How it works

The biggest barrier to any directory is the blank page. Nobody wants to type in their career from scratch. Plataforma doesn't ask you to.

The platform does the cataloging for you. When you join, it searches the collections of major museums and public databases for works already attributed to you — and presents them for your review. The Met, the Rijksmuseum, the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and dozens of other institutions have digitized their collections and made the data openly available. Hundreds of thousands of works, with artist attribution, medium, date, dimensions, exhibition history. For musicians, MusicBrainz has credits for over two million artists. For filmmakers, open databases track credits across tens of thousands of productions.

Nobody has assembled this information into a single view organized around the artist. Each institution knows what it holds. No one has connected them. That's what the platform does: it searches across every open source and builds a draft of your catalog before you've entered a word. The experience is "we found your work in twelve collections — confirm, correct, or add" rather than starting from nothing.

This isn't a one-time import. The platform continues to monitor public sources and surfaces new attributions, exhibition records, and institutional acquisitions for your approval. Your catalog grows as your career does. You confirm, correct, add to what it finds. The assembly is automated; the authority is always yours.

One identity, not six. Your professional identity is currently scattered across databases you may not even know about — Wikidata, the Getty's artist registry, library authority files, gallery CMS records, a Wikipedia page someone else wrote. Each has a different slice of you. None is complete. None is under your control.

Plataforma doesn't replace these identifiers — it links them. Your profile connects to every ID that already exists for you and gives you a single, portable, persistent URI that you control. One place that is canonically you, across disciplines and institutions. Scientists solved this problem years ago with ORCID — a universal persistent identifier that follows a researcher across journals, grants, and institutions. Artists have never had the equivalent. That's what this is.

The connections become visible. The most valuable thing about the directory isn't any single profile — it's what happens when the profiles are connected. A visitor arrives looking for one artist and discovers ten more through shared exhibitions, common collaborators, overlapping institutions, related media. Your page isn't a dead end. It's a gateway into a network of creative relationships that exists in person but has never been visible online.

The social mapping that the founders' concept describes — making the depth and strength of artistic connections navigable — is what turns a directory into a living professional resource. Not a social network with feeds and likes. A structured map of who has worked with whom, where, on what, and when. The relationships artists build over decades, finally reflected in a form that helps them and the people looking for them.

Your data, your rules. Everything in your catalog is exportable. Nothing is used for training without your explicit, granular consent. If you leave, your data goes with you. These aren't aspirations — they're structural features of a cooperative that exists to serve its members, not extract from them.