Today I had the honor of receiving first place in the Electronic Literature category at the Digital Culture Awards ceremony at the University of Bergen for my interactive fiction project The Turing Test: Fragments of a Life Saved by Pixels. I am humbled and deeply grateful, still reflecting on what this recognition means, both personally and for the communities this work is about.
The project sits at the intersection of digital ethics, platform governance, and autoethnographic methodology. Drawing on Jill Walker Rettberg's concept of algorithmic failure, Ian Bogost's procedural rhetoric, and Rosa Menkman's glitch aesthetics, it documents what happens when large language models are systematically tested on their knowledge of Norwegian LGBTQ+ organizations and crisis resources. The results revealed dangerous patterns: hallucinated organizations, invented contact information, and misinformation that could harm vulnerable people seeking help.
Rather than presenting these findings in a traditional research paper, I embedded them into a playable narrative where the interface itself becomes unstable as the player moves through the documented failures. Screen shake, visual corruption, and system errors are not aesthetic choices added after the fact. They enact Menkman's argument that glitch exposes the invisible infrastructures of digital systems. The form and the argument are the same thing.
$survival.information_saved_me = true
$survival.now_helping_others = true
This work is also personal. I know what it means to need accurate crisis information and not be able to find it. I named the project after Alan Turing because the machines he made possible should serve the communities he belonged to. Documenting the gap between that aspiration and the current reality is both a scholarly obligation and a deeply personal one.
I am profoundly grateful to the Digital Culture programme at the University of Bergen, to my professors who encouraged this work, and to everyone interacted with this piece and engaged with its argument. Receiving this recognition as a second-year student, writing in my second language, means more than I can easily express. Thank you for taking this work seriously.
Photo by Frøydis Nåvik
If you are a developer, researcher, community organizer, or someone who believes that marginalized communities deserve accurate crisis resources, I would be very grateful to hear from you. This is too important to do alone.
If you want to help build The Turing Network, a community-owned tool providing verified, multilingual crisis and emergency resources for LGBTQ+ communities, refugees, and migrants: reach out.
ingrid@bergenpride.no