Welcome to the Art & Science repository for the academic year 2065/27. Here you will find a growing collection of teaching-related materials such as lecture presentations, literature, and media. In a separate section, you can also access the repository dedicated to this year’s topic: Models (of the World).
REPOSITORY of slides and medias used in Martin’s lectures
Slides
Usefull on line resources (DOC)
Literature
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Movies
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Activities Images
26/27 YEARLY TOPIC: Models (of the world)
Models are everywhere. They appear as mathematical equations and physical prototypes, maps and diagrams, architectural maquettes and scientific simulations. A model can be a person posing in a drawing class, an organism standing in for a species, an example to follow, or an artificial intelligence trained on vast amounts of data. Despite these very different meanings, models share a peculiar relationship with something beyond themselves: they stand for, simplify, embody, test, predict, or propose something else.
Models are fundamental tools of both scientific inquiry and artistic practice. We build them because the world is too complex, too large, too small, too distant – or sometimes simply not yet there – to be approached directly. Models isolate relationships, test assumptions, communicate ideas and explore possibilities. Their power lies in selection and reduction: in deciding what matters and what can, at least temporarily, be left aside.
Modelling is therefore an active and consequential process. Something becomes a model because someone decides what should be represented, which relationships are significant and which can be ignored. Who makes a model, for whom and for what purpose? What enters it, what disappears, and what might emerge unexpectedly in the process?
These questions also complicate the relationship between model and world. An architectural model may refer to a building that does not yet exist. A climate model describes processes that can never be encountered as a single object. A mathematical model may have no obvious material original at all, while fictional and speculative models can construct possible worlds of their own. Modelling can move from an existing phenomenon towards abstraction, but also from an idea, hypothesis or fiction towards something that might eventually become real.
Scientific and artistic practices both work within this productive distance. Models can make inaccessible phenomena available for observation and experiment; sketches, maquettes, scores, diagrams, simulations and fictional scenarios allow relationships to be rearranged and possibilities tested. In doing so, models can reveal structures that were not apparent before. They do not simply show what is already known. They can make something visible, thinkable or knowable in the first place.
And models can act back upon the world. Maps organise territories, economic and climate models inform decisions, architectural models anticipate environments that may subsequently be built. Digital technologies intensify this feedback. A digital twin can become part of the system it was designed to describe. Machine-learning models classify, generate, recommend, decide and communicate. What does model mean when a model no longer only represents something, but begins to act within the world – and even talks back to us?
The gaps, omissions and failures of models are equally revealing. Models can be inaccurate, biased, outdated, deceptive or simply confronted with something they were never designed to accommodate. Yet the discrepancy between a model and the world can itself produce knowledge. It may expose hidden assumptions, reveal what has been excluded, or open possibilities that a supposedly accurate representation would not.
Models have always participated in changing ways of understanding the world. Globes, anatomical figures, perspective drawings, maps and mathematical abstractions do more than preserve particular worldviews. By selecting and arranging relationships, they help establish what can be seen as evidence, what can be known and what can be imagined as real. Sometimes models describe worlds; sometimes they anticipate them; and sometimes the world begins to resemble its models.
This year's topic invites students to approach modelling as an experimental practice across art and science: to investigate existing models and their assumptions, to test their limits, take them apart, misuse or reinvent them, and to imagine models for things that have so far resisted representation.
What other models might we need to understand a world that is changing around us? What happens if we model relationships, uncertainties, transformations or possible futures? Can we invent models that do more than explain what already exists – models that allow us to think differently, perceive differently, and imagine worlds that have not yet taken shape?
The challenge is not only to understand the models we already have, but to discover what else a model could be – and what other worlds it might enable us to think.
SOME LITERATURE related to Models (of the World)
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (1978)
Goodman challenges the assumption that there is one world that our representations simply describe more or less accurately. Through art, science, language and other symbolic systems, we construct different “versions” of worlds by selecting, ordering, combining and emphasising aspects of experience. His concept of worldmaking offers a particularly productive connection to the question of what “of the World” might mean in our yearly topic.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1994 [1981]), especially “The Precession of Simulacra”
Baudrillard radically questions the traditional relationship between model, representation and original. In simulation, models and signs can cease to refer to a stable reality and instead participate in producing what is experienced as real. Whether or not one follows Baudrillard’s conclusions, the text provides a provocative way of asking what happens when the distinction between model and world begins to collapse.
