Panel Discussion & Opening Reception | Media and Modernity: 25 Years of Thinking through Mediation

M+M x25 exhibition curated by Beatriz Colomina, Foivos Geralis, and Antonio Cantero 
at the Princeton University School of Architecture
Open March 3 – May 1, 2026

Panel discussion featuring Beatriz Colomina, Hal Foster, Devin Fore, Irene Small, Tom Levin, Spyros Papapetros, Sylvia Lavin, S.E. Eisterer, and Eduardo Cadava.

Exhibition Opening and Reception – 6.30 pm
North Gallery, School of Architecture

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The M+Mx25 exhibition offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of an ongoing experiment: the Media and Modernity program launched at Princeton University in 2000. M+M has operated as a single continuous 25-year seminar, bringing faculty and students from all over the university each week to a concrete and glass room in a brutalist building to explore the evolving entanglements of media and modernities in dialogue with a guest scholar or artist. Around a crowded table in room N-107, discussion is privileged over formal presentations, proximity over detachment, bodies over technologies. Paradoxically, M+M has always been analog, low tech, and low budget.

This perpetual conversation has drawn people from more than 30 departments and centers at Princeton into dialogue with more than 475 guest speakers. Parallel M+M seminar courses each semester, often co-taught between disciplines, incubated extended research trajectories, conferences, and publications. The intensity of intellectual energy in a single room has generated an explosion outward through the university and beyond to more than 16 countries with major research exhibitions, conferences, books, film projects, and digital platforms. The low-tech gathering of different voices and initiatives became a media explosion.

M+Mx25 presents this concentration of ideas and people in a single room and the centrifugal force it generated outwards across disciplines, institutions, geographies, and technologies. Rather than presenting a unified narrative, the exhibition assembles M+M as a working archive: the partial, uneven, and cumulative traces of an ongoing collaborative experiment. Both “media” and “modernity” shifted over the last 25 years. Early discussions of architecture, visual culture, and mass media expanded into infrastructures, environments, geopolitics, and planetary systems. Slides, tape recordings and videos gave way to digital files. Yet key questions persisted. Many voices from different fields were there from the beginning until now. Many guests returned with their latest work. The shared thinking in N-107 released an ever-expanding chain reaction of effects. M+Mx25 brings it all back into a single room adjacent to the one that incubated it and where the joint labor of thought continues.