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.
-
The Runaways, 2010-2011, Carla Gannis.
Image Credit: Screenshot/CIFRA In this short performance work by pioneering new media artist Carla Gannis, two figures run atop a landscape of clouds. One is Gannis; the other is a virtual avatar rendered in the clunky graphics of the long-running life-simulation video game The Sims. They circle the sky, outpacing one another, before the scene shifts to a split screen: the avatar walks along the yellow lines of an empty cityscape while Gannis traverses the center lines of a country road. The implications are immediate. One world appears deathless—a suspension of the rules of the road, a place where being run over simply means another chance to respawn.
-
SKINS.II, 2025, Klimentina Li
Image Credit: Screenshot/CIFRA As digital technologies have advanced, avatars are no longer merely puppets for play. Bots and AI agents now infiltrate labor markets and generate spam. SKINS.II interrogates this new terrain and the question of virtual representation, even discrimination, through what Li describes as an “interactive visual novel,” populated by humanoid and robotic figures. CAPTCHA tests ask passersby to identify “skin”—a doubled reference to human flesh and to in-game clothing and accessories for digital avatars. In doing so, Li questions the foundations of virtual identity. “Their digital identities are constantly interchangeable and in motion while their stories are what is leading us,” Li wrote in an Instagram post introducing the work.
-
LoveCounter, 2025, Ruini Shi
Image Credit: Screenshot/CIFRA Over the last decade, we have come to entrust more and more of our intimate lives to online games, apps, and digital services. Love Counter offers a satirical take on this gamification of dating and the financialization of even the most private aspects of social life. The project presents a fictional platform where users can deploy blockchain technologies to create an NFT-like “proof of love” stamp for their crypto wallets or earn karma points by investing in a Marriage Smart Contract. Even the most intangible parts of our personal lives, Shi shows, are now subject to quantification.
-
Roam Simulator, 2020, Cao Shu
Image Credit: Screenshot/CIFRA A more melancholic meditation on the interweaving of digital and intimate life appears in Cao Shu’s Roam Simulator (2020). In this interactive game and video installation, audience members navigate a desert landscape designed by Shu, punctuated by occasional buildings, rocks, and street signs. Users can “take a photo” to reveal family photographs that Shu used as reference material for the rendered environment. The result is a poetic attempt to construct, in virtual space, a landscape built from memory.
-
Swatted, 2021, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis
Image Credit: Screenshot/CIFRA If Shu’s work draws from IRL experience to build a virtual space, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis’s short film Swatted demonstrates the explosive force with which the online can rupture lived reality. In the film, streamers recount being “swatted”—when a malicious online actor obtains their address and convinces police to dispatch a SWAT team to their home. Because many streamers broadcast live, these raids are often recorded and disseminated in real time, heightening the spectacle. Chandoutis intercuts animation, gameplay, and YouTube footage to render a portrait of how trolls exploit the internet’s infrastructure to wreak havoc offline.
-
MEET ME IN DIFFUSION, 2024, Lihao Shao
Image Credit: Screenshot/CIFRA Where Chandoutis examines interpersonal chaos, Lihao Shao takes a more planetary view. In MEET ME IN DIFFUSION (2024), Shao employs AI image-generation models trained on diffusion techniques to create a disquieting video work. The piece opens with a spinning Earth floating in space. The globe gradually splits apart, its surface morphing into a cascade of anime figures. The interplay between world map and virtual character intensifies, culminating in footage of wrestler Conor McGregor facing off against a constantly shifting anime entity that eventually consumes his image, just as it did the planet. If Gannis once ran alongside her avatar across the sky, Shao imagines the AI avatar as an engulfing system—one that threatens to overtake the world itself.
