more information coming soon

Opening

Monday, 10/06             from 5 p.m.

regular opening hours

Wednesday to Friday      3 to 7 p.m.

Saturday & Sunday           1 to 6 p.m.

Every weekend: carpet café with free pastries, coffee, and tea

About the exhibition

WE ARE NOT CARPETS presents newly created, unique personal carpets and their stories, which are experienced in a poetic, cinematic and sensory way. The exhibition shows a dissensus between a carpet and a Carpet, once the weaver binds it with her own name, story, colors, patterns and aesthetic. Through their carpets, artist weavers from the North Khorasan region in Iran tell their stories by transforming their craft into a medium of storytelling and works of art.

“The rug of life became the playground of all I desired. Its patterns - whatever I dreamed of, its threads - -whatever I wished for, its colors - whatever I longed to embrace.

Today, I am the sovereign of this palace, the ruler of my own realm. It is I who decree where each color rests, and where each pattern takes its place.

When the weaving was done, I finally believed in the magic of transformation.

The rug of life, thread by thread, little by little, gently taught me the courage to change. With a soft slope, without battle or bloodshed, it gifted me bravery
And when the weaving was complete, I found myself closer to who I am.

I love myself more deeply, and I have discovered my own worth.”

Masoumeh Zolfaghari - The Weaver Artist

The presented carpets are the result of the collaborative research project “Weaving Memories” by Tahereh Aboofazeli und Arjang Omrani. Ten artist weavers from this region have participated in the „Weaving Memories“ project. Among those, five artist weavers are taking part in the installation in Siegen: Masoumeh Zolfaghari, Asieh Davari, Saheb Jamal Rahimi, Taqan Beik Barzin and Zohreh Parvin. Zoleikha Davari provides additional support with stabilizing weaving work.

The research project “Weaving Memories” presented its first installation of carpets and stories titled WE ARE NOT CARPETS from September 27, 2024, to January 5, 2025, at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne. →website

The second installation will be on view from October 8 to 31, 2025, at POOOL, the cultural project space of gruppe 3/55 e.V. in Siegen (Löhrstrasse 3).” → website

The exhibition is curated by Tahereh Aboofazeli (University of Cologne) and Arjang Omrani (Ghent University) in cooperation with the DFG funded Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1187) "Media of Cooperation" at the University of Siegen. 

About | Program Highlights | Registration | Program outline 

About the Conference

The ongoing Russian full-scale war against Ukraine is documented not only by institutions but also by civilians who record and share their experiences via digital platforms. Among these, Telegram continues to play a crucial role as a space for coordination, expression, information exchange, and collective sense-making (Nazaruk, 2022). As part of an ongoing collaboration between the “War Sensing” project (European University Viadrina and the CRC “Media of Cooperation”) and the Telegram Archive of the War (Center for Urban History in Lviv), the three-day event “War Sensing through the Telegram Archive of the War” aims to re-actualise the role of digital archives in the rapidly changing digital and political environment.

The Telegram Archive of the War (further: the Archive), curated by the Center for Urban History in Lviv, captures the digital dimension of the war. Since February 2022, the Center has been systematically archiving public Telegram channels related to the war, including those used for evacuation, OSINT, mutual aid, memes, infrastructures, or local reporting. The Archive, therefore, offers a unique basis for empirical, inventive and interpretive research into how war is experienced, represented and documented. Our collaboration during this conference and data sprint builds on the previous data sprint with the Archive organised in 2022 (see Bareikytė et al. 2024), and aims to update research on digital platform archives with contemporary questions and approaches.

The final programme, including the Zoom links, will be sent to registered participants. 

Program highlights

The event consists of

• a pre-conference event in Frankfurt (Oder) (22.09.2025),
• a hybrid conference featuring keynote talks and tutorials (23.09.2025),
• and a hybrid data sprint incl. hands-on work with the Archive’s data during the two-day datasprint (23-25.09.2025).

On the Data Sprint

During the data sprint, we would like to invite scholars, artists, civic tech and OSINT communities, journalists, and civil society actors to work collaboratively with selected datasets from the Archive. 

