Digital Natures: prefiguration and the aesthetic regimes of nature recovery.

Digital Natures: prefiguration and the aesthetic regimes of nature recovery.

Contemporary nature recovery is increasingly mediated through digital visualisation technologies. This working paper examines the emerging aesthetic regimes of future landscapes asking how such tools organise perception by reinforcing a bifurcation of nature that separates objective ecological processes from subjective perceived experience. We argue that, under conditions of digital saturation, this bifurcation prioritises hyperrealist consumption over lived material engagement, producing hyperreal foreclosure that narrows the imaginative and political space through which ecological futures can be negotiated. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative philosophy we understand visualisations as prefigurative spaces that organise the conditions under which ecological futures can be perceived, felt, and imagined. In response, we propose repositioning 3D visualisations as speculative propositions or “lures for feeling” that attempt to coordinate ecological and social relations into perceptible and experiential patterns capable of sustaining convivial, generative engagements with ecological futures. The paper draws on an auto-ethnographic engagement with a digital visualisation tool developed for an ongoing nature recovery site in Denmark to explore how calibrated realism can ensure the digital remains answerable to the material ecological realities. As a working paper we invite open discussion on these reworkings of digital nature.