Caves play a special role in reflecting on the relationship between the world within and the world "outside". Plato's cave metaphor for perception generally explains how we construct systems from the limited sensations which we have access to. The prisoners of the cave constructed their world on the basis of shadows on the wall.

Robert Ryan ascribes a significance to caves in antiquity as an exploration of the inner world, that which could be seen with "eyes turned inwards". He argues that the Shaman of antiquity was both a wise person and an artist. There were no other artists than the shamans. Art was a representation of symbolic animals on cave walls not real ones. The content of art was not copying empirical reality, but exploring the inner constructing consciousness and its forms. An animal is rendered as its spirit, its essence, its beauty in motion, rather than a hunting scene where animals are being killed or eaten.

Artists should have the skills to show others about themselves. Radically different life-experience is requiered. The shaman-artists knew death through their own near death experiences and could express it visually / multimedially. Caves lead into the unknown underworld and were places of initiation. Therefore they were appropriate places for the placement of such visual forms.

Art is essentially the expression of the reality-construction potential, not of reality itself.

Software has its own version of the eyes turned inward / outward. The GUI is the visible layer with its own design quality. The underlying code is the unconscious, the presupposed, the underlying reality construction principles. Code seeks to construct a reality-appearance, often modelled on the constructed worlds of everyday life and business but often also a virtual world of its own. The artist as programmer, programmer as artist, has the level of sensual stimulation and its underlying complexity as tools.