INFINITO BY STEFANO CONTIERO
This was part of an ongoing series of articles that released was digitally in November 2022. They were first published in the print edition of the Bright Moments Quarterly that was distributed at NFT ART CDMX in Mexico City.
Thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview, Stefano. In one of your own essays, you describe your art as a “happy, little, secret walled garden, in which I was sheltering from the world.” Describe how this “garden” emerged in your life and when you decided to open it to the world.
How this has changed is a really interesting question. For all my life, I was playing around with creative things. As a kid, I spent hours playing around with Paint on Windows, drawing abstract shapes and experimenting with colors. And there are several painters in my family. Growing up in Italy, I was also surrounded by art in a broader sense: architecture, sculpture and painting were just part of the environment where I grew up.
Quite independent of that, I have been very drawn to technology. I studied software engineering and I wanted to work in tech. Around 2018, I pivoted from software development to design, which spoke to my creative passion. What combines creative design and software engineering? Generative art.… When I wasn’t working, I was always exploring the opportunities in generative art. This creative outlet was helping me with difficult times at work and in life.
After the first months of experimenting with generative art, I began sharing the outcomes with friends and on social media. At one point in 2019, I wanted to find a different job. I displayed my art as part of my portfolio on my personal website. It just so happened that someone was interested and that I sold my first work of generative art. But at the time, I did not want to monetize my practice, as it still had this character of a walled garden that shielded me from the world.
In 2020, I found myself stuck in Berlin during a very strict lockdown. I was working at home. In this challenging environment, art continued to be a strong support. In fact, it was the one thing that I felt passionate about. In a certain way, I felt as if I had nothing to lose. I rebuilt my website as a generative artist. I went all-in and became a full-time artist.
It was exactly around this time that Art Blocks emerged. The timing was ideal. When I saw Art Blocks, I immediately grasped that someone had understood generative art in a profound way. Prior to Art Blocks, there was no way to preserve the code in a meaningful way. Artists would simply curate a selected number of outputs. In my own trajectory, everything then happened very quickly. I applied to Art Blocks and was accepted for the Curated track. This is, essentially, how my walled garden turned into a public park. It was a very satisfying development, but it also consumed an incredible amount of time and energy.
What is your creative practice like? Do you work intermittently on projects or do you fully immerse yourself in a new work? Do you experiment primarily with the code or do you start in a different medium?
One of the reasons why I was so excited about generative art is the way it allowed me to work with code. I had been coding all my life for fun. But when you work as a professional software engineer, this is of course not really possible. You have strict deadlines and guidelines for how to do certain things. As a generative artist, I can lean into my coding passion.
In my creative practice, projects develop in a harmonious and very steady way. When I am in the flow, I create a lot of art in a short period of time. I may produce a new sketch every day and then I spend time on refining it.
Recently, it has become more difficult to code and create in this way. The organizational work and communication associated with the success I have had consume a lot of time. As we all know, the NFT space is very intense and demanding. There is always a lot going on. The pace is very fast. This essentially forces me to work in sprints – in the early morning or late at night. On the one hand, I would like to have the mental space that I used to have. But I also enjoy these phases of intensity. Inspiration used to come to me as a steady wave. Now it is more like a sudden outburst that appears and vanishes again. And I also have to balance my creative work with moments of decompression before and after, as I really can’t create without them.
Looking at your previous projects like Frammenti, Millefoglie, and, most recently, Essenza one can observe a balance between very harmonious palettes and shapes, on the one hand, and a recourse to classic tropes of dissonance (fragmentation, entropy, disintegration), on the other hand. Could you share your thoughts about this compositional tension?
For me, the interplay between harmony and dissonance is the expression of life itself. Personally, I am an eternal optimist, but I am not unaware of the horrors of life. Life is not always harmonious; there are difficulties that we have to go through. Despite hardships, horrors and harsh conditions, however, I want to show the beauty in life. The reason why I create art is, quite simply, to create beautiful things. Bringing beauty to the world is a way to make other people’s lives brighter.
The compositional tension emerges from playing around with things. It is not something that I plan at the outset. Rather, these tendencies emerge in the process. After I have created the work, I look back at it and try to understand what has happened. The projects you mentioned share a very common theme, but they develop it rather differently. Framennti relies on a very hard, geometric style even if the explosion is harmonious. Essenza, on the other hand, builds very smoothly and softly. The process of naming the variables, comprehending the themes and characterizing one’s intentions comes after the fact.
A concept that has come up in our previous conversations about your work is “texture.” In the arts, texture is used to describe a quality given to the work by the composition and interaction of its parts. But the word also carries connotations of woven structures, a compositional technique many contemporary generative artists have shown a great interest in. What interests you about the idea of texture in generative art and how does this interest inform your work?
