Santiago Márquez is a Uruguayan artist and poet who works under several names, including the persona Human Kernel and rotating aliases such as time and corn. He has been making art since childhood and began working digitally around 2010, scanning pen drawings into visual poetry books before moving into NFTs on Tezos.
He treats his rotating names as characters within a single, ongoing story, saying he tries to be “three characters of the plot at the same time”. His process mixes hand drawing in Aseprite with painting on paper and canvas, vectorizing and layering the results in Inkscape, sculpting in Blender and feeding outputs into Midjourney.
Around 2021, working with early p5.js code and encouragement from the artist NFT Sweatshop, he began sharing deliberately inefficient drawing tools and running Twitter drawing contests built around them. He has since created digital brushes used by other artists, including The Myth. He is also the figure behind “NFT Uruguay”, a long-imagined event he has deliberately kept small rather than let it become a brand. In November 2025, he took part in a painting residency with the artist Héctor Herrera in Mexico, producing the show “Tiempo Lateral”, twelve paintings made over ten days.
