Deciding the Best of Given Choices

Daniel R. Quiles

of a collective dream.1
“ The Consistency Device,” reads advertising copy from 1941,
“ permits scoring of examinations designed to measure the
consistency of an individual’s attitudes and opinions.”2
Designed to grade behavioral exams but applicable to all
two-part questions, the Consistency Device is an optional
accessory for the IBM Test Scoring Machine Type 805,
a predecessor of contemporary scanning technology that was
one of the earliest devices for the scoring of standardized
tests in the United States. The 805 was designed to detect
and puncture the electrically conductive mark made by certain
types of lead pencils, hence the “bubble sheet” on which to
record answers. The Consistency Device’s mensuration of “an
individual’s attitudes and opinions” analogizes the larger aim
of the Test Scoring Machine and standardized testing
in general: to quantify the test-taker by rendering objective
the subjective experience of the exam. The 805 folds “analog”
operations—the thought, sensation, and physical contact
inhering the answering of questions—into a “digital” one—
the tallying of multiple-choice questions into a score.
In Prep Materials, Carla Herrera-Prats displays photographs
and documents related to the development of grading
technology on walls throughout the Art in General gallery.3
The artist found these materials in the archives of the
International Business Machines Corporation [IBM], the
Educational Testing Service [ETS], and Iowa University,
where the material history of the now-defunct Measurement
Research Center [MRC] is kept in the Special Collections and University Archives. Images from these three institutions
are interspersed in horizontal succession across the walls,
in three different formats: digital photographs of rooms and
objects in the archives printed 30 by 40 inches and framed,
scans of multiple photographs and ephemera re-photographed
in the artist’s studio printed 27 by 22 inches and framed,
and scans of analog archive photographs of machines and
documents digitally printed on standard sheets of paper and
taped to the wall. In contrast to much contemporary installation,
in which a space is filled with an array of objects constituting
a kind of environment, these meticulously individuated materials
are more like informational stations at which the viewer might
stop and look closely, and are accompanied by a pamphlet
of “footnotes” for each image that traces its significance within
the larger history of testing.4 Herrera-Prats contrasts a specific
material history with the methods of archival research that allow
this history to be mapped. For standardized testing and the
contemporary archive share a common medium—the scanner.
In both cases, the physical contact between the scanner and
the object it scans—its haptic charting of surfaces—mirrors
the bodily traces of human activity embedded within the object,
conditioning the result, score or image, as an authoritative
source of knowledge.
Standardized testing in the United States emerged
from contrary aims. The initial forays into this practice in the
nineteenth century were devoted to rooting out deficiency or
abnormality, to finding those unequipped for education. In 1916
Lewis Terman, at Stanford University redesigned the IQ test, now
dubbed the Stanford-Binet exam, to detect excellence instead
of insufficiency.5 Developed out of the IQ tests administered
to soldiers during World War I, the Scholastic Aptitude Test was
first developed by Carl Brigham in 1926, although it was not until
the postwar era that it began to be implemented widely as an
accurate predictor of academic performance.6 Technology for the
rapid grading of standardized tests first became available with
Reynold B. Johnson’s sale of a grading machine to IBM in 1934.
By World War II, soldiers were being widely tested to determine guru Henry Chauncey.
Three figures spearheaded advances in testing and
grading after the war. Benjamin H. Wood, at IBM, helped to refine
Johnson’s technology once the company acquired it, producing
increasingly lighter versions of the 805. Wood had also founded
the Cooperative Test Service in 1936, which in 1947 became
the Educational Testing Service, based in Princeton, New Jersey.
Chauncey was named director and oversaw the introduction
of many of the ETS’s better-known achievement tests, including
the MCAT and TOEFL, at that time. Everett Franklin Lindquist,
who had implemented a widely-used standardized exam in Iowa
in the 1930s, founded the MRC, the first centralized grading
institution for standardized exams, at Iowa University in 1954.
