»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.
