Panel «Hybridising Environmentality» at STS-CH 2025

Digital Twin Engine: synthetic imaginaries of Earth

Guillemette Legrand, Joan Llort

This paper discusses the shifting techno-politics of climate modelling practices through the increasing integration of AI processes into traditional (physical) models. This integration results in so-called hybrid models, or even in some cases, in supplanting climate models with deep learning weather and climate algorithms. We propose to look at this shift through the case of the Digital Twin Engine, an interface described as the orchestrator of the digital twins, configuring a new form of data handling and interactivity within the European project Destination Earth. We explore the computational modalities through which the Earth’s twin formulates and anticipates climate imaginaries through asking: What are the limitations of the Earth’s twinning? Are digital twins more clones or counterfeits? How does the Digital Twin Engine ‘twins’, what is excluded or misrepresented in this process, and how is this communicated back to the ones operating it? We will document the limitations of ‘twinning’ the Earth in the context of the Digital Twin Engine, through mapping its reliance on synthetic data to train AI algorithms, the mimicking of existing large climate models with their uncertainties, and finally, the gamification of Earth’s simulation through an engine interface. This paper documents but also speculates about the socio-technical imaginaries of the Digital Twin Engine in the anticipation of its full-scale launch.

Hybridity and fragmentation at the peripheries of digital infrastructures

Cristina Cochior, Helen V. Pritchard

This paper looks at how infrastructural scale shapes the epistemic valuations attached to “hybridity” and “fragmentation” in relation to the climate polycrisis. While large-scale Big Tech infrastructures present themselves as stable, coherent, and finished, small-scale grassroots digital infrastructures embrace situated and ad hoc practices.

This paper argues that this asymmetry does not stem from intrinsic qualities, but from divergent intentions to conceal or reveal infrastructural practices. We argue that large-scale infrastructures routinely incorporate bricolage, and improvisation, features typical of experimental practice, yet these are rendered invisible through discursive techniques that produce an illusion of unity and permanence. By contrast, the experimental and patchwork qualities of small-scale digital infrastructures, such as community run servers, are hypervisible. Fragmentation in small-scale infrastructure might be understood as a form of hybridity; not a failure to cohere, but a situatedness of technologies, knowledges, and temporalities. Yet because they don’t fit dominant infrastructural practices and aesthetics or models of scale, they’re often rendered marginal or “inefficient” and generally undervalued in climate policy and governance—by corporate and state actors.

How is infrastructural legitimacy performed and scaled, and how might fragmentation be reimagined as a site of possibility? Through disobedient policy analysis and practice based research our paper proposes a consideration of small-scale practices not as peripheral or incomplete versions of large-scale models, but as complex sites of attunement that challenge linear narratives of infrastructural progress and how we imagine, build, and justify infrastructural responses to ecological breakdown.

Green transition and resource frontiers invisibilization: Rethinking the Valle di Lei dam as envirotechnical device

Stella De Luca & Isabella Traeger (Politecnico di Milano)

Drawing from STS, Border Studies and Urban Political Ecology, this paper investigates the Valle di Lei dam — the centerpiece of a cross-border hydroelectric system unfolding along the Italo-Swiss Alpine border — as a site of infrastructural and political hybridity and experimentation. It frames the dam as an envirotechnical device at the center of deeply etched reterritorialization processes, embedding forms of extended urbanization into a predominantly rural and marginal(ized) alpine context. The dam’s construction radically reconfigured the web of multi-scalar power relations, producing and entrenching asymmetric interdependences among the diverse network of actors and actants. It acted as both kaleidoscope and catalyst, making national security concerns, traditional transhumance practices, and energy imperatives collided, leading notably to the reconfiguration of the border’s location and enactment. These dynamics acquire renewed urgency within the framework of Switzerland’s Energy Strategy 2050, which aims to transition towards renewable energy as nuclear plants are phased out, and assert the nation’s role as Europe’s green battery. As 80-year hydropower concessions, like the one encompassing the Valle di Lei, approach expiration, the materialdiscursive construction of hydroelectric infrastructure (both existing and proposed) is poised to underpin local and national debate. In a sector already highly automated and reliant on computational forecasting, this paper takes the Valle di Lei as a starting point to critically reflect on the invisibilizing effect that dominant techno-solutionist narratives centered on the green transition can have on resources frontiers, reinforcing marginalization processes and failing to problematize hegemonic frameworks. Borderlands, though, are intrinsically spaces of irreducible plurality, friction and encounter, which resist the univocal narrative of Western progress. As such, the Valle di Lei emerges as a generative example to advocate for a situated, territorial reading of hydroelectric infrastructure within uncertainty, drawing on feminist and postcolonial perspectives. Based on interviews, fieldwork and archival research, the article proposes a reading attentive to the entanglements of (more-than-) human agencies, everydayness, and resistant imaginaries and practices of ‘staying with the trouble’.