One attempt to grant digital information systems a sort of ontology is to use the metaphor of a global neural net:
(..) a vast distributed 'perceptron' gathering its own materials, continually drawing new nodes and links into a learning system which has never needed anyone to tell it how it should proceed. (Plant 1998: 173)While this image overly anthropomorphizes the Internet, Plant's metaphor alludes to phenomenological questions deserving attention: are digital information systems like a consciousness? Does digital information and digital art have 'a life of its own'? Generative art in particular seems to be 'alive' and at play. Consider works like p-Soup (Napier 2001) and Rabbits and Wolves (Shodor Education Group) [1]. Harsh indeed to condemn such works to the status of magic - a trick that does not really exist.
We need an analysis that denies neither the strangeness nor the reality of digital information. When we go online, we experience the epiphany of our own information transposed to an apparently different ontological key; one that is not embodied and not inscribed in natural language. This confrontation may be peculiarly intensified in digital art. Many digital artists knowingly manipulate the strange ontological status of digital information [2].
As Prospero says of theatre, so seems digital art:
(..) the great globe itself,(The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1, lines 167-169)
shall dissolve;
and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind
It perhaps fails to receive the serious attention it deserves because of its aura of unreality. Digital art and digital information exists and yet fails to meet the ontological criteria we have for most objects. An analysis of our experience of digital information would assist in evolving concepts to conceptualise a human-digital relationship which can acknowledge strangeness without preventing meaningful engagement.
[2] Alan Sondheim, Ted Warnell, Talan Memmott and Mez are four digital artists that spring to mind in this regard.
Plant, S. (1998) Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate)
Shakespeare, W. (1983) The Tempest. In The Complete Works (London: Regent Books)
Shodor Education Group (1997-2002) Rabbits and
Wolves
http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/rabbits/index.html