Hi, we are eeefff, an artist collective (Minsk-Berlin). We are two people: artist and fiction writer Dzina Zhuk & artist and computer scientist Kolja Spesivtsev. We work with the poetics and politics of new technologies.

We combine artistic practices with research, sociality of computer science, networking and developing open-source tools. Dzina holds a BA from Department of Literature at Belarusian State University. Kolja holds a BA from Belarusian State University of Informatics and Electronics. We both hold Master of Arts from “Art in Context” UdK Berlin. Our methods include: installations, performances, moving images, interventions, walks and picnics, software and hardware hacking, framing environments, choreographing social situations and making settings for collective imagination.

Within our works we raise topics such as: emotions and affects shaped by technologies, tension between the algorithmic and the sensory, infrastructures and networks, work and leisure regimes, extraction of labour and resources under computation, resistance against digital colonialism and fascism, imaginations around techno-social landscape, among others.

Currently we are working on instances of digital colonialism, approached through looking at the leaked “yandex” code and making new sessions dedicated to “algosomatics”, working with non-verbal ways of dealing with computations: how imagination could be invented with the help of motor learning, how bodies, being trapped in the techno-capitalism, can try to turn it into the strength. As example, we did an algosomatic session at transmediale 2025 and a score for it, connected to “punishment” of users who try to use e-scooters for free and now we are looking into other algorithms to experiment with them. We are also very into the idea of general intellect and collective intelligence, that are opposed to the technocratic idea of “artificial intelligence”. We are currently making experiments with radio and communalisation of interfaces, recently developing it during a residency at KIN museum of contemporary art and making new sketches for “infrastructures of imagination”.

We run the School of Algorithmic Solidarity (2022-ongoing). The general framework of the school is to clash together two contradictory vectors: algorithms and solidarities, attempting for provocative, inventory and imaginative approaches in the politics of computations. With the School of Algorithmic Solidarity we intend to explore the possibilities of solidarities in dispersed situations, to communalise “private” experience of dealing with techno-ecologies, to elaborate new circumstances through social experimental site, co-acting and collective ways to imagine. By form, it can be a collective experience / radical pedagogy practice / walk to the specific location / playful protocol / digital togetherness / open-ended situation / affective temporary training zone. It is an attempt to gather a quickly-assembled community, temporary forum around (non)algorithmic forms of communality and commoning. For example, one of the sessions was dedicated to growing unprofitable and yet impractical skills. We proposed participants to train how to create our own “train slowers”, using wires, pliers, gloves, clamps. This session took place during Documenta 15 as part of friendly Antiwarcoaltion invitation and Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt. We have looked into infrastructural time and how it can be embodied (if even it is possible).

Returning back to our previous works, in Picnic near a data center (2016) we were sitting near a building where data get gathered and aggregated, feeling produced heat from it on our skin, and discussed automatisation and “artificial intelligence”, outsourcing and forms of possible “algorithmic solidarity” under nowadays highly capitalised conditions.

As our approach, we experiment with unintended usage of objects and processes in order to feel their materiality. For an installation “Traffic Loop” (2018) during our artist-in-residence at Havremagasinet in Boden we have built a floor from former facebook servers and proposed visitors to walk on them, feeling their materiality under one’s feet.

As continuation of this, recently, we have made sensory room with 42 cooling fans (2023) where we were more focused on sensations that could come up because of a close interaction with hardware. So, another our approach is to experiment with sensuous and affective side of infrastructures and gig economies. In “Cloud Bushes” (2017) during Fotograf festival residency in Prague we made an action for Uber drivers and their visitors, with audio-visual intervention reflecting the common air we breathe in a car, feelings and emotional labour behind the economy.

One of our methods is software and hardware hacking. In Outsourcing paradise (parasite) (2020-ongoing) we used a post-Soviet online recruitment platform to look for workers whose labor is largely invisible behind the ceaseless work of algorithms. We wanted to break the production cycle of macro and micro tasks, stress tests, call rounds, image and text recognition, and to create an imaginary space of an “outsourcing paradise,” where outsourced workers could bring their alienation or live it in different ways. The archive of Outsourcing Paradise presents itself as a bug, or a superstructure above existing web pages, directing attention to the invisible labour and material infrastructure that keep outsourcing enterprises afloat. Another work, Tactical Forgetting is a computer-suported exercise that tackles the overlapping of work of IT workers and their leisure, digital battlefields and the real war. The Exercise exists in two forms: video and training machine. The video can be seen as a playthrough which one traverses following the threads of the mental memorising exercise.

Another our method is creating settings for collective imagination, or how we call it “infrastructures of imagination”, with props and fictional connections that by their affect can potentially become non-fictional. For example, Economic Orangery (2021) is a playful 2-month long collective situation that includs exchanging of physical inplay objects and has traces in reality. The situation has a focus on alternative instituting and view from the speculative setting that allows to change the function(ing) of technologies of nowadays. Events inside of the Orangery went in parallel with the actual revolution in Belarus where since August 2020 multilayered protests have been taking place due to the falsification of presidential election results. The overlapping of two temporalities — a fictional one and the temporality of the uprising — was the key experiment. Another synthetic game situation, Holed Futurism (2019) was centured around contemporary production drama related to self-exploitation, the condition of emotional burnout, outsourcing of affection, and alienated emotional labour. There were two cooperatives inside of the situation: the cooperative of burnt out and the cooperative of emotional workers.

We also write texts, for example, in “Smart for whom?” (2017) we talk about “artificial intelligence” and political participation in the smart city. In All you need now is in pinned messages (2021) we montage continuous partial attention with drifting along 3D spaces, industrial attention with desires encoded in economies, exercises on gymnastic balls with revolutionary tactics.

And we make visual interventions into magazines, for example, Perplexed Species / a visual intervention into Kapitál newspaper (en, sk) (2018) where we made visual collages with texts encompassing ideas around “perplexed species” that “mine something that has no value” and whose “utopia is build around stolen software”. Another example is “Chimeras: Inventory of synthetic cognition” (2022) and Sowing Unrest: The Biennale Matter of Art Reader (2024).

We are also lecturing and doing workshops, we have made a seminar dedicated to critical reading of AI (2023), Error-friendly networks 3 days-program (2019) dedicated to traumas in machines and bodies.

We co-organised an annual week Work Hard! Play Hard! in Minsk (2016-2020) that was dedicated to the issues of knowledge production, cooperation, work, leisure and technology through various performative, participatory and discursive formats. The archive of 5 years is available in a form of a collective glossary, written by the participants from different years. As continuation of this initiative now we co-organise events with assemblies as a medium of struggle, of joy, of listening and performing: Decentric circles assembly in 2024 and Forest Assembly of Educational fictions in 2025.

You can find us on mastodon and instagram. Drop us an email if you are interested in our practice, would like to support us, to collaborate, or would like us to contribute.