It was here that Lindquist installed a new, high-speed scanning
technology (patented in 1962), which ran light through
the paper to locate marks. The MRC centralized the grading
of standardized exams into the 1970s.7 The three men—
Wood, Chauncey, and Lindquist—remained in contact throughout
these decades, with IBM and Iowa developing faster and
more efficient grading machines that were then utilized
by ETS. Their collaboration was not free of competition and
maneuvering, however. In 1959, working through his Science
Research Associates institution in Chicago (founded 1938),
Lindquist introduced the American College Test, or ACT,
to compete with the SAT.8 As Herrera-Prats’ findings reveal,
on more than one occasion these institutions threatened
to sue one another for copyright infringement.Financial
capitalization and profit motives shadowed every step of
advances in the field of standardized educational testing
and scanning technology.
In Testing: Its Place in Education Today, Chauncey outlined
ETS’s philosophy as of 1963, noting that standardized tests
succeed when they exhibit two fundamental qualities.9 First,
they must possess “validity”: they must “measure what they
are intended to measure.” This tautological criteria is ultimately
dependent upon public perception, in that the exam must be
recognized as an authoritative evaluation of its given field
or skill set. Second, tests must be “reliable,” meaning that
if an examinee took one more than once, his or her score would
be more or less the same. This is why exams feature many
similar questions—they repeat within themselves. These two
objectives are folded into the larger operation that is the
standardized test: the channeling of disparate individuals
into equivalent numeric values, of analog into digital.
“The analog and the digital must be thought together,
asymmetrically,” theorist Brian Massumi writes, “because
the analog is always a fold ahead.”10 In Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation, Massumi frames the relation
between analog and digital in affective terms, arguing that
it is only the analog that bears traces of the body and its fluid
interaction with the world around it. For example, computer
code might produce words which appear on the screen, but
it is only in being contacted and read by human eyes that those
words truly “appear.”11 Likewise, an exam score condenses
and obscures the analog operations that allowed the score
to be computed. Both body and mind are engaged while
an exam is taken. The body has the last word. After an answer
is chosen, a correspondent bubble is filled in via an act of
drawing that represents a previous mental labor; a retroactive,
gestural record of deduction. This gesture is contained within
the field of the “bubble,” within the syntax of the machine
that is to read/grade it.
Body is thereby fit into machine, but almost always
awkwardly; few receive a perfect score. The majority of testtakers,
getting at least a few answers wrong, do not match
100% of the machine’s answers. Ideal preparation for the
exam is therefore the accurate anticipation of the machine’s
future actions, the anterior script that it follows. To excel
is to match this programming as closely as possible, to
preemptively approach its consistency. Yet the machine does
not dominate utterly, for its operation is contingent upon its
prior human interface. Scores allow for people to be compared
numerically, but hidden within them are messy, physical processes: the mental strain of deduction, the effort of the
hand exerted upon the substrate later fed into the machine.
Consistency is marked from within by contingency.12
Prep Materials engages this deep structure of grading
through a different conversion of analog to digital: that
of the contemporary archive. Herrera-Prats’ juxtaposition
of different formats does not only take place from image
to image, but within the images themselves. Original analog
photographs, such as those of IBM’s different iterations
of the 805 and the MRC’s larger production machines and circuit
boards, have been scanned prior to printing. Edges of archival
binders and supports are visible, and in some cases typewritten,
pasted-on captions. It is not only the photographic record
of the machine, room, or document that is presented to the
viewer, but the status of this photograph as one of myriad
elements in an archive. Attention is paid to the subtle distinction
between camera and scanner. In bouncing light off a given visual
field, the camera captures an image in an instant, while the
scanner literally runs over the surface of the document at hand,
making contact with it gradually. The scanner thus engages time,
a process more akin to reading; the camera is synchronic. With
digital photography, the activity of the camera is closer to that
of the scanner. In both technologies, light-sensitive diodes
called “photosites” are organized into a larger charge-coupled
device
or “CCD array,” which converts light, as photons, into the
electrons that serve as the foundation of digital information.
In the scanner, the CCD array is attached to a “scan head” along
with mirrors, lenses, and filters, and run evenly over the length
of the scanned object. In this sense it echoes the indexical
contact of the scanned object with its archival predecessor,
the photocopy or Xerox machine (though the scanner retains
digitized information that can then be further manipulated).13
Herrera-Prats pushes these media against one another to
expose their point of convergence; not where they explicitly
differ, but hinge, where one is generated from the other.
