Earth systems models, and perhaps sciences more generally, excite experiments in making ensembles.

But rather than regarding earth as an experimental object, this chapter turns to earth systems models as experimental practices in constituting ensembles. It is less concerned with the epistemic features of the models in describing earth processes and more with how models re-configure relations in an ensemble. I work again here with the presentiment that ensembles have some different propensities to the operating system, machines, devices or to their pre-eminent contemporary arrangement as platforms.

Ensembles are interesting precisely because they lack the internal regulation of a machine, and they do not circulate in concretized detachment in the way certain technical elements may do. Ensembles differ from other technical configurations in that they constrain internal couplings, or mutual conditionings. But their composition as ensembles depends on a ‘margin of indetermination’ (Simondon 1989, 12).

For Simondon, the margin of indetermination plays out in the ‘inter-commutativity’ of the ensemble not in its emergence with an associated milieu/background/middle (1989, 73).

Earth and science and technology studies

What does science and technology studies (STS) actually say about the world and what it is made up of? Increasingly, recent STS speaks directly of earth, its places, surfaces, flows and histories. And while this work might seem to lie at some remove from the data centres, terminals, hash functions, graphics processing or functional closures of app programming, platforms are affected by it.