Mary S. Morgan & Margaret Morrison (eds.), Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Science (1999)
This influential collection examines models as more than representations or applications of theory. Models operate as mediators between theory and the world: they can be constructed, manipulated and explored in order to generate knowledge. The book offers a useful foundation for thinking about modelling as an active epistemic practice.
Soraya de Chadarevian & Nick Hopwood (eds.), Models: The Third Dimension of Science (2004)
This collection explores the history and use of three-dimensional models in scientific practice, from anatomical and biological models to representations of molecules and other phenomena. It foregrounds the materiality of modelling and shows how models can function as instruments of research, communication and teaching. Particularly relevant is the way physical models move between scientific, educational and visual cultures.
Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison, Objectivity (2007)
Daston and Galison trace the changing ideals that have shaped scientific images and practices of observation since the eighteenth century. Rather than treating objectivity as a timeless scientific value, they show how different ways of producing and interpreting images have constructed different forms of scientific knowledge. The book raises a central question for our topic: how do representations help determine what can be seen and accepted as evidence?
Eric Winsberg, Science in the Age of Computer Simulation (2010)
Winsberg examines computer simulation as a distinctive way of producing scientific knowledge. He investigates how simulations combine theories, mathematical models, approximations, computational techniques and empirical knowledge, and asks how we can establish confidence in their results. The book is particularly useful for thinking about climate models and other situations in which experimentation on the world itself is difficult or impossible.
James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (2018)
Bridle examines the paradox that unprecedented access to computation, data and information does not necessarily make the world more intelligible. Scientific models, algorithms and computational infrastructures can illuminate complex phenomena while also producing new forms of opacity and uncertainty. Written from the perspective of an artist and writer, the book provides an accessible bridge between technology, politics, culture and artistic practice.
Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (2021)
Crawford approaches artificial intelligence not as an immaterial or autonomous technology but as a material and political system dependent on data, human labour, natural resources and systems of classification. Her analysis makes visible what disappears behind apparently abstract computational models. The book is particularly relevant to questions of selection, categorisation, bias and the material conditions underlying AI models.
Knuuttila, Grüne-Yanoff, Koskinen, Wirling (eds.), Modeling the Possible: Perspectives from Philosophy of Science (2025)
This collection examines how scientific models are used not only to describe what is or has been the case, but to investigate what could be possible. Drawing on examples from climate science, economics, biology and other fields, the contributions explore how models construct and test spaces of possibility, hypothetical scenarios and alternative worlds. Particularly relevant to Models (of the World) is the idea of modelling as a practice for exploring realities that do not yet exist – or may never exist – while asking how we can justify the possibilities that models allow us to imagine.
More to come…
⇒ For all available e-books click here
SOME MOVIES related to Models (of the World)
Alain Resnais, L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961)
In an elaborate hotel, a man tries to convince a woman that they met there the previous year, while she denies or cannot remember the encounter. Architecture, repetition, memory and contradictory narratives continually reorganise the possible past. Rather than establishing a definitive version of events, the film constructs competing models of what might have happened.
Chris Marker, La Jetée (1962)
After a devastating war, a man is selected for experiments in time travel because of his unusually powerful attachment to an image from his childhood. Memory becomes the means through which past and future are reconstructed, until the remembered image and the event it represents become inseparable. The film offers a particularly concise exploration of memory as a model through which reality is continually reconstructed.
Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville (1965)
In the futuristic city of Alphaville, everyday life is governed by the computer Alpha 60 according to principles of logic, efficiency and calculation. Emotion, poetry and ambiguity are progressively eliminated from a society organised according to its computational system. The film raises the question of what happens when a rational model no longer describes the world but begins to organise it.
Jacques Tati, Playtime (1967)
Tati transforms modern Paris into a seemingly endless environment of glass, grids, identical interiors, traffic systems and standardised behaviour. Architecture, objects and social conventions appear to follow the same rational model, while accidents, misunderstandings and spontaneous encounters continually disrupt its order. Playtime can therefore be seen as a comedy about the discrepancy between designed systems and lived reality.
Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1972)
A psychologist travels to a space station orbiting Solaris, a planet whose mysterious ocean materialises figures drawn from the memories of the scientists studying it. These manifestations are at once copies, reconstructions and autonomous beings, destabilising any clear distinction between memory, model and original. The film asks how we can understand something that produces representations without knowing either their mechanism or their purpose.
