In a collaboration Peppe Borge and Jesper Halling I am working with the complexity in a personality. PPU (Projekt: Personlig Utvärdering) means Project: Personal Evaluation and is an interactive triptyche. It deals with ideas of personality – mostly evaluating and testing personality. What we do is make up methods to do this, and preferably bad and ironic methods.
PPU 1.0 dealed with prejudice and strangers’ relationship to PPU’s subject. This PPU-part was exhibited at Örebro Konsthall in May 2009. There was lists with “appearance” and “personality traits” which visitors got to connect and then the PPU trio arranged the collected connections on a big two-parted list on the wall. For example the visitor could connect the word “short” (appearance) with the word “radical” (personality trait) and we would draw the same line on the wall. If a lot of other visitors also thought short people generally have a radical personality that would be marked on the line, and so short people viewing the big list could see that, generally, people that had visited Orebro Konsthall thinks that they are radical.
PPU 2.0 wanted to explore people with a relationship to the PPU subject. The PPU trio simply used ourselves for this, and put together a questionnaire about the subject’s personality, put our own names as the subject to evaluate, and then sent these questionnaires to 75 individuals that we considered ourselves in some kind of a relationship with (may it be professional, friendship, family…) These individuals got to answer an array of questions about our personality, and then send back the questionnairs anonymously. They also had to put a grade on our personality.
In PPU 3.0 it was finally time for the subject to evaluate itself! This part was exhibited at Galleri Mejan in august 2010. The gallery visitor got to answer seven questions about themselves, all based upon different ways of sorting types of personalities (for example astrology) and theories of what dominates a personality (for example Freud’s theory about id, ego and super-ego), but also put a grade on their own personality (in the spirit of the Secret theory – that you will be and get what you strive for. If the subject thinks that it is a B+ person, then it probably is a B+ person…). The answers was decoded by the PPU trio and the visitor could walk out of the gallery with their very own personal evaluation in hand.
