Editor’s Note: This article was produced in partnership with CIFRA.
As the art world continues to grapple with how best to exhibit, preserve, and monetize digital work, a new streaming platform aims to do more than simply replicate the white cube online. CIFRA positions itself as a platform made for artists working in video, sound, and other time-based media. For years, digital artists have been constrained by social media platforms that privilege speed, virality, and short-form display over context and craft. CIFRA attempts to address that by allowing artists to upload complex works, list provenance, construct portfolios, and connect with curators and collectors in a purpose-built environment.
Audience participation and artist discovery on CIFRA moves beyond the scroll of our increasingly algorithmic internetscape. Public playlists allow the public to act as curators while navigational tools and curator spotlights help artists and audiences go into deep dives on genre, artists, and history, returning power back to users. Headquartered in Dubai and developed in collaboration with researchers and art experts around the world, CIFRA is betting that digital art needs more than exposure—it needs infrastructure.
And while media theorists parse through the shaky philosophical differences between the online world and IRL, digital-native artists are engaged in the lived reality of those two worlds. Many of the 1,500 artworks currently on CIFRA concern the nature of doubles, verification systems that attempt to separate humans from bots, and avatars that are both self and not self. Other works place their gaze on gamification. Prior to the internet, games meant suspending society’s rules to apply new ones in a controlled setting, allowing people to perform characters and enter into immersive world-building mediated by one’s imagination. But today the boundaries of the game have bled into everyday life; dating, finances, security, and even memory are all subject to gamification.
The six artists included in this playlist gesture at these blurred boundaries of our virtual world, showing how once closed fantasies increasingly dictate life IRL.
