Other Tongue (Excerpt: 02:17 Min.), 2024, Duration 13:03 Min.
An Excerpt from a film installation, 4K, Color, Sound, Camera: Branka Pavlovic.
Other Tongue by Noa Gur stages political debates and propaganda networks and conspiracy theories taking place on social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, particularly in the wake of the Gaza war. Gur developed AI-based bots and embedded them across various platforms, later collecting excerpts of their conversations — together with exchanges between other bots and human speakers — and transforming them into an absurdist play, performed by human actors and documented on video. At a certain point, the performers are asked to decide whether the speaker before them is human or not — and whether they themselves are human — based solely on the text they have been instructed to memorize. In this updated Turing test, Gur exposes yet another layer of dehumanization embedded in the disembodied debates of social networks.