Digital Art, Ethics

It seems to me that digital art is clouded in a mystique that complicates its relationship to the user/reader/spectator and brings up a host of ethical questions. That nagging, conscious acknowledgement of the presence of a hypotext (to use Moulthrop’s term) in my mind when I look at something like a simulation of a garden in the CAVE befuddles my relation to the visual output. There is an obvious feeling of being manipulated, with interactivity increasing this sense even more because it threatens to eat up at least perceptual reality (of course, being conscious and somewhat paranoid of this limits the totalizing force of hyperrealist simulation). The realism of cyberspace that Soren Pold talks about elicits questions of what exactly is “the active and dialectical relationship between reality and representation, the interface entering in front of an increasingly invisible reality” (3). How does one approach the fact of extreme mediation in this relationship? How can one not feel threateningly consumed by a barrage of perceptual stimulations, and should this even be a goal? In light of questions like these, how can one truly appreciate the aesthetic value of digital art? These are issues that I can only leave unresolved for myself.