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Taking common multiple choice tests from the fields of educational achievement and psychological diagnosis, this project explores the forms of those tests and the psychology of human viewers/participants. I envision this as a reciprocal investigation: elucidating the formal structure, descriptive limitations, and values embedded in a variety of testing metrics (including psychological inventories, diagnostic tools, intelligence tests, and scholastic aptitude / achievement tests) while also engaging the viewer/user in some reflexive consideration of their own psychology in relation to that test. These tests hold great weight in determining future outcomes of people in society and as thus merit further critical analysis.
The central interactive model for this project is the idea of the user administering tests to the computer--an exchange suggesting the possibility of diagnosing need to diagnose the computer (and through it, the test) to discover its underlying pathology, and encouraging prompting the viewer to form some sense of the parameters and limitations of the testing tooltools. Multiple-choice tests are closed systems with finite possible outcomes and descriptive states--and as such they are already essentailly "machines" for producing diagnoses. Thus they , and thus are natural structures to ripe for interface with and intervene in with an illuminating machineexploitation by statistical or learning machines. Computer vision (CV) and statistical machine learning technologies are the means to orchestrate this encounter between the viewer and the test, and to facilitate the ongoing interaction between the two.
Open Questions (To Be Addressed):
*are the results and the test stored in the same system? If so, that seems like a bit of a foregone conclusion.
*what does the user/viewer contribute? explore their own responses to questions while simultaneously learning the test, driving the computer
*engaging external circuits of meaning: **sending tests into testing services. **taking the SAT. (funny the idea of verified identity, not possible to have a computer take the test)**hiring a therapist. **getting an official diagnosis.
*exploring tests as cultural artifacts -- (for instance the 599 question MMPI)
**implicit values
*physical form.
**getting it off of the screen!
== Timeline ==