TESTED: vaio road test is a reenactment of Ed Ruscha’s famous artist’s book ROYAL ROAD TEST (1967), which was made in cooperation with Mason Williams and Patrick Blackwell. It documents the act of throwing a typewriter out of a moving car and its damaged remains through photographs. For TESTED, the three artists transfer this into the present and update the technology used: instead of a typewriter, paula roush (driver), Teresa Paiva (thrower), and Maria Lusitano (photographer) throw a Sony VAIO notebook out of the window of a moving car and pick up its damaged individual parts to repeat the same action a few more times. They thus contrast the mechanics of a typewriter with the far opaquer workings of a computer, which can nevertheless be disassembled and examined as shown in the book.

The action was documented and turned into a film, a limited edition artist’s book reproducing the layout and shots of Ruscha’s version, and a print-on-demand publication, created originally as part of the Artists’ Books Cooperative’s series ABCED: “a multi-volume book project created [...] to celebrate Ed Ruscha’s seventy-fifth birthday.” TESTED not only honors Ruscha’s artist’s book, but is also a feminist take on Ruscha’s practice, as the three female artists revisit the ironic yet masculine iconography of the original.