Helio Santos (Mexican, b. 1984) is a digital artist based in Colima, Mexico, who trained as a painter before turning to computer vision, artificial intelligence and creative coding. He uses landscape imagery as a lens for exploring the relationship between humans, nature and machines, training AI models on historical paintings and reprocessing the results through his own computer vision algorithms.
In 2019, Santos built a Twitter bot that used computer vision to generate new oil landscapes based on eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings, with each collector receiving a single work that paired a physical print with a tokenized digital file. For Multiplexing Reality, a 2023 collection released as a limited edition of 40 pairs, he trained a deep learning model on more than 1,500 images by nineteenth century landscape painters such as Charles-François Daubigny, Carlos de Haes and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, then processed the generated images through computer vision algorithms that mix and relocate pixels into hyperreal, eerie dreamscapes.
