Personas, part of the Metropath(ologies) installation at the MIT Museum, is created by Aaron Zinman (with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath) of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is a beautiful visualization of search results, but the story is that it presents a infographic as "how the internet sees you."
After typing in your name, the system searches the web and processes the words around the results, presenting them as a view of your personality. With terms like education, politics, illegal and others, as you quickly watch the search results on a name go by, you can't help but think the system knows what it is doing. But this really isn't an accurate assessment.
There are many people with the same name. If you don't have a unique name, how would the system know it is you? The results, even though they are based on data, are missing critical information necessary to be factually correct. This makes this art piece work for me -- as a modern digital fortune teller x personality test x social commentary experiment x tribute to my former advisor, the late great Muriel Cooper, designer of the Media Lab's identity system pictured below.
Personas has me coming back day after day.
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