the experience of taking/teaching the test, and it's ramification for education (and consequently thought).
Flattening. Stratifying. Efficiency. Black and White.
Love it. I find these images frightening.
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