The data sprint participants will explore curated datasets and can join to (collaboratively or individually) work on the following themes/projects: detention and filtration, sabotage, crowd witnessing (cf. Andén-Papadopoulos, 2013) and trustworthiness of OSINT outputs (cf. Digital Method Initiative, 2024).

Data sprint working group projects:

1. Detention Centers

This project group aims to systematically map detention centers established by occupying forces in Ukraine's territories. During the data sprint the group will focus on the use and perception of detention centers—both formal and makeshift. The group explores the evidentiary and investigative potential of Telegram data in identifying possible detention sites, tracking forced relocations and narratives of capture and imprisonment, and understanding civilian-led search practices to enable advocacy and accountability efforts for deported and missing Ukrainian children. 

2. Sabotage

This project argues that, alongside disinformation, contemporary sabotage and the growing number of unexplained attacks are fuelling fears about the future of Europe, including Ukraine and beyond. At the same time, sabotage can contribute to acts of resistance, which can destabilise the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine. Using data selected from the Telegram Archive of War, this project aims to categorise narratives of sabotage in Ukraine in 2022-23. The project's overarching goal is to explore how sabotage is portrayed on Telegram and to illustrate its role as a contemporary form of destabilisation and resistance during wartime.

3. Witnessing the War

The outbreak of the full-scale invasion became visible through Telegram as citizens of Ukrainian cities turned to urban chats to share and corroborate their experiences due to the lack of official news coverage. The Telegram Archive of the War creates a unified message feed that documents the chronological development and regional variations of the collective witnessing of the first days of the invasion. The goal of this project is to analyse more specifically what wartime practices are represented in the archived dataset.

4. Assessing trustworthiness of OSINT outputs on Telegram

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) outputs became an important way for thoroughly analysing events during Russia’s war against Ukraine, such as tracking military movements or crowdsourcing information. Nevertheless, the flood of user-generated content on Telegram raises serious challenges for assessing its reliability and trustworthiness. Existing evaluation frameworks, such as the “Amsterdam Matrix” (Digital Method Initiative, 2024) on assessing trustworthiness of OSINT-labelled posts on Twitter/X, offer guidance but cannot simply be transferred to another platform, such as Telegram, where unique styles, cultures, and formats shape how information is disseminated. This project therefore further develops a systematic methodology tailored to Telegram, aiming to improve the reliability of OSINT verification and accelerate the detection of misinformation.

Registration

The hybrid conference, combined with the data sprint, offers the possibility to join the event in Frankfurt (Oder)/Słubice, Lviv, or online.

To participate, please send a short email to warsensing[ae]europa-uni.de by 15.09.2025, expressing your interest to join the public keynote events.

If you would like to participate in the data sprint, please specify which project group during the data sprint you want to join. We will follow up with more details and an updated schedule closer to the event.

This data sprint is part of the ongoing collaboration between the “War Sensing” project (European University Viadrina and the CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation”) with Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė and Johanna Hiebl and the Telegram Archive of War (Center for Urban History in Lviv) with Taras Nazaruk.

Program Outline

22.09.2025: Pre-Conference event in Frankfurt/Oder (on-site & in German)

Presentation and Reading with Q&A, 18:00-19:30 CET
moderated by Johanna Hiebl (European University Viadrina)

Das Russland-Netzwerk. Wie der Kreml die deutsche Demokratie angreift [The Russia Network: How the Kremlin is attacking German democracy]
by Susanne Spahn (University of Passau)

23.09.2025: Hybrid Conference in Frankfurt/Oder & Lviv (online)

Keynote lecture, 10:00–10:45 CET [11:00–11:45 EET in Lviv]
moderated by Johanna Hiebl (European University Viadrina)

Telegram Archive of the War – Context and Curatorial Ethics
by Taras Nazaruk (Center for Urban History, Lviv)

Evening Public Talks, 17:00–19:00 CET [18:00–20:00 EET in Lviv]
moderated by Miglė Bareikytė (European University Viadrina)

Labour of Witnessing
by Asia Bazdyrieva (The University of Applied Arts Vienna) and Svitlana Matviyenko (Simon Fraser University)

