Personas: an online art installation with a personal twist

Personas is a fascinating piece of web-based art that visually represents just how much the internet knows about you. Type in your name, and Personas will analyze the text of the Google results, breaking your web presence down into various categories. These groupings include everything from "online" to "sports" to "illegal," and each one has a color, so each person's name results in a unique band of colors.

If you have a unique name, Personas can be disturbingly accurate. If not, it's still visually interesting, but other people who share your name can muddy your results. The flaws in this kind of data analysis are part of the project, though: Personas is about showing how smart the web has become, and how far it has to go before software can intelligently trace our digital histories.

Tags: art, mit, personality, personas