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.
On Tezos, his collection Reconstructed reality “reconfigures landscapes with algorithms”.In flow(er)s, shown in the 2023 group exhibition “Unbound: Ecology in the Age of Machines” at Unit London, a machine learning process reimagines multiple real landscape scenes into a single idyllic vision of nature.
In Data Residues (Digital Remains), shown in the 2025 exhibition “(Land)scape” in Berlin, he processes AI-generated topographical datasets with his own algorithm and re-materializes them as oil paintings, returning the machine's view of landscape to a physical, corporeal form.In the 2024 group exhibition “Echoes of Life” at the Institute of Fine Arts in Cali, Colombia,his AI-sculpted mountains appeared to vanish and return in sync with the rhythms of resource extraction.His work has been exhibited internationally, including in Paris, New York, London, Tokyo and Mexico City,and he also works as a professor and researcher in visual arts.