Massumi cautions, “Whatever medium you are operating in, you miss the virtual”—his term for the ineffable flux that conditions
being—“unless you carry the images constructed in that
medium to the point of topological transformation.”14
The larger photographs in the exhibition provide glimpses
of the archival sites in which the rich history of testing and
grading has been laid to rest. An early grading machine, the Type
850, sits in an anonymous hallway at IBM, its leaden weight
and odd design (its legs resemble those of a sewing machine)
flanked by staid office plants on either side. Now useless,
dusty circuit boards and connectors lie on desks at the
University of Iowa. At ETS, photographs of the institution’s
prior spaces compete for attention with stacks of newer review
texts for various exams, which are equally subject to rapid
obsolescence. The smaller photographs also speak to an
insistent outmodedness. The MRC’s first and second models
were clusters of machines that took up an entire room and were
designed like futuristic control centers. Here, the obsession
to digitize the archive becomes clear: it is an attempt to flee
the materiality of the defunct. The organization of the images
in Prep Materials echo the archival storage codes of horizontal
and vertical, vectors echoed by close-up photographs of
library stacks, that aim to organize and control everything. In
contrast with recent artistic representations of the archive
as an antiseptic tomb, however, Herrera-Prats utilizes the large
photograph format to expose clutter and hints of disorganization
that speak to the continued analog activity of the archivist.15
The 27 by 22 inch panels of re-photographed materials,
which include promotional illustrations and photographs
for different machines, identify particular users. In the 1930s
and 1940s, IBM frequently pictured women seated at grading
machines. When, in some images, the female operator sits
at the 805, its flat surface resembles a desk. Wendy Hui
Kyong Chun has observed a tension circa World War II between
“computing,” the mindless and repetitive programming that was
allotted to women at that time, and the more difficult job
of “programming proper,” with its attendant notions of system
mastery, that remained the province of male operators.
Chun writes, “During World War II almost all computers were
young women with some background in mathematics. Not only
were women available for work then, they were also considered
to be better, more conscientious computers, presumably
because they were better at repetitious, clerical tasks.”16
Computing was a logical extension of clerical work—
women’s work. In the early scanning technology of the grading
machine, it is the role of teacher that is extended technologically.
The women in IBM photographs are sutured to the
machines, which speed up and elongate their ability to instruct
(by grading exams). These women are amalgams of secretary,
seated at a desk, and teacher, herself already an extension
of the mother during the workday, her educational doppelganger.
ETS photographs from the 1960s, however, unveil changes
to the script. Male teachers, signified by their shirt and tie with
no jacket, appear as the new benefactors of advances in
grading technology.
In 1974, Lindquist’s scoring system was applied
to the development of ballot machines for elections. Multiple
choice here takes on a different valence: given to citizens of
a democracy that is also a culture of testing. Evaluated at every
turn, we evaluate those who will rule. As with the standardized
test, however, “validity,” or legitimacy, is an essential precondition
for democracy. In voting, a leap of faith is taken that
the election will be a fair one, that the hardware will work.
As is now clear, however, that the exam can be rigged. The
blame laid upon outdated machinery for the uncertain results
of the 2000 presidential elections implicitly contended that
had the newest technology been purchased, there would
not have been a problem. In this sense, the anomalous event
merely reassured Americans that the system ordinarily functions
correctly. Ultimately it is we who absorb validity as citizens from
the devices that mediate the democratic act of voting—and
happen to be locked in a cycle of perpetual obsolescence.
Prep Materials includes a schematic wall drawing of an early
ballot machine. The precariousness of the hand-drawing
reflects that of the ever-newer technologies that condition our political experience, while also referencing the bodily
movements required of the ballot machine when selecting
that chosen candidates.
Written in 1949, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
anticipated the postwar relay between media, the subject, and
achievement. In a sequence in Act Two, Willy Loman, trying
to save himself from an impending nervous breakdown, requests
a desk job from his younger boss, Howard. The transition would
put an end to the protagonist’s exhausting and pointless sales
travel, but Howard demurs, even when Willy describes his close
relationship with Howard’s father. Howard leaves the room,
and Willy lapses into a reverie in which he speaks with his former
boss, in the process leaning too close to a wire recorder that
Howard has just purchased and used to record members
of his family.
WILLY: […] He leans on the desk and as he speaks the
dead man’s name he accidentally switches on the recorder,
and instantly
HOWARD’S SON: “…of New York is Albany. The capital
of Ohio is Cincinnati, the capital of Rhode Island is…”
The recitation continues.
