»Drift. Sink. Emerge. Repeat«
Multimodal Exhibition and accompanying Program (film, walks, performance, workshops)
to the STS-Hub 2025 »Diffracting the Critical«
curated by Petra Beck, Maxime le Calve und Robert Stock
To care for multimodal works in STS is to recognize their fragility—not in the sense of weakness, but in their resistant potential to the dominant infrastructures of academic legitimacy, that favors textual permanence, skepticism, and a refusal to be swept away. Multimodal scholarship, in its collaborative, multimedia-based, and inventive dimensions, does not thrive on detachment. It calls instead for submersion—for an entangled, situated, and processual way of engaging with knowledges and materialities. And yet, in its diffractive nature, multimodal works remain vulnerable, as they unsettle the text-based infrastructures that have long functioned as stronghold of conventional scholarship. Text, stored in journals and books or circulating across repositories, is safeguarded against loss and doubt, while multimodal forms—video, sound, installation, interactive media—often risk erasure, misunderstanding, and exclusion. Caring for the multimodal, at STS HUB 2025 and elsewhere, means the challenge of curating and hosting these contributions as part of a living and evolving project.
To address this challenge, we initiated an experimental publication process in a radical open access format, drawing on the research practices of one of the working group members[undefined]. Caring for multimodal work means ensuring that it counts—that it is accounted for, cited, and made available in ways that sustain its impact beyond the event of its presentation. Publishing these works in a catalogue is not an attempt to capture their full multimodal complexity, but rather a recognition that their closest available format of valuation is that of the artwork. The exhibition catalogue serves this purpose: not as a mere record, but as a way of extending the life and accessibility of these works into the networks of scholarship, giving them a citability that allows for their repetition, for their REPEAT in cycles of knowledge-making.
Submersion as a Diffractive Practice
Forming a crucial part of the STS HUB 25 “Diffracting the Critical”, this exhibition embraces submersion as a method for diffractive scholarship. Inspired by the work of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, Drift. Sink. Emerge. Repeat explores what it means to be submerged in the generative currents of knowledge —where researcher, material, and medium co-produce meaning in ways that defy the distanced objectifying, isolating gaze of conventional critique. Submersion is not about losing oneself entirely but about embracing the porous, shifting, and processual nature of knowledge-making. Submersion is a practice of “being within.”
Drift. Sink. Emerge. Repeat., almost as a motto, embodies the conference’s call to diffract the critical by embracing submersion as a mode of knowledge-making that is relational, processual, and inventive. As Bruno Latour famously warned, critique may have “run out of steam” if it remains confined to deconstruction and unmasking.[undefined] The multimodal, experimental, and collaborative works in this exhibition take up the challenge of doing critique otherwise, through an entangled engagement with the material and sensory dimensions of inquiry. These works resonate with feminist and environmental STS, postcolonial studies, and the more-than-human ontologies that have expanded the terrain of critical thought, moving it beyond text-based infrastructures and into the realm of practice, mediation, and intervention.
Multimodal research, as explored in this exhibition, enacts critique through a diffractive process that does not simply observe or reflect but generates patterns of interference that make meaning material. As Donna Haraway and Karen Barad remind us, diffraction does not merely map where differences appear; it follows these patterns of “difference that make a difference”, it traces the effects of those differences, the new entanglements and realignments they produce. The works in Drift. Sink. Emerge. Repeat. enact epistemic and aesthetic experiments that trouble dominant ways of knowing. By engaging with sound, image, installation, performance, and digital media, these works do critique rather than merely stating it, positioning knowledge as something that moves, shifts, and transforms in practice.
This exhibition moves through four key operations of diffractive submersion – Drift. Sink. Emerge. Repeat. – each a necessary movement in the unfolding of multimodal STS research. These are not steps in a sequence but entangled, recursive processes that transform how knowledge is made and how it matters.
Drift.
Drifting is a mode of navigation that resists linearity and control. It acknowledges that knowledge is not fixed but emerges through movement, through the interference patterns of multiple trajectories converging and diverging. In multimodal research, to drift is to engage with what appears in motion, to let meaning be shaped by the diffractive interplay of perspectives, media, and material conditions, to be carried by the streams and currents. Just as diffraction patterns show the effects of differences rather than merely their location, drifting is an openness to what difference does, to the forms of thought and practice it enables. Unlike the rigidity of pre-mapped epistemologies, diffractive submersion in multimodal STS demands a drifting methodology, one that values uncertainty, improvisation, and the contingent unfolding of research encounters.
Sink.
