Helio Santos (b. 1984, Colima, Mexico) is an artist, professor and researcher whose practice joins painting, data, internet culture and emerging technologies.

Trained as a painter and digital artist, he now works with creative coding, computer vision and artificial intelligence. Landscape, natural and urban, is his main subject and his conceptual vehicle for thinking about the relations between humans, nature and machines. He treats technology as an extension of the body and intellect rather than a neutral tool.

His approach reprograms machine vision so that it contemplates instead of controls, turning surveillance and data-extraction tools into creative agents. Recent research asks how AI might build ecological awareness instead of reinforcing extractive or techno-optimistic narratives. Earlier works used bots and artificial-life systems to confront violence, disappearance and border surveillance in Mexico.

His output includes oil paintings made with custom CNC plotters and robotic drawing systems, as well as digital and on-chain works. It has been exhibited in Paris, New York, London, Lisbon, Seoul, Tokyo, Mexico City, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires, Rome, Zurich, Amsterdam and Barcelona, and is held in private collections internationally.

Since 2017 he has been a full-time professor-researcher in the Visual Arts department of the Instituto Universitario de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Colima, where he leads the research group Visual Practices, Art, Territory and Community (UCOL-CA-129) and teaches the New Technologies workshop: net art, networks and public art on the internet. With the research group he organises the International Congress of Artistic Syncretism Habla el Arte, international since 2026.

A large part of the work since 2021 lives on the blockchain, mainly on Tezos.

The main body of editions and unique works is minted on OBJKT and Teia: landscapes from Reconstructed Reality, works shown in OBJKT exhibitions such as Al aire libre (Copenhagen, 2024) and Still Wet (Berlin, 2026), and pieces from the Landscapebot and machine-painting line. Generative work such as A Hacker in the Pampas is on fxhash; Multiplexing Reality was released on Ethereum with Unit London; and a sovereign contract on Base holds work minted under the artist's own contract.

For Santos, blockchain is also a subject of research: he has written on blockchain, art and community, and on how on-chain culture changes the way art circulates and is collected.