Didem Yalinay is a digital artist based in Istanbul. After a career as an actor in films such as Barda (2007), Unutulmaz (2009) and For the Blinds (2014), she now focuses on art and research. With a PhD in Communication Science from Istanbul Bilgi University, she created her first piece, Edge(s), with support from the World Health Organization.

Since 2018, she has also taken part in the project Trans-making, funded by the European Union. Her work has been shown as part of the Sónar festival, in Spain and Turkey, during the first virtual exhibition by the Generative Art Platform of the Politecnico di Milano, in Italy, and in Tokyo as part of the International Academic Forum. In 2019, she won the Be Mobile, Create Together programme initiated by the Institut français in Turkey, for which she was hosted for her first residency by the Cité Internationale des Arts in France and at the Cube. 

After a time spent working as a channel director for the Discovery Channel, Didem Yalinay founded a consulting firm for cultural entrepreneurial programmes. She is currently focusing on creating generative installations, such as her piece Edge(s). This was produced in collaboration with Seçkin Maden and Cemal Koray Bingöl, using data on the health problems experienced by refugees driven to Turkey by the Syrian conflict. As such, the possibilities for interaction between individuals around and within the healthcare programmes aimed at Syrian refugees are interlaced within an interactive and decentralised generative narrative made up of several strata. Edge(s) therefore explores the narrative possibilities in the creation of collective narratives. 

Yalinay is an artist working with interactive generative narratives and recently completed a residency at the Cube and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Working on an interdisciplinary basis, halfway between academic research and the contemporary art world, these residencies gave her an opportunity to organise workshops entitled In the Gap of Data World: //noise/less. For these events, she produced an installation that focuses on production in the world of data to invite participants to find ways of perceiving data. Yalinay thereby questions our values by confronting them with today’s digital practices.