In Conversation with Elena Rumyantseva: CIFRA’s Vision for Digital Art

In today’s interview, we welcome Elena Rumyantseva, an international curator and producer who has spent over two decades shaping the landscape of new media art. With a career spanning senior roles at pioneering institutions dedicated to media art, such as the MediaArtLab Center for Art and Culture, she has curated over 100 projects globally, collaborating with icons like Bill Viola, Peter Greenaway, and Gary Hill. Now, as Strategic Director and Head of the Art Department at the digital art platform CIFRA, Elena is applying her unparalleled expertise to define how contemporary art and cinema are experienced in the streaming era.

1. You’ve been working in media art for over two decades—what first drew you to this field?

I actually started out in the theatre. After graduating from the Academy of Theatre Arts, I worked on a range of projects in that field. The early 2000s were a real space for experimentation, and I became increasingly drawn to cross-disciplinary intersections. I wanted to explore other genres more deeply, and that eventually led me to the Moscow International Film Festival, where I met Olga Shishko, the founder of MediaArtLab, the first institution in Russia dedicated to media art. I joined her team as Program Director of the Media Forum, the first official section at an A-list film festival devoted to video art and alternative cinema. It was a groundbreaking platform that reflected new developments at the intersection of different genres — video and sound art, hybrid art, media poetry, and more.

What made it truly revolutionary was that it was never only about screenings or educational programs. It also included large-scale exhibitions where we presented pioneers such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Gary Hill; filmmakers experimenting at the edge of cinema, like Peter Greenaway and Ken Jacobs; as well as new visionary classics such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Isaac Julien, Eve Sussman, Fiona Tan, Harun Farocki, Yang Fudong, Jesper Just, and Anri Sala. We also showed some of the most exciting audiovisual performances, including Ryoichi Kurokawa and Ryoji Ikeda, among many others.

After that, there was really no way back. The rest, as they say, is history.

2. What are the most significant shifts you've observed in how audiences engage with media art, and how is CIFRA responding to those shifts?

Over the past decades, the field has changed dramatically, and so has its audience. Media art is no longer a marginal or niche territory for a select few, as it was in the early stages of its development. It has very much become part of the mainstream. The audience has expanded significantly and, with the rise of the internet, has become truly global. People are now used to engaging with digital content as part of everyday life, so art itself has increasingly moved beyond its traditional physical boundaries. Museums began digitising their collections and developing online exhibitions; major art fairs, including Art Basel, started giving more visibility to digital practices; and phenomena such as the NFT boom drew even broader public attention to the field. We have also seen this shift very directly through our own work: CIFRA was the first to introduce a dedicated media art section to POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair, one of Germany’s leading art fairs. Together, these developments reflect a much broader transformation in how digital art is presented, circulated, and experienced.

In that sense, the emergence of CIFRA was a natural response to these broader cultural shifts. The online environment is, after all, the most organic context for screen-native art. Our platform is not only a place where audiences can encounter works by artists from more than 60 countries, but also an important point of connection for the wider art ecosystem. We bring together artists, curators, institutions, and collectors on a global scale.

At the same time, CIFRA is not designed exclusively for the professional art community. We are equally interested in reaching broader audiences — people who are engaged with visual culture, technology, and design, but who may still need a more accessible point of entry into digital art. If professional audiences often come to CIFRA for research and are drawn to deeper contextual material, wider audiences tend to enter through our curatorial selections and more explanatory formats. In this sense, the platform operates both as a professional resource and as a bridge, helping digital art become more legible, engaging, and present within contemporary culture.

3. Given your history of presenting artists like Bill Viola, Gary Hill, and Peter Greenaway, how does CIFRA's mission to "reimagine classics" and showcase "big screen art" translate into curatorial strategy? Can you give us an example of a project that bridges your past curatorial work with CIFRA's current vision?

