UC San Diego

Practicing art has been the apparatus to educate myself about the complexities of care, social exclusion, and inequality. I try to provide a lens for my viewers with an oblique angel to view over and beyond utilitarian behavior. Past research and works where I have collaborated with a high school student with cerebral palsy and a specialized academic instructor resurface in relation to a contemporary film by Kazuo Hara. With the collaborative project, the educational apparatus is a tool for inclusion. Mary Anne Doane's book helps to illustrate how the camera method can be used to understand modernity. The pressure created by a set of behaviorist/Taylorist curriculum where there is scripted dialog and publicized reading ranking of students according to their academic “levels” of achievements, relates an entirely new unjust meritocratic system. The major distinction from Taylorism, and my collaborative project, is embedded in the “school-to-work,” or “industry embedded education.” The project was designed through an anti-Taylorist lens. In conclusion, my thesis exhibition is an attempt to collapse many different modes of production. PEMDAS serves as a broken empathy machine, a void evoking questions of control. The power behind educational planning and the consequences of arbitrary goals rooted in Taylorism.