Canek Zapata (Mexican, b. 1985) is a net artist, editor and curator whose work moves from a background in literature into automated writing, generative poetry and internet visual languages.,,Self-taught in programming, he builds language machines that generate poems and images from text databases, often drawing on others' writing as much as his own.Born and raised in Mexico City, he studied Classical Letters at UNAM before turning to code.,
He has said his path to art ran through literary theory, particularly Rosalind Krauss's writing on sculpture, and that an interest in how language shapes objects and texts led him toward internet art and electronic literature. Many of his pieces rely on Markov chains, an older statistical method for generating text, fed with corpora of his own writing and that of others.Writing poetry with a computer es post-humano, from 2024, applies this method: he selects the database, and the chain's math produces the words.,He has also made generative cartography: Estratos, also released as Strata, layers landscape, diagram and poem into one system whose seed, territory and palette can be changed to produce new plates.,
In 2024 his piece Lands, pairing AI-generated poetry with DALL-E visuals in a retro web aesthetic, was shown in “Web as a Medium” at NEORT++ in Tokyo, alongside artists including Jan Robert Leegte, JODI, Damjanski and Exonemo.In 2025 he made Doomscrolling>>>, a Tezos project curated by Kika Nicolela and commissioned by ORBIT_E, the virtual space of the Museum of Fine Arts Le Locle in Switzerland, adapting a 2021 piece for which he had gathered gifs appropriated from Tumblr. The work draws on a database of more than 1,500 pieces by 28 invited artists, using the Tezos blockchain and the objkt API to source and display them as an infinite scroll of collages.,In 2026 he made Pequeñas acumulaciones de aerosoles atmosféricos, synthetic videos of clouds, rainbows and other atmospheric phenomena shown online through Fellowship's Daily, exploring how image-generation systems interpret the classifications people use for clouds and weather.
His work has been exhibited at institutions including Centro de la Imagen, MUAC, the XIII FEMSA Biennial and Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico, the Visual Art Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and Neort++ Gallery in Tokyo, and is anthologized in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4. He has curated exhibitions in Mexico and internationally, including at The Wrong Biennale, and works as an editor and programmer for the electronic literature publisher brokenenglish.lol.,
