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Tom Varley (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Since 2020 Tom has concentrated exclusively on painting and drawing. Prior to this he worked with a range of media including film, video, text, and installation. His artworks have often explored the subjective character of individual experience and how this relates to wider systems and structures — language, ideology, and economy.

The Personality Test (2017) 
HD Video, 18’11”

Actors: Rebecca Banatvala, Duncan Harte and Olivia Ross

Varley's recent work examines how new communication technologies are changing the way in which individuals, governments and corporations interpret reality. The Personality Test (2017) repurposes a series of prompts from psychometric tests used by data analytics companies to build profiles of individuals, enabling the ‘micro-targeting’ of advertising, political campaign messages, etc. Made in collaboration with a group of professional actors, the piece investigates the ways in which the process of acting relates to notions of individual personal identity, and explores the shot/reverse-shot camera technique conventionally used to film dialogue sequences. 

Watch full video on Vimeo