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This is the last of three editorials written as board member for Geoforum. These have provided a welcome opportunity for theoretical speculation, which overspills research papers, and experimental exploration with alternative sites of critical intervention. Although unplanned, the editorials have addressed similar themes, evoking interpretative tactics from the borderland, positioning humour and monsters as biopolitical tropes in the unfolding transformations of nature, science and society (Davies, 2003; 2007). Given this is the last editorial; it is perhaps fitting to talk about endings. In this final commentary, I examine emerging questions around where experiments end. I want to return one final time to questions about the constitution of borders and the turbulence of boundaries, this time between the laboratory and the landscape, experimental objects and experimental subjects, and communities of aesthetic and scientific practice, using these to explore the changing nature and scope of experimentation.

Geographers, and others, are increasingly interested in the sites of actual experimentation (Powell and Vasudevan, 2007) and the location of truth spots (Gieryn, 2006). Here, there are questions about the assemblage of apparatus, the characteristics of space and the disposition of witnesses through which experimentation enables the ‘systematic production of novelty’(Pickstone, 2000, p. 13) and provides visible testimony for a formerly invisible nature (Shapin, 1989). Also of growing attention is the way that experimental practices, such as ubiquitous testing (Ronell, 2005), perpetual survey (Thrift, 2008), and interactive simulation (Der Derian, 2009 …