Fri 27.11.2026 From Web, Library, Fire to War, Garden, Feed

A metaphor might seem like a mistake, a wrongly placed word, something that doesn't make sense but then, strangely, it does. The internet is full of such metaphors. They reveal how we interact with machines, what desires and fears we share, and how they interfere in our lives. War to Fire invites researcher Elena Beregow to talk about fire across the threshold of nature and culture, asking how combustion, both as material force and metaphor, shapes ideas of passion, crisis, and social transformation. Afterwards, the artist collective eeefff will turn to the metaphor of war: in a lecture-performance they trace how militarization, extraction, and colonial logics seep into everyday life through maps, algorithmic assistants and lines of code.

From Web, Library, War to Fire, Garden, Feed is a book and event series that explores imaginations and narratives of the internet. It was initiated by Tereza Havlíková, Julia Kochanek, Anneliese Ostertag, and Sasha Weber, and is the second iteration of their long-lasting collaboration. For their research, they are currently Medienkunstfellows at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities, an interdisciplinary research center of the University Alliance Ruhr.

The event is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, and curated by Tereza Havlíková, Julia Kochanek, and Anneliese Ostertag.

Program:

Tereza Havlíková, Julia Kochanek, Anneliese Ostertag, Sasha Weber 
Introduction: From Web, Library, War to Fire, Garden, Feed

A metaphor adds new meaning: it refers to one thing by mentioning another, and by doing so, detaches the affects of one area and passes them on to another. It is in this moment of transference that a crack appears, a dissonance that sparks the imagination for behavior and perception, while, at the same time, setting certain limitations and norms. From Web, Library, War to Fire, Garden, Feed turns to those cracks; In collaboration with artists and theorists, the project explores the history, power, and logic of the images through which we think about and with computers. In their introduction, the editors of the book, Tereza Havlíková, Julia Kochanek, and Anneliese Ostertag, as well as the graphic designer, Sasha Weber, will introduce the frame and method of their research.

Elena Beregow
Lecture: Where There Is Fire: On Combustion and the Making of the Social. 
Fire occupies a peculiar place at the threshold of nature and culture: as an elemental medium, a cultural technique, and a founding scene of social life. At the same time, fire provides a powerful metaphorical repertoire through which societies imagine passion, conflict, progress, crisis, and transformation. Moving between the materiality and metaphorics of combustion, this talk explores how fire shapes both imaginaries and thermopolitics — and how its capacity to transform matter becomes a way of thinking about social transformation itself.

eeefff
Lecture Performance: Conditions of War, Fairytale About Love, fixDisputedCities, Total Metrics, Factory of the Map, Minimum Wage May Be Denied

Cyberwarfare, digital mapping, algorithmic  assistants, and code instructions quietly reshape reality, embedding militarization into homes, bodies, and imaginations, while extractivist fairytales and hidden comments in code reveal how violence becomes normalized at an infrastructural level. In their lecture performance, the artist duo eeefff explores how digital architectures reproduce logics of control, territorial domination, and resource extraction, fusing imperial violence with technological standardization. Combining sound, embodied actions, and moving images based on recently leaked Yandex codes, they inquire how Russia’s colonialism extends through algorithmic systems and technological platforms.

Elena Beregow is Junior Professor of Cultural Sociology at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities, University Alliance Ruhr. Her research lies at the intersection of sociological theory and cultural sociology, with a particular interest in the materiality of social life, metaphors, and the relations between bodies, technologies, and environments. She currently leads the research group Sweat: Sociology of Transpiration in the Age of Global Warming.

eeefff (Minsk/Berlin) is artistic cooperation / made-up institution / cybernetic political brigade / poetic computations / hacking unit / queer time. It is neither one of these, nor all together. Active from 2013. The group works with emotions and affects shaped by technologies and makes software-based projects, publications, networks, and platforms that critically explore digital labour, value extraction, and community formation. Methods include: public actions, online interventions, performative seminars, software, and hardware hacking, framing environments, and choreographing social situations. Organizers of the School of Algorithmic solidarity (2022-ongoing) that was initiated to explore the relations between infrastructural time, algorithmic abstractions, and bodies. Co-organizers of Work Hard! Play Hard! (2016-2020), Decentric Circles Assembly (2024) and Forest Assembly of Educational fictions (2025). More info: https://eeefff.org/