When I approached generative art, the space was quite different from the contemporary scene. There was very little overlap with the physical world – something that is very important for me. Hence I wanted to explore a material, textured aesthetic through generative processes. Having the viewer question whether this is a computer generated work of art was crucial for me. But it is also a way to express the complexity of life: the little particles that are woven into a whole where everything is connected; the interaction of elements within a structure – all this resonates with the complexity of life itself for me.
The evocation of tangible feelings is very characteristic of my style. In a certain way, this marks a stark contrast to the screen-driven aesthetic that generative art naturally gravitates towards. But I feel that my work is meant to be looked at and experienced in the physical world. In the world, colors are intrinsic to the material. Digital screens isolate them. The link to materiality and embedded colors is crucial for me. Perfection is always fake. That is why I am driven to the imperfection of the material world.
The theme of infinity is at the center of your project for NFT ART CDMX. When did you begin to work on this project? And what do you plan for your exhibition space in Prim?
I am convinced that most things in life are infinite: love, happiness, time.… All these things are infinite. This is, of course, a very idiosyncratic understanding of the infinite. But it feels to me that we are just part of something larger, where the moment keeps repeating ad infinitum.
In Mexico City, I want people to experience how I feel about the infinite in a very small space. The idea is to have an infinite mirror room. The guiding thought is that nothing really matters on the scale of the infinite. I want to evoke this particular sense of beauty and meaninglesness that follows from this infinite. Because this leaves people with only two choices. Either you think that your life is meaningless and that this is terribly depressing. Or your life is without meaning and as a consequence you are entirely free.
This also informs the reveal experience. After the viewer has entered the room, the work will emerge from darkness, filling the space with bright light. So at first you experience complete darkness and then white light elucidates this darkness. This change of light resonates, for me, with life, death and reincarnation.
Does the fact that this project will be exhibited and minted IRL in Mexico influence your creative coding process?
Yes, it definitely influences my creative process: not in a technical way, but certainly in a conceptual and creative way. You know, this is the first time that I have the chance to control how people experience my art and this is particularly meaningful for me due to the importance of the link to the material world that I mentioned earlier.
In fact, I would go as far as to say that the reveal is the art itself. The NFT is the memory of the performance; it is derived from it. This gives me the creative freedom to make certain choices that I couldn’t have made if this was an online mint. And this will also be the first time that I use music in my work in a way that is fully integrated with the art.
Aside from being one of the 11 artists of the Mexico City Collection, you are also involved with the organization and curation of the event. How would you describe this experience of being both an artist and a curator and organizer?
First off, I feel very blessed and in a special position because this role gives me very early access to the space. And I can understand and grow as an artist working with fellow artists and the Bright Moments team.
Apart from this practical concern, I feel very honored and happy to confront myself with this new challenge. The project is very stimulating and stressful – but in a good way. As an artist, I feel that I also have to do other things to grow as a person, and this dual role feels like the perfect challenge for me at the moment.
I have been following and admiring Bright Moments for quite some time. When I arrived at NFT ART Berlin, my expectations were quite high. And they were far exceeded. The same happened in London. Bright Moments over-delivered, again. And I think that Mexico City will be the same.
NFT ART CDMX is important for me personally because of my link to Latin culture. I am interested in the strong connection with spirituality, divinities, and the afterlife in Mexican Culture. My exhibition space in Prim should tap into this side of Mexican culture. And I am very excited about the community, gastronomy, and local festivities.
After the immense success generative art has had over the last two years, it seems that we now see a consolidation of certain developments. On the one hand, there is a mutual interest between the generative art scene and the established contemporary art world. On the other hand, many generative artists begin to launch projects independently or cooperate with brands on design projects. Where do you see the space headed and what do you wish to explore next?
What happened to us, the community of generative artists, is not only unlikely, but quite singular. In the end, we were a bunch of nerds with a very niche passion. Over night, we became stars in our little bubble. That gave many of us the freedom to quit our jobs and focus full-time on our art.
And yet, this immense success also gives us artists the responsibility to choose a path. Some artists are just happy to focus full-time on crypto art and stay within their very specialized community. Others want to enter the established art world and seek to find recognition there.
Personally, I am most interested in generative design collaborations. It would be fascinating to produce generative furniture or clothing. I love generative art and I do not see myself moving away from it. But I don’t want to be limited to a very narrow definition of generative art.
Another project I want to do in the next one or two years is writing a book with AI. I am thinking about a kind of co-creation with AI by giving two perspectives on the same day. One would be my personal diary writing; the other would be sequential AI images.
