The background and the context of this digital abstraction can be found in this post on the Encounter Studio photo blog. The image, which is another fragment in the abstraction series, delights in colour.
A digital image poses a problem: Is the digital work its file, encoded and encrypted and clearly mathematical, or is it a fulfilled, material expression of that file? Or is it both of these? The key is the integration of photography into the network milieu with the emergence of new practices for circulating and archiving everyday images (eg., on Flickr). The makes the photograph's condition one in which the image increasingly functions as a form of data regulated by statistical/algorithmical processes.
A well known reading of abstraction in the visual arts has its roots in the abstraction expression of the 1950s---these artworks, which negated representational content, express their artists’ interiorities or intense subjectivities; or more accurately, they were expressions of the artist feelings in an industrial capitalist society. These art works were an antidote’ to the dominant rationality of capitalism, its automated production and mass consumer culture.
This account no longer makes sense of the abstract digital image in a world of camera as computers, meta-data and algorithmic analysis.