Collision. A new aesthetic of postnature: Tara Donovan’s material modulations

The work of Tara Donovan represents a new aesthetics that manifests the conceptual nuances of posthuman thought via material assemblages. Her work creates a detour that, instead of having the fluidity of digital networks as its point of departure, starts with material objects and repetition as textual elements that create postnatural landscapes permeated with biomorphic, organic, fluid motions that seem to expand our understanding of the natural. I compare her aesthetics to James Bridle's New Aesthetics. New Aesthetics embody the technological properties of the digital by accumulating virtual traces of material networks, documenting and curating various examples of immaterial physicalities. Tara Donovan's work represents a reversed form of New Aesthetic that, instead of bringing the 'digital' into the 'physical' in an automated and mechanic way, infuses and shapes materials according to the fluid possibilities of the natural, organically and meticulously. Both artistic movements, be it from the virtual into the physical or from the natural into the artificial and vice versa, are conducive to a new aesthetic territory: a postnatural landscape that manifests itself as immaterial physicality.