This series of videos, presented for Testing, testing, hosted by E-flux and co-presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, is part of an ongoing research project by artist Sandra Erbacher and writer, artist, and curator Ruth Estévez. It unfolds in chapters, forming a larger work that moves toward a video installation and performance-oratory, looking at how intelligence is constructed, measured, and instrumentalized.

The research is structured around the logic of the test and the questionnaire, but also around other forms of inquiry present in castings, trials, and different kinds of interrogations—situations that imply examination and hierarchies of power. It follows loops of question and answer, image and text, word and sound, drawing from both cognitive and sensory models of “expertise.” From there, it reflects on how what we now call “cognitive abilities assessment” comes out of systems that privilege rationality, linguistic fluency, and normative ways of thinking. Even if today these systems appear more subtle—distancing themselves from their historical links to eugenics and racial segregation—their core function remains tied to performance: improving efficiency, fitting individuals into predefined structures of knowledge, and classifying humans into increasingly optimized forms, or even substitute proxies.

The Responders (2026) brings together questions drawn from historical archives, intelligence tests, casting processes, and legal interrogations. They form an absurd dialogue that never resolves. The questions don’t push, don’t insist—they simply wait. Everything hangs in suspension, anticipating a “responder”: someone who might provide information, complete an evaluation, or follow a protocol.

I Told You So (2026) moves differently. It is closer, more intimate: an exchange between a possible examiner and their patient, in which the voice of the “subject” is absent, yet its presence lingers like a ghost. The piece takes the form of an ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) video, focused on the soft voice of the examiner reciting a montage drawn from intelligence test manuals by Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon (1905). What began as a tool to identify children needing educational support quickly became a system for classification and ranking, later adapted in the service of the eugenics movement and deployed across schools, the military, and immigration processes.

Body Recognition (2025) takes the idea of the “perfect human” as a starting point to reflect on bodies, anatomy, measurement, and ideals of perfection. It draws from Jørgen Leth’s film The Perfect Human (1968), originally framed as a humorous anthropological study. Here, that reference is reworked through archival gestures, awkwardness, and displacement, where beauty and function mingle with clumsiness, revealing the instability and constructed nature of such standards.

All these videos circling around the same questions, without settling them, continue to look at how knowledge is produced, and how judgment takes form.