Throughout my career, I have always been deeply interested in the dialogue between classicism and modernity, because the history of art is continuous. What we call innovation is very often not a rupture, but an organic rethinking of older forms, images, and ideas. That interest was already central to projects such as the one I did with Peter Greenaway in 2014. The Golden Age of the Russian Avant-Garde was a large-scale exhibition project, commissioned for the 5000 sq.m. Manege exhibition hall. Innovative multimedia technologies, combining cinema and painting, animation and 3D, used in the project, not just demonstrated digital reproductions of the most brilliant works of the Russian avant-garde, but also immersed the viewer in the context of the epoch, creating the effect of an amended reality, andrevealing new meanings.

Later, when MediaArtLab became part of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, we continued this line of inquiry by launching Pushkin XXI, a new direction dedicated to a dialogue between classical tradition and contemporaneity. The program aimed to present the modern classics that speak not only a language of pictorial art, graphic and photography, but also a language of new forms, such as video, sound, and performance. A new media, frequently transitory and ephemeral, can impart a new understanding of classical artworks, making them breathe and move, involving them in a dialogue with a viewer. 

Within that framework, we produced large-scale exhibitions such as Man as Bird. Images of Journeys, a collateral project of the 57th Venice Biennale, in which we explored how the boundaries of the visible expanded over history and new perspectives reshaped the viewer’s perception. In our following project, There Is a Beginning in the End at the 58th Venice Biennale, we commissioned four site-specific video installations that reconsidered the innovative approach of Tintoretto, the greatest Venetian master.  

At CIFRA, this curatorial logic continues in a different but very natural way. We are equally interested in artists who revisit, reinterpret, and reactivate classical forms through contemporary media. For example, we presented a solo exhibition by the highly cinematic Greek artist George Drivas, who represented Greece at the 57th Venice Biennale and whose work, in many ways, reinvents the genre of ancient tragedy through moving images. Another example is our exhibition of Ranbir Kaleka, one of the most significant contemporary Indian artists, who has worked at the intersection of video and painting for more than three decades. In his practice, one can see a rich dialogue not only with cinema — including Visconti — but also with the visual language of the old masters.

So, for me, CIFRA’s approach to “reimagining classics” and presenting “big screen art” is not a break from my earlier curatorial work, but rather its continuation. The formats may have evolved, but the underlying question remains the same: how do artists today engage with inherited cultural forms, and how can that dialogue open new ways of seeing?

George Drivas. Kaizo

4. As Head of the Art Department at CIFRA, what is your curatorial philosophy for selecting artists? What are you looking for in a piece of digital art that makes it suitable for, or elevated by, the streaming format?

Our curatorial approach is always multi-layered. On the one hand, we are constantly looking for the most compelling artists shaping the field today — voices that are truly pushing media art forward and defining its current trajectories. At the same time, we believe it is essential to place the new within a broader context, which is why we also present archival works and pioneering artists who have shaped the history of media art.

We are equally committed to supporting emerging artists, who often need visibility most within what can still be a rather closed art world. By highlighting their work, we aim to create opportunities for them to become visible to both the curatorial community and wider audiences.

At the same time, CIFRA’s curatorial vision is not authoritarian. We work in close collaboration with leading international curators, and this year our direction will also be informed by members of our newly established advisory board, including Christiane Paul, David Elliott, Oliver Grau, Martin Honzik, Daniela Arriado, and Lev Manovich. These are all visionary figures who will help guide CIFRA’s artistic development. We also regularly bring together experts for specific projects. For example, the first Open Call of 2026 will be judged by Li Zhenhua, Sabine Himmelsbach, Irini Papadimitriou, and Sohyeong Roh, who will help identify artists whose practices are redefining reality today.

As for what makes a work especially suited to the streaming format, it is not simply a technical question. We are interested in works that retain conceptual and aesthetic strength on screen and can fully unfold in a digital environment, rather than losing something essential outside the physical exhibition space. In many cases, streaming is not just a means of access, but the most natural mode of encounter for the work itself. We look for pieces that engage the viewer through the screen with clarity, intensity, and emotional or intellectual precision — works that are not diminished by the format but, in fact, activated by it.

5. Many of your previous projects focused on the border between video art and alternative cinema. How does CIFRA explore this hybrid space, and what new possibilities does the platform offer for this genre?

