Breaking and Making Models

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.

About the Author :
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). 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). 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.

Review :
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. Breaking and Making Models shows what truly interdisciplinary collaboration and communication can do. The book provides interpretations and politically challenging critiques of models and their limits, from perspectives across the social sciences and humanities, and sets them in conversation with one another. Together, the essays that make up this theoretically and narratively rich text expand our understanding of how models represent and govern our social practices and collective imagination. - Quill R Kukla, Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies, Georgetown University