Stefano Contiero (Italian-Dominican, b. 1991) is a self-taught generative artist who codes emotionally driven, color-layered compositions exploring memory, identity, and the dialogue between subconscious and technology.,,Raised between Italian and Dominican cultures near Venice, Contiero worked in tech before turning to generative art in 2018 and became a full-time artist by 2022.
Contiero began coding at age eight and spent his teenage years in early internet Photoshop-competition forums. He discovered generative art in 2018 and became a full-time artist by 2022, crediting NFT collectors with making that possible.In spring 2021 he released Frammenti through Art Blocks Curated, a 555-work collection made while living in Berlin that treats memory as a process of fragmentation and reconstitution, building on the computational fragmentation pioneered by Vera Molnár.Its follow-up, Rinascita, released through Art Blocks that summer, turns ordered grid-like mosaics into flowing ribbons of color across 1,111 works, echoing Georg Nees's Schotter and Manfred Mohr's systematic disruptions.
In 2021, a trip to reconnect with family in the Dominican Republic after more than two years apart inspired Sentimenti, whose title means feelings in Italian and which Contiero called a way of telling himself “it's ok to be happy and sad at the same time.”Debuting Unit London's Art Blocks Engine program in 2024, Disconnected is a 111-work limited collection whose scattered geometric forms and vibrant colors explore isolation and reconnection, accompanied by an ekphrastic poem reflecting on a period of personal disconnection in 2023.
For Battito, shown in Unit London and GrailersDAO's 2023 “Uncomputer” exhibition, Contiero trained a machine learning model on six years of his own heartbeat data to predict his heart rate, visualizing each beat, minute, and hour as a dot, line, and layer on a shifting digital canvas.Contiero's work has been included in auctions at Christie's and Sotheby's.It has also been shown during the Venice Biennale.,He has also released work through platforms including fx(hash), Bright Moments, and Tonic.In 2023 he was part of the second cohort of the VCA Residency, a program he credited with connecting him to the wider crypto art community.
