Artist: Helio Santos
I’ve always loved maps, detailed maps, maps that show things that are no longer there and maps that make your imagination wonder at what is to come. My grandfather worked with the US Army Transportation Corps during WWII, and I own a few of his strategic maps of Europe, along with my parent’s travel guides through what was West Germany. I have atlases from countries that have changed names, and we have a globe showing borders that are now decades gone. I still have travel atlases from when my bands would tour the eastern USA in the 90 and 2000s. The beauty of maps is that they allow us to view place and time, geographically, and politically, for one fleetingly brief moment in history.
Heliodoro Santos is an amazing artist that I’ve admired since the early days of the Tezos-based Hic Et Nunc platform back in 2021. Most of his work that I’ve collected are described by him as “landscape generated by machine learning and computer vision algorithms. The dream of a landscape by the machine”. Below is one of my favorite pieces called Landscape dissolution II, described by the artist as “Exploring generative adversarial network and particles”:
Map 1 is my introduction to the artist using more two-dimensional work. I really love the colors at play here, they are the first thing that drew my eye to it, the strong contrast of reds, orange and light blue. As the viewer of any map, we want this area to exist, to find something familiar and focus on a concrete location, but we cannot. Much of this looks like the southwestern United States, the red areas resembling the heat maps that we’ve seen much of this year. It also looks like there are elements of the Mexican peninsula throughout. The piece feels very Pacific in nature. I love the fact that the map itself includes what appears to be a legend, in white, the text garbled, but still present. It’s beautiful:
Once again, the mystery behind this work’s creation adds to its beauty. I’m sure I could try to get an explanation of processes and machinery behind this (perhaps not?) but regardless, it’s a really amazing piece that carries the weight of most maps in this day and age, portending geographic motion, displacement, confusion and massive, uncontrollable swaths of heat.
