Space depends on movement for its existence. Without movement, the eye does not present us with space but just a visual surface. For the sensation of touch to provide spatial relationships our muscles have to move a touch sensitive surface such as finger tips across a surface or an object. 

Space, perspective and 3 dimensions depend on the perceiving organism moving its eyes and limbs around to map its surroundings. Through movement, space is activated and constructed.

Interpersonal concepts of space arise in organisms in motion and through communication with one another. With cultural history, complex notions of space have been built up, which originate in the movement.

A concept of space “out there” is constructed, giving an apparent simplicity and self-evident feeling of moving in three dimensions with others along a thread of time. This is however not a simple construct, but depends of billions of years of species development and learning to give a human-specific space feeling. We live in human-space.

For a computer to reconstruct this history for itself, it has a lot to learn. It must know that one point is next to another, or not. It needs to recognise layers in space, movement across layers and movement of multiple points within a layer. Eventually, with enough information, a computer or an implanted computer will be able to generate the sensation of being in space. Potentially it could generate bee-space, amoeba-space, or a bird-space for a human with the appropriately programmed implant. Their human-space would be suspended.

An artist's representation of space is informed by their own construction of space. It is essentially their own system of representation that is their object. This appears to be “out there”.

(ref.: Jakob von Uexküll Theoretische Biologie)

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.

Art is not the “slavish reproduction of sense experience” (Ernst Cassirer) but “produces and posits a world of its own”. As such art is just like perception which is not determined by a world outside, but produces the world through the forms and prior workings of the brain. The brain does not “learn from experience to create a perceived world out of the data transmitted to it by the sense organs” but “it is necessary for the brain to have already carried out its characteristic function before there can be any experience...” (Brian Magee: “The Philosophy of Schopenhauer”)

There is a common process for art, experience and computer programmes. Each one creates a world of its own through its pre-existing forms and processes. Nevertheless each one follows an internal necessity. In art, what is considered beautiful is the product of millions of years of the formation of imagination. Jung conceives this as archetypes. "These are the common forms of the collective unconscious” which “comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings” (Carl Jung).

Computer programmes have a more limited history. For them to gain the power of human creativity, they need to have millions of years of prehistory programmed into them. “The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.” ”To me it is a vast historical storehouse” (Carl Jung).

In terms of the question of the existence of software, this collective unconscious has strong parallels to the software running in computers which is not seen. This vast historical storehouse can be compared to an object class library, providing the rules and constrains for creativity (although themselves changeable).

Quotes from: The Strong Eye of Shamanism Robert E Ryan p10 ff