Detention and Filtration Practices
with Daria Hetmanova (Simon Fraser University)

23.-25.09.2025:  Hybrid Data Sprint  in Frankfurt (Oder) and Lviv (online)

Tutorials on the Telegram Archive
23.09.: 16:00-18:00 CET  [17:00–19:00 Lviv]

Hands-on work with the Telegram Archive
24.&25.09.: 09:00-17:00 CET [10:00–18:00 Lviv]

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), big data processing, and synthetic media has profoundly reshaped how culture is produced, made sense of, and experienced today. To ‘synthesize’ is to assemble, collate, and compile, blending heterogeneous components into something new. Where there is synthesis, there is power at play. Synthetic media—as exemplified by the oddly prophetic early speech synthesizer demos—carry the logic of analog automation into digital cultures where human and algorithmic interventions converge. Much of the research in this area—spanning subjects as diverse as augmented reality, avatars, and deepfakes—has revolved around ideas of simulation, focusing on the manipulation of data and content people produce and consume. Meanwhile, generative AI and deep learning models, while central to debates on artificiality, raise political questions as part of a wider social ecosystem where technology is perpetually reimagined, negotiated, and contested: What images and stories feed the datasets that contemporary AI models are trained on? Which imaginaries are reproduced through AI-driven media technologies and which remain latent? How do synthetic media transform relations of power and visibility, and what methods—perhaps equally synthetic—can we develop to analyze these transformations? 

The five-day event at the University of Siegen—organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers Media of Cooperation and Transformations of the Popular together with the Center of Digital Narratives in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture—explores the relationship between synthetic media and today’s imaginaries of culture and technology, which incorporate AI as an active participant. By “synthetic,” we refer not simply to the artificial but to how specific practices and ways of knowing take shape through human-machine co-creation. Imaginaries, in turn, reflect shared visions, values, and expectations—shaping not only what technologies do but how they are perceived and made actionable in everyday life. 

The event opens with a one-day conference and moves into hands-on workshops and project work. 

Mix questions! Monday, 8 September

Day one begins with a keynote by Jill Walker Rettberg and opens space for emerging questions—think of it as an idea hub. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions curated by the organising team. Presenters will be connected via email ahead of time to coordinate their contributions. Each presentation will be set to 10 minutes to allow ample time for discussion, collective thinking, and exchange. The emphasis is on dialogue, not polished conclusions.  

Mix methods! Tuesday, 9 September-Thursday, 11 September

The next three days—featuring a workshop by Gabriele De Seta and an artistic intervention by Ángeles Briones and DensityDesign Lab—are about exploring new methods—hands-on! We invite you to join a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers in probing new methodological combinations. Each of our project teams will present a research question alongside a specific method to be collaboratively explored. Participants will not only learn how to design prompts and work with AI-generated text and images but also how to critically account for genAI models as platform models. All projects draw on intersectional approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative data to explore the synthetic dimensions of AI agency—whether as content creator, noise generator, hallucinator, research collaborator, data annotator, or style imitator. Please bring your laptops. The project titles will be announced soon. 

Synthesize! Friday, 12 September

The final day is dedicated to sharing, reflecting, and synthesizing the questions, methods, and insights developed throughout the week. Project teams will present their collaborative processes, highlight key takeaways, and discuss how their ideas and approaches shifted through hands-on experimentation with methods.

Registration

The event is free of charge, though attendees are responsible for arranging and covering their travel and accommodation in Siegen. Limited travel support is available (two to three stipends ranging from €500 to €700). Early-career researchers and PhD students are invited to apply; stipends will be awarded by the NFDI4Culture consortium based on the strength of the justification, particularly concerning critical ethical engagement with AI research data, as well as the distance and cost of travel. Short summaries of the presented work will be published on the NFDI4Culture website.

A certificate of participation will be issued for both the conference presentation and the hands-on workshop sessions.

The Registration closed on August 1 2025.

The Autumn School is organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers Media of Cooperation (SFB 1187) and Transformations of the Popular (SFB 1472) together with the Center of Digital Narrative in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture –