Plataforma — Technical Extension

A cooperative network for discovering and cataloging creative work. Zachary F. Mainen, May 2026.

The Problem

Artists are hard to find. A personal portfolio site is discoverable only if someone already knows the artist's name. Gallery websites showcase their own roster but not the wider landscape. Existing platforms are marketplaces first — discovery is a byproduct of selling, not a goal in itself. There is no place where a curator, collector, researcher, or fellow artist can explore creative work across a community the way one might browse a great library or walk through a well-curated fair.

Meanwhile, the information that would make discovery possible — structured records of who made what, where it has been shown, which collections hold it — exists but is scattered. It lives in museum databases, gallery spreadsheets, Wikidata entries, and CV PDFs that fall out of date. No one has assembled it into a single, navigable, artist-controlled directory.

What we are building

A cooperative network where artists are discoverable — by curators, collectors, other artists, and the public — within a directory that has the editorial seriousness of a good institution and the reach of the open web. Not a marketplace. Not a social network. A structured, searchable, browsable map of creative production across disciplines, built and governed by the artists themselves.

Each artist on Plataforma maintains a catalog of their work. But cataloging is just the mechanism — the point is what happens when those catalogs are connected. A visitor can arrive looking for one artist and discover ten more through shared exhibitions, institutions, movements, or media. Plataforma makes the relationships between artists, works, and institutions visible and navigable in a way that no individual portfolio site or gallery roster can.

Plataforma does much of the cataloging work for you. When you join, it searches the collections of major museums, Wikidata, and other public databases for works already attributed to you, and presents them for your review. You confirm, correct, or add to what it finds. The experience is "we found 47 of your works in museum collections — confirm?" rather than "please enter your first artwork." Over time Plataforma continues to monitor public sources and surfaces new entries for your approval. The catalog is yours — the network it creates is shared.

Your data, your rights

Plataforma is built on a simple principle: artists own their data. This is not a terms-of-service promise — it is a structural commitment, designed into the architecture and enforced by cooperative governance.

1. You own your catalog. Plataforma is a custodian, not an owner. You grant a revocable license to display and index your work. If you leave, your data is deleted — not archived, not retained.
2. You can export everything, anytime. Your complete catalog — metadata, images, relationships, exhibition history — is exportable in open formats. No lock-in, no fees.
3. No training without your consent. If Plataforma builds recommendation tools or any intelligence from artist data, you opt in explicitly. Consent is granular and revocable.
4. If value is created, it flows to you. If Plataforma ever generates revenue from your data — through sales, recommendations, or licensing — compensation is tracked and distributed to contributors, not captured by the cooperative.
5. Artists govern Plataforma. Policies are set by members. The people whose work constitutes the cooperative make the rules.

Not just visual art

The catalog is designed for creative work in any discipline. A painting has dimensions; a musical composition has duration and performers; a film has runtime, cast, and screenings. Plataforma draws from museum collections for visual art, from MusicBrainz for music, from film databases for cinema, and from Wikidata for everything. An artist working across media — or a musician, filmmaker, or architect — can maintain a single catalog of their entire body of work.

Identity

Scientists have ORCID — a universal persistent identifier that follows them across institutions and publications. Artists have nothing comparable. Plataforma addresses this by linking your profile to every existing identifier (Wikidata, Getty ULAN, ISNI, MusicBrainz) and giving you a persistent, portable URI of your own. When you join, Plataforma automatically searches for your existing identifiers and connects them. Long term, we aim to become an identity standard for creative professionals — an ORCID for artists.

What comes first

The prototype seeds the network with profiles of well-known artists drawn from open museum data — creating a directory worth exploring from day one, before any artist has registered. From that foundation: artist profiles and structured catalogs (manual and auto-populated), a beautiful public page for each artist, faceted search and browsing across the full directory, and the relationship graph that makes one artist's page a gateway to others.

Future phases add recommendation and discovery tools that use the relationship graph actively — surfacing artists you haven't heard of based on the ones you know — along with gallery and institutional accounts, artist networking, and, if artists want it, sales infrastructure built on fair terms.

Who it is for

Artists who want to be found — by curators, collectors, collaborators, and audiences they have not yet reached. Artists who want to be discoverable within a curated community rather than invisible on a personal website or buried on a platform they do not trust. Galleries and curators who want a reliable, browsable directory of artist work. And anyone who believes that the infrastructure of the creative economy should serve the people who make the work.

Appendix A — Data sources

Plataforma ingests artwork metadata from open APIs and public datasets across creative domains.

Appendix B — Artist identity landscape

No single identifier for artists is equivalent to ORCID for scientists. Plataforma reconciles across all existing standards.

Appendix C — Open questions

• Name. The project needs a name that signals cooperative ownership and cultural seriousness — something an artist would be proud to list on their CV.
• Legal structure. Cooperative, nonprofit, or another form? The choice must make the data-sovereignty commitments credible and enforceable.
• Curation. Is admission open or curated? If curated, by whom? The tension between exclusivity and density needs a governance answer.
• Sustainability. Membership fees, institutional subscriptions, or transaction fees on future sales? The revenue model must not create incentives that undermine artist ownership.
• Scope. Visual art first, or multi-discipline from the start? Breadth increases long-term value but diffuses the initial community.