Just enter your name at the Personas Project website and this innovative art project (that is part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, which was originally on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab) will search the web for information and with its sophisticated natural language processing, will create a portrait of your online identity.

Personas shows you a prose-like, colorful and shockingly accurate visual portrait of how the internet sees you. While the algorithm compiles your information into predetermined categories you can view the computational process at each stage of the process.

From the Personas website:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrate the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

From the masks actors wore in ancient Greek dramas and Carl Jung’s personality constructs to marketer’s “personas” user types, we can add one more “self” to the repertoire of masks we wear when facing the world. Now we know how the internet sees us.

Personas was created by Aaron Zinman, with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath. It has been shown in 7 exhibits around the world, from Peru to Italy.

Metropath(ologies) (see video) is an installation about living in a world overflowing with information and non-stop communication. The sounds and visual imagery incorporate live and recorded data ranging from personal updates and private information, to global news reports. Visitors may choose to become part of the exhibit, their images captured by surveillance cameras, their names entered into databases, their voices recorded and played back by in the echoing soundtrack.