WILLY, leaping away with fright, shouting: Ha! Howard!
Howard! Howard!
HOWARD, rushing in: What happened?
WILLY, pointing at the machine, which continues nasally,
childishly, with the capital cities: Shut it off! Shut it off!17
Throughout the play, Willy has disavowed his son Biff’s
professional failures, all of which apparently stem from the
failure of a high school math exam that, had he passed, would
have secured him a football scholarship to the University of
Virginia and a pathway to the good life. Here Willy is confronted with the disembodied voice of Howard’s son, at the precise
moment that Willy is thinking of his long-lost success in
sales. Howard’s son intones correct answers to the names
of the fifty capitals of the United States, as though taking—
and passing—an oral exam. The mechanical structure of this
exam is literal. Machines pass exams; machines succeed.
Biff is far too human, as is Willy, who, thanks to his outburst,
is fired on the spot. Willy flees to the office of his only friend,
Charley, a successful businessman with a lawyer son
and thus Willy’s diametric opposite.
CHARLEY: Howard fired you?
WILLY: That snotnose. Imagine that? I named him.
I named him Howard.
CHARLEY: Willy, when’re you gonna realize that them
things don’t mean anything? You named him Howard,
but you can’t sell that. The only thing you got in this world
is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re
a salesman, and you don’t know that.
WILLY: I’ve always tried to think otherwise, I guess.
I always felt that if a man was impressive, and well liked,
that nothing—
CHARLEY: Why must everybody like you? Who liked
J.P. Morgan?…18
Willy has maintained up to this point that Biff will
ultimately succeed thanks to his “likeability,” his inherent
humanity; this is all that is needed to forge a connection with
a boss or buyer. But likeability cannot be quantified. Charley
contends that only capital, the dollars one generates and
which allow one to be compared to others, is what matters.
Assessment in the workplace is preceded by the exams that
simultaneously predict and prefigure one’s fate in a digitized professional world. The exam that Biff failed expelled him
forever from the circuit of never-ending evaluation that begins
with exams and ends in the production of capital, that which
sets an entire life span to the rhythm of the commodity. Printed
on the wall next to the images in Prep Materials is the phrase,
“Everything measured is every thing done.”19
At points during the play, a lone flute is heard. Stage
directions tell us that Willy “hears but is not aware of it”;
his body senses independent of his mind’s interpretation.20
It is later revealed that Willy’s father played and sold flutes as
he traveled around the country. The flute is a synecdoche of
an earlier entrepreneurial moment in which one’s individuality
actually mattered, and an earlier, bodily music prior to recorded
sound. This instrument channels human breath into a system
of notes and measures; the wire recorder captures all sound
and simply plays it back, severed from its source. The flute
accompanies Willy as a spectral trace of human presence.
Upon hearing the utterly perfunctory operation of the recorder,
Willy discovers, at the heart of his dream of success, tape
reels revolving mindlessly.
Prep Materials marshals this same flute theme to accompany
a slide show in which every single circle of a Scantron
sheet is gradually filled out. The movements of the artist’s hand
have been elided; the slide show is a progression of traces. The
slides are created from digital scans, run together like frames
of a film through an outmoded analog projection device. This
is a serial script: all bubbles will be filled in. The sheet has been
used against its original purpose, turning from coded to visual
material, to a template for drawing. Agency cannot be extricated
from the technological structures which digitize it for capital
at every turn. But the march of technology creates fissures
between media, through which the analog gleams. Consistency
yields its own wrinkles of difference.

Many thanks to Carla Herrera-Prats, Media Farzin, Lindsay
Caplan, and Dana Ospina for their thoughtful comments about
this essay in its earlier stages, as well as Eva Díaz and Art in
General for providing the opportunity to write about this work.

1. Walter Benjamin, “Convolute F:
Iron Construction,” The Arcades Project,
trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1999), 152.
2. “IBM TEST SCORING MACHINE Type 805,”
Promotional Brochure, 1941, IBM Archives.
Though not included in the exhibition, this text
is in the larger archive of materials related
to testing compiled by Herrera-Prats during her
research at the archives of IBM, the MRC and
ETS in 2008.