To sink is to relinquish the stable ground of certainty. It is the necessary first movement of diffractive submersion—letting go of the distanced gaze that has structured Western epistemology and dissolving into the entanglement of matter and meaning. Sinking means saying no to the rescue vest of objectivity, recognizing that to know is to be caught within the phenomenon. It is a practice dedicated to generative strangeness and effective bewilderment. Multimodal research—whether through fieldwork, sound, image, or intervention—begins by sinking into the event, into the relational networks that make knowledge possible. Like dropping into deep water, it is an act of trust, of attunement to the more-than-human forces shaping inquiry. In Barad’s terms, it is the moment of intra-action, where the knower and the known emerge together, where neither can claim priority.[undefined]
Emerge.
Emerging is never a return to the surface as one was before. Submersion, once entered, cannot be undone; it alters the conditions of both knower and known. To emerge is to come into a new configuration, to materialize knowledge that is neither extractive nor reductive, but a consequence of being-with the phenomenon under study. Diffractive emergence does not produce fixed conclusions but situated effects, patterns of meaning that respond to the specific historical, material, and epistemic conditions of inquiry. In multimodal research, emergence often takes the form of experimental articulations—installations, performances, films, digital compositions—that make knowledge felt as well as understood. It is where the entanglement of research and researcher is rendered visible, where making and knowing coalesce into form.
Repeat.
Repetition in diffractive submersion is not a return to the same, but the ongoing reconfiguration of what matters. To repeat is to acknowledge that research, like diffraction itself, does not simply conclude but continues to generate new patterns of difference that make a difference.[undefined] The multimodal must be repeated in order to count, to be taken seriously within scholarly infrastructures that privilege text over embodied, aesthetic, and experimental modes of knowing. The exhibition catalogue, as a citational act, is part of this repetition—it allows for the multimodal to persist, to be taken up, to interfere with and reshape what scholarship can be. In repeating, knowledge is not merely sustained but made again and otherwise, in ways that refuse fixity and invite ongoing transformation.
Subthemes
Ecologies and Infrastructures
Submersion, as an ecological practice, invites us to experience human and more-than-human relations not as static or external but as dynamic entanglements. The works of this section attune us to the material, affective, and discursive dimensions of ecological themes, revealing how knowledge emerges through situated, responsive, and relational engagements. By submerging in these interconnected systems, we encounter not just environments but vibrant worlds that call for care, attunement, and response-ability.
Collaborations and Solidarities
Collaboration in STS is never neutral—it is a mode of working and knowing that is shaped by power, friction, and ethics. Submersion in collaborative practice means accepting the uncertainty, vulnerability, and mutual reciprocal accountability that comes with co-creation. The works in this section explore the solidarities that emerge from shared submersion, from entanglements in research, art, activism, and community building. Here, submersion dissolves the boundaries between academic and non-academic spaces, reminding us that knowledge is always co-produced in dialogue with others. This section not only displays works, but also provides space for collaboration, sharing, playful exploration, and practiced solidarities.
Scales and Temporalities
Submersion unsettles fixed notions of scale and time, revealing how knowledge-making unfolds across overlapping, asynchronous, and non-linear rhythms. The pieces in this section move fluidly across scales, from the microscopic to the planetary, from the historical to the speculative. By submerging in these shifting temporal and spatial logics, audiences are invited to sense the interwoven complexities that shape the conditions of knowledge, action, and modes of resistance.
Film Program
In this section, moving images take us into the depths of diffractive submersion. Thus, films are not merely representations but entangled interventions, tracing the effects of knowledge in motion. They invite us to drift through shifting perspectives, sink into relations, emerge transformed, and repeat the process of knowing otherwise.
Drift. Sink. Emerge. Repeat.
Diffractive submersion does not produce stable foundations but instead invites continuous reconfigurations of meaning and matter. Each iteration of drifting, sinking, emerging, and repeating reshapes the conditions of knowledge, making space for collaborative, inventive, and multimodal engagements that resist disciplinary enclosure. The works in this exhibition enact these movements of diffractive engagement, embodying the fragility, vitality, and persistence of multimodal inquiry. To drift is to move with the currents of thought and practice. To sink is to let go of certainty. To emerge is to surface transformed. And to repeat is to carry these encounters forward, sustaining the multimodal in an academic world that too often resists it.
By embracing submersion, we refuse to stand outside of knowledge. Instead, we move with it, shaping and being shaped, sensing its textures, and tracing its transformations. In this way, Drift. Sink. Emerge. Repeat. is not just an exhibition—it is an invitation to step into the currents of multimodal STS and allow its generative forces to take hold.
More information can be found here:
https://drift-sink-emerge-repeat.pubpub.org/