John Coney / Sun Ra, Space Is the Place (1974)
Sun Ra returns to Earth from outer space with a plan to transport Black people to another planet, where an alternative society free from racism and oppression might be created. Combining science fiction, music, political satire and Afrofuturist mythology, the film transforms outer space into a speculative site from which existing social realities can be questioned and alternative futures imagined. Rather than modelling the world as it is, Space Is the Place proposes fiction, music and myth as tools for constructing a world that does not yet exist.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Welt am Draht (1973) - Part One - Part Two
At a research institute, scientists operate a computer simulation populated by thousands of artificial inhabitants who are unaware that their world is simulated. As the boundaries between different levels of reality begin to collapse, the film turns into an investigation of perception, control and the possibility of distinguishing model from original. It offers an early and remarkably complex exploration of what happens when a model becomes an inhabitable world.
Charles & Ray Eames, Powers of Ten (1977)
Beginning with a couple having a picnic in Chicago, the film repeatedly changes scale by powers of ten, travelling outward towards the limits of the observable universe and inward towards the subatomic structure of matter. The continuous movement creates an apparently coherent model connecting radically different spatial scales. In doing so, the film demonstrates how scale itself is a conceptual instrument through which the world becomes intelligible.
Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (1979)
A guide known as the Stalker leads two men into the Zone, an anomalous territory in which ordinary assumptions about space, causality and human intention no longer seem reliable. Attempts to understand its rules repeatedly fail as the environment appears to resist prediction. The Zone can be read as a system that exceeds every model constructed to explain it.
Peter Greenaway, The Falls (1980)
Presented as an encyclopaedic documentary, The Falls catalogues ninety-two people whose surnames begin with “Fall” and who have supposedly been affected by a mysterious event known as the Violent Unknown Event. Through biographies, classifications, recurring symptoms and elaborate cross-references, an increasingly complex fictional world emerges from the very system designed to document it. Classification here does not simply organise reality; it actively produces the reality it claims to describe.
Godfrey Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Without conventional dialogue or narrative, Reggio assembles images of landscapes, cities, machines, traffic, production and human activity into rhythmic visual patterns. Through montage and changes of speed, individual actions begin to appear as components of larger technological and social systems. The film can be approached as an audiovisual model that attempts to reveal patterns that are difficult to perceive from within everyday life.
Peter Greenaway, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)
An artist is commissioned to produce a series of precise drawings of an English country estate, believing that careful observation will allow him to record the property objectively. Yet unexplained objects and changes begin appearing within his drawings, suggesting events whose significance he fails to understand. The film becomes a playful investigation of the difference between accurately recording what is visible and actually understanding what it means.
Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (1983)
Moving between travelogue, essay, fiction and documentary, Sans Soleil reflects on memory and on the ways images construct our relationship to places, histories and experiences. Images are repeatedly remembered, rearranged and electronically transformed, making their instability visible. Rather than functioning as neutral records, images become instruments through which different versions of the world are produced.
Lana & Lilly Wachowski, The Matrix (1999)
Human beings unknowingly inhabit a simulated reality generated by machines while their physical bodies exist elsewhere. Beyond its familiar question of whether reality might be a simulation, the film explores what happens when a model becomes the environment through which reality itself is perceived and understood. The simulation is no longer an image of a world but a world with material consequences.
Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York (2008)
A theatre director attempts to create an increasingly comprehensive reconstruction of his life inside an enormous warehouse, eventually building a replica of New York populated by actors playing himself and the people around him. As the production expands, representation and life become impossible to separate. The film pushes modelling towards the paradox of the 1:1 map: what happens when a model attempts to become as complex as the world it represents?
Ryan Coogler, Black Panther (2018)
Hidden from the outside world, the technologically advanced African nation of Wakanda has developed without experiencing colonial conquest and exploitation. Drawing on Afrofuturism, the film constructs a counterfactual model of African modernity in which technological innovation, cultural tradition and political sovereignty have evolved together. Like Space Is the Place, Black Panther uses speculative worldbuilding not simply as an escape from existing reality, but as a way of asking how history might have unfolded differently – and how imagining alternative pasts can open possibilities for different futures.
