Breaking and Making Models
Published on 20. May 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
VI, 391 pages
978-3-96558-085-5 (ISBN)
Description
Practically anything can be a model of or for something else. What characterizes models is rather their specific reductive relationality, which often promotes understanding but is always generative rather than merely representational. The essays in Breaking and Making Models engage with the normative and performative qualities of models, their aesthetic and political dimensions, and their world-making potentials. Bringing such perspectives into a broad interdisciplinary dialogue, this book explores ways to work creatively with models.
Reviews / Votes
In this exceptionally diverse collection of essays, Breaking and Making Models casts a wide net to address the multifaceted nature of models and modelling. In this, Holzhey, Kesting, and Peppel marshal a plethora of perspectives to address this broad topic. By drawing on sources ranging from history and philosophy of science, cultural studies, biology, aesthetics, and others, the essays make for an appropriately eclectic experience that breaks the mould of the vast literature surrounding the topic of models and modelling. In this endeavor, they are successful. Not only does the book directly address traditional topics such as representation, it also openly engages in the political, legal, aesthetic, and general intellectual import of the topic. In support of this, the volume also connects to vividly diverse examples, moving effortlessly from large language models to the model organism Physarum polycephalum. This book is recommended for those seeking a refreshing view on models and modelling, especially when challenging one's own discipline-specific views on the topics contained therein. - Daniel Brooks, research fellow, Fresh Pond Research Institute.More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Berlin
Germany
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
653 gr
ISBN-13
978-3-96558-085-5 (9783965580855)
DOI
10.37050/ci-33
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Editor
Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which he has led since 2007. He holds PhDs in theoretical physics (1993) and German literature (2001). He has run several projects at the ICI Berlin and has (co-)edited several volumes, including Tension/ Spannung (2010), Multistable Figures (2014), De/Constituting Wholes (2017), Re- (2019), Weathering (2020), ERRANS (2022), and The Case for Reduction (2022).
Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which he has led since 2007. He holds PhDs in theoretical physics (1993) and German literature (2001). He has run several projects at the ICI Berlin and has (co-)edited several volumes, including Tension/ Spannung (2010), Multistable Figures (2014), De/Constituting Wholes (2017), Re- (2019), Weathering (2020), ERRANS (2022), and The Case for Reduction (2022).
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Marietta Kesting is a media and cultural theorist, currently working as research coordinator at the ICI Berlin and as leader of the FWF-funded project 'Future Dreaming in the Arts' in Vienna. From 2016 to 2022 she held a junior professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, and from 2022 to 2024 she taught at the University of Potsdam. She most recently co-edited the volumes Human after Man (with Susanne Witzgall, German in print 2022, English as e-book 2024) and Landschaft, Wetter, Kraut und Kritter ( FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, 75, 2025, with Kerstin Brandes).
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Claudia Peppel is in charge of academic coordination and communication at the ICI Berlin. She studied Italian and French literature at the Freie Universität Berlin and at La Sapienza in Rome and holds a PhD in philosophy from Technische Universität Darmstadt. Her publications focus on literary and cultural studies, as well as aesthetics, art history, and visual culture. She has taught at Berlin University of the Arts and has curated exhibitions of contemporary art. In 2019, she co-edited the volume Die Kunst des Wartens (with Brigitte Kölle), on the topic of waiting in the arts.
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Content
Introduction | CHRISTOPH F. E. HOLZHEY, MARIETTA KESTINGCLAUDIA PEPPEL | 1-17
TRANSFERRING MODELS BETWEEN THE ARTS AND THE SCIENCES
Models as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand Deligny | ASTRID DEUBER-MANKOWSKY | 21-45
Abstraction as Strategy for Worldmaking | JULIA SÁNCHEZ-DORADO | 47-77
From Climate Model to Climate Fiction: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future as Operative Literature | ROSS SHIELDS | 79-107
The Slime Mould's Many Bodies, or Modelling Networks with Physarum polycephalum | MARIA DEBINSKA | 109-130
PERFORMING MODELS
Persistence: Model Asylum Narratives and a Recognizable 'Transgenderness' | B CAMMINGA | 133-154
The Statistical Cloud of Race: Lancelot Hogben's Anti-Eugenics between Populations and Organisms | BEN WOODARD | 155-179
Crises in Modelling: Articulations of the Romanian Labour Market in the Long 1990s | ALINA-SANDRA CUCU | 181-200
Models, Markets, and Artificial Intelligence: A Brief History of our Speculative Present | ORIT HALPERN | 201-215
Large Language Models, Parrots, and Children: Modelling Speech, Text, and Learning Processes | MARIETTA KESTING | 217-238
MODELLING AT THE MARGINS
Modelling Institutions, Instituting Models: The Juridification of Politics and the Performative Power of Naming | NATASCIA TOSEL | 241-262
Aesthetic Modelling at the Limit of the Human Montage | MARTA ALEKSANDROWICZ | 263-285
The Exophonic Lyric: A Poetics | MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN | 287-321
Towards a Genealogy of Moffie: Troubling the Binary Model of Understanding either Homosexuality or Homophobia as Un-African | RUTH RAMSDEN-KARELSE | 323-341
References
Notes on the Contributors
Index