3. This is an approach consistent with
Herrera-Prats’s previous archive-based
projects: Measures of an Archive (2007),
which looked at the art-historical archiving
(via exhibition catalogues) of artists who
themselves work from archive collections;
The Burden of Decision: Two Exercises
on Collaboration (2006), with Úrsula Dávila,
which exhibited materials related to Lawrence
Weiner that were in the Fluent-Collaborative
archives in Austin, Texas, and Official
Stories (2005), which displayed materials
from archives related to the Mexican government’s
use of pre-Colonial imagery and
history.
4. This definition of “installation” is outlined
by Briony Fer in her recent text The Infinite Line:
Re-making Art After Modernism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
Fer traces installation to the efforts of
color field painters such as Mark Rothko
to completely fill the walls of the gallery,
literally surrounding the viewer with art.
5. For discussions of the history of the IQ exam
and its controversies, see Stephen Jay Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man (W.W. Norton, 1981)
and Stephen Murdoch, IQ: A Smart History of
a Failed Idea (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishers,
2007).
6. Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret
History of American Meritocracy (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 29–41.
7. Herrera-Prats’s collection of archival
documents contains a number of exchanges
between ETS and its lawyers, as it
unsuccessfully searched for legal grounds
to sue Lindquist.
8. Lemann, The Big Test, 97–98.
9. Henry Chauncey and John E. Dobbin,
Testing: Its Place in Education Today (New York:
Harper and Row, 1963), 54–65. In his
history of American meritocracy, Lemann also
discusses these two qualities, though
in reverse order (Lemann, The Big Test, 32).
10. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 143.
11. Ibid. 138.
12. This relation between examinee, exam
and grading machine is transformed with
a recent development in standardized testing:
fully computerized versions of certain ETS
exams, such as the GRE and TOEFL, that
began to be introduced in the late 1990s
(although paper versions of these exams
are still given). In addition to instant results,
which render obsolete the formerly long wait
for results when exams are sent far afield
to be graded, the computer-based exams
have the unprecedented ability to adapt
to the examinee mid-test. If questions are
answered correctly, subsequent questions
become more difficult; vice versa if incorrect.
This exam intelligence adds an interesting,
difficult to measure feature to the exam,
in which the examinee is as conscious of the
exam’s intelligence as the exam is “conscious”
of the specificity of the examinee. Altered
affective relationships (from an interface with
a paper exam to one that is one the screen,
with answers directed by a mouse) must also be taken into account. While the role
of drawing now disappears, the hand remains
the conduit by which intuition is marked on the
exam, now in a virtual setting, meaning that
Kyong Chun’s arguments about software’s
ideological masking of hardware, cited below,
are all the more relevant. Instead of “drawing,”
how might the hand’s guidance of the mouse
be described? The mouse is a visible piece
of hardware with a software correspondent,
the arrow, on screen. These elements
mirror the hand’s movements. In drawing,
we are left with the trace of the gesture.
On the computer, indexicality is virtualized
and remains in the present.
13. For a history of the development of xerography,
see David Owen, Copies in Seconds:
Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox
Machine (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
14. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 134.
15. Recent years have seen a spate of
art and exhibitions investigating the archive.
A decade of shows related to the archive
might be traced from Deep Storage, the 1997
exhibition at curated by Ingrid Schaffner
at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, through
Okwui Enwezor’s Archive Fever: Uses
of the Document in Contemporary Art at the
International Center of Photography in New
York in 2007. See Okwui Enwezor, Archive
Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary
Art (New York: Steidl/ICP, 2008), Charles
Merewether, Documents of Contemporary Art:
The Archive (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006),
and Ingrid Schaffner et. al., Deep Storage:
Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, exh.
cat., P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York:
Prestel, 1998). 16. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun,
“On Software, or the Persistence of Visual
Knowledge,” Grey Room 18, Winter
2004, 33–37.
17. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman,
(New York: The Viking Press, 1949),
82–83.
18. Ibid. 97.
19. This is a variation on “you get what you
measure,” an adage common to metrics
and other theories of assessment, which
argues that workers will perform better
if they know that their work will ultimately
be evaluated numerically.
20. Miller, Death of a Salesman, 12.

From publication Carla Herrera-Prats: Prep Matierals