The boundary between cinema and video art is, in fact, very thin. More often, it depends less on the work itself than on its context and mode of presentation. Artists are increasingly being shown at film festivals, while filmmakers are more and more present in museum spaces. CIFRA brings these two territories together within an ideal hybrid environment, where genre boundaries do not need to be rigidly imposed. This allows us to present the full diversity of media art in a much more open way — from video and sound art to more complex moving-image practices that exist between exhibition and cinema.

At the same time, the online format offers advantages that are difficult to replicate in the physical world. In a cinema, you are essentially limited to one film at a time, while to fully experience time-based works in a traditional exhibition, you would often need to spend many hours — if not days — in the museum. On CIFRA, viewers can engage at their own pace and immerse themselves much more fully in an artist’s universe. That flexibility creates a very different kind of encounter with the work: one that is more open, more sustained, and often more personal.

This is also why, in the near future, we will continue to develop our institutional track. More and more museums, festivals, and galleries are coming to CIFRA in search of a digital extension for their projects — one that can expand their reach and transform something temporal and ephemeral into something with a longer, more lasting presence.

Aeonium, 2020

6. What themes or trends in contemporary digital art are you most excited about right now?

Of course, one of the most fascinating developments to observe right now is the rise of AI. It feels like something fundamentally new — a shift that has dramatically changed the rules of the game. In a way, it is comparable to how the invention of the video camera helped give rise to media art in the 1960s. AI is entering virtually every sphere of life and culture, so it is impossible to ignore it as a phenomenon.

At the same time, I think it is crucial not simply to embrace it, but to engage with it critically. At CIFRA, we are very interested in exploring this field through a wide range of artistic positions and approaches, while also focusing on the urgent questions, tensions, and forms of reflection that AI inevitably raises.

7. How do you see the relationship between artificial intelligence and artistic practice evolving within CIFRA’s ecosystem?

Because this subject is so central for us, we actually dedicated an entire season to it last year, highlighting a wide spectrum of perspectives — from artists who are deeply sceptical of AI to those who have fully embraced it as a new artistic language. 

At CIFRA, you can also find curatorial selections that represent different approaches. In Dominique Moulon's playlist, artists reveal how technology, from artificial intelligence to blockchain, has reshaped modern society. In Lev Manovich’s selection, you can see artists who use AI tools to respond to our digital realities in a variety of ways. Another playlist, curated by Auronda Scalera and Alfredo Cramerotti, uses the concept of “duets” as a framework to explore a perpetual dialogue among artists, mediums, and technology. Another selection by Anika Meier (The Second-Guess) explores Cyberfeminism in the age of artificial intelligence, examining how technology can serve as both a tool for liberation and a mechanism of oppression.  

The conversation around AI will certainly continue. It is something we will keep revisiting within CIFRA’s ecosystem. For example, this spring, we are presenting Promptoscape, a curatorial selection by Ma Nan and Dajuin Yao, developed as part of their larger project document.AI. The project examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping creativity, perception, and cultural meaning. At its core is the idea that AI, in some sense, embodies a kind of collective unconscious — an aggregation of history, culture, and human experience. Its significance for art lies not simply in the technology itself, or in the familiar idea of merging art and science, but in the humanistic, cultural, and even spiritual dimensions it carries. Rather than treating AI as a mere tool for image or content production, Promptoscape frames it as a co-creative domain — one that reorganises how thought, imagination, and identity are articulated within contemporary technological systems.

Laboratory of Dilemmas, 2017

8. Finally, with all your experience in producing new formats of artistic collaboration, what is one ambitious project or collaboration you dream of realizing with CIFRA that would truly push the boundaries of what a digital art platform can be?

If we are speaking about ambition, then the dream is, quite simply, to take over the world — in the best possible sense. What we are building with CIFRA is not just a platform for distribution, but a global infrastructure for digital art: a space where meaningful connections are created, and where artworks are not merely circulated, but also contextualised, revisited, and woven into larger cultural narratives.

In the longer term, I see CIFRA as a potential global archive for digital art — one that preserves not only individual works, but also the contexts, relationships, and histories that give them meaning. That, to me, would be one of the most exciting ways to push the boundaries of what a digital art platform can be: to move beyond access alone and become a living ecosystem of memory, interpretation, and exchange.