Leggenda (2022) emerges from Stefano Contiero’s contemplation of digital legacy and the archaeology of virtual spaces, imagining a future civilization discovering remnants of our contemporary digital galleries. This collection of 888 works transforms a profound existential question into visual poetry: what traces of our digital lives will persist beyond their creators?
Each composition functions as both artwork and artifact. They present gallery-like arrangements of tiny generative pieces within larger compositional frameworks that suggest museological displays from an imagined future past. The modular grid structures echo Sol LeWitt’s systematic investigations, while the archival impulse recalls Hanne Darboven’s obsessive documentation of time and process. Where both historical artists used systematic approaches to create meaning through accumulation, Contiero transforms their strategies into speculative archaeology, questioning how contemporary digital practices might be interpreted by future civilizations while making the archive itself the aesthetic object.
Some works embrace monochromatic restraint, while others display fragments and gestural elements that echo Frammenti (2021) and Rinascita (2021), as if these earlier works have become artifacts in their own right. Released through Flutter and FlamingoDAO in partnership with Gallery, Leggenda functions as both artistic statement and institutional critique, questioning how digital art will be contextualized, preserved, and understood by future cultural institutions.
By imagining future archaeologists puzzling over digital galleries, Contiero anticipates the curatorial challenges that contemporary museums already face in presenting generative art. The collection suggests that institutional frameworks themselves may prove as fragile as the technologies they seek to preserve, proposing that the most enduring aspect of this digital Renaissance may not be its innovations but its capacity to inspire wonder across temporal boundaries yet to be crossed.