Turing Dames (2010-2018)

Founded in 2010 by Eran Hadas, Batt-Girl, and Dganit Elyakim, “Turing Dames” is a net collective that explores various political, ethical, and social battles that emerged from our virtual platforms including social networks, online encyclopedias, and more. Turing Dames’s playful projects vary from net art to software art. You might find our projects funny, but we’re damn serious

May B Att&ending (Maybe Attending, 2012)

An interactive web-based, audio-visual, live performance – a virtual journey that traces fears stemming from the influence of technology, inspired by Brecht’s educational play “He Said Yes and He Said No”. The work incorporates materials drawn from virtual environments, such as prophetic texts dealing with the future of mankind on the web, images, and animations. The work is performed as a live show that is accompanied by music composed in real-time by a computer. In the course of the plot, the audience is asked to decide between total devotion to technology or renunciation of it.

Wikiland is an arena for physical Wikipedia edit wars. Anyone can edit any entry on Wikipedia, and an edit war occurs when editors who disagree about the content of a page repeatedly override each other’s contributions, rather than trying to resolve the disagreement through discussion. Such Wiki-wars are projected on a screen, forcing the people who stand in front of it to become engaged in fighting for the right revision.

A sensor detects the viewers, assigns them to one of two teams according to their position, and attaches a chat bubble to each team, holding one of two competing revisions of the same Wikipedia entry. The bubble moves according to the movement of its team members, whose goal is to convey their story to the center and push the other team away. Each team scores points by capturing the center and by picking “Wiki-candies”, and eventually one team wins, causing its revision to be updated on the real Wikipedia site.