More to come…
⇒ For all available movies click here
SOME ARTWORKS & ARTISTIC PROJECTS related to Models (of the World)
Yona Friedman, Ville Spatiale – Spatial City (1958–)
Friedman's unrealised Ville Spatiale proposes a large elevated framework above existing cities within which inhabitants would design and construct their own dwellings. Rather than determining a single architectural outcome, the structure establishes a set of conditions within which many different outcomes remain possible. The project offers a particularly useful conception of a model as an open framework with degrees of freedom: it does not prescribe the future world but creates conditions within which its inhabitants can continually remake it.
Archigram / Peter Cook, Plug-In City (1964)
Plug-In City proposes an enormous infrastructural framework into which housing, services and other elements could be inserted, removed and continually replaced. Rather than designing a finished city, Peter Cook created a model for permanent transformation: an urban structure whose individual components remain temporary and adaptable. Drawing and speculative architecture become tools for testing technological and social possibilities rather than blueprints for a building that simply waits to be constructed.
Superstudio, The Continuous Monument (1969)
In a series of drawings and photomontages, Superstudio projected an immense, white gridded structure across cities, landscapes and eventually the entire planet. A radically simplified architectural order is thus imposed upon the complexity of the existing world, turning modernism's desire for rational and universal organisation into an unsettling global vision. The project can be read as both a model of total order and a critique of what happens when a single model is extended everywhere.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield, A Confrontation (1982)
On a landfill in Lower Manhattan, only two blocks from Wall Street, Denes planted and cultivated two acres of wheat on land valued at billions of dollars. The work brought agriculture, food production and ecological processes into direct confrontation with systems of finance, real estate and urban development. Rather than representing an alternative relationship between land, value and resources, Wheatfield temporarily enacted one, suggesting how an artwork might function as a material model of another possible world.
Mark Lombardi, Narrative Structures (1990s)
Lombardi transformed extensive research into large, hand-drawn diagrams mapping relationships between individuals, banks, corporations, governments and political scandals. Based largely on publicly available information, his “narrative structures” radically reduce complex political and economic systems while making connections between their actors newly visible. They demonstrate a fundamental paradox of modelling: abstraction and reduction can reveal structures that remain hidden within an excess of information.
Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube (1963–65)
A transparent Plexiglas cube containing water continuously responds to temperature, light and the presence of viewers as water evaporates and condenses on its surfaces. Influenced by systems theory, biology, ecology and cybernetics, Haacke conceived such works as dynamic processes rather than static representations. Condensation Cube therefore raises a productive question for Models (of the World): where does a model of a system end and an actual functioning system begin?
Allan McCollum, The Shapes Project (2005–)
McCollum devised a combinatorial system capable of generating more than 31 billion unique two-dimensional shapes – enough, in his original conception, for every person on Earth to have an individual one. The shapes can be generated digitally and materialised through printing, carving, CNC production and numerous other techniques. The project operates simultaneously as an algorithm, classification system, model of individuality and almost absurdly ambitious bureaucracy, asking what happens when uniqueness itself is produced systematically.
Kate Crawford & Trevor Paglen, ImageNet Roulette / Training Humans (2019)
Crawford and Paglen investigated the datasets through which computer-vision systems learn to classify human beings. ImageNet Roulette exposed the often racist, misogynistic and absurd categories embedded in ImageNet, while Training Humans examined the longer history of images used to train machines to recognise and categorise people. The projects shift attention from what an AI model “sees” to the human decisions through which its categories of reality are constructed: who models whom, according to which categories, and with what consequences?
Pierre Huyghe, After ALife Ahead (2017)
Created in a former ice rink, Huyghe's installation brought together architecture, water, bacteria, algae, bees, human cancer cells, an aquarium, a genetic algorithm, augmented reality and an automated ceiling into an evolving biological-technological environment. Processes within the work affected one another rather than following a predetermined sequence. Instead of representing an ecosystem, After ALife Ahead behaves like an experimental ecosystem itself, blurring the distinction between model, experiment and autonomous system.
Tomás Saraceno, Aerocene / Cloud Cities (ongoing)
Saraceno's long-term projects combine art, architecture, environmental research and experiments with solar-powered flight to imagine alternative forms of inhabiting the atmosphere. Cloud Cities develops speculative floating architectures, while Aerocene has moved from proposition towards functioning aerosolar vehicles capable of flight without fossil fuels. These works are particularly relevant because the model precedes the possible original: speculation, physical experimentation and prototype become successive stages through which another form of inhabiting the world is tested into existence.