Digital Art as Ontological Experimentation, Not a Genre

In a philosophical essay published in Art Press, Yves Citton argues that digital art should not be understood as a distinct artistic genre but as an ontological horizon that redefines what it means for something to exist. He contends that the absence of canonical masterpieces in digital art is not a failure but a misdirection: the proper question is not whether digital art is as good as other art, but whether it is art in the same sense. Citton draws on Heidegger's distinction between ontic and ontological, and Kant's transcendental philosophy, to claim that the digital is not a particular region of reality but a mode of being that can apply to anything. He cites examples such as Masaki Fujihata's Field-works@Alsace (2002), which uses GPS and digital cameras to interrogate what a place becomes when translated into a digital existence, and DN's Rosemary's Place (2007), which explores ontological passage without necessarily existing in digital format. Citton aligns digital art with a new experimental spirit, akin to the maker movement, that operates through hypotheses and bricolage rather than manifestos. He references Bruno Latour's modes of existence, Warren Sack's concept of rewriting the world, and Anne-Marie Duguet's work on electronic images. The essay concludes that digital art has not 'taken place' because the very notion of 'taking place' is destabilized; instead, it is an ongoing practice that will increasingly shape how we think.