UNDRGRND ARTIST: SANTIAGO
NOVEMBER 17TH, 2023
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With visual artists the focus tends to rely on the visual interaction between the works and the audience; they utilize visuals as their language of choice. With abstract artists we rely on context clues, like the title, to help translate the idea.
We can feel santiago’s obsessive need to create not just through the sheer amount of art he creates but also through the sprawling length of the titles: don't tell the truth again cause it's tiring, units of droid emotion as gaps between liquid and impossible to find buildings that are found on the beach before the catastrophe, this is the secret story of a pair of shoes that grew in your mind before the planet started making those weird noises and fumes.
“[My] visuals come from a place of pessimism about communication and life,” santiago says, “I am a dad who hopes the air is breathable in 20 or 30 years because I love life intensely. But, I often feel that the big human project failed. We, collectively through generations, made a building that can’t stand up, is weak and celebrates the worst in it, and punishes the good. This is a common [theme] in post-meme, vaporwave aesthetics and glitch art. In the whole field of art expressions that are related to the internet culture, some are harsher, while others are more like a joke that looks back at a more serious pessimism and says, ‘Well things aren’t that awful, right?’ I think that being part of a shared experience about the internet and being adults from the era after the pandemic, we find meaningful, interesting similar images and thoughts.”
His visual creation, the frequency of creating, and meticulously crafted titles convey santiago’s sense of urgency to fix and properly communicate our dire situation.
While santiago feels that the human experiment has failed, he manages to provide some hope by rebuilding breakdowns in communication through his art.
His project Human Kernel is described as the “anti-pfp project on Tezos”. 1/1 digital painting PFPs each one has a personality and different depiction creating no assemblence of continuity.
“I’m not a native English speaker, so I ignored at the time every meaning of kernel, I meant it in the way of convolution matrix (which I also understood very vaguely). As a kernel in corn, it kind of gives a funny metaphor of how an individual in a community might act or be valued, for good or bad, and PFPs have had this crazy approach to community and some common ideas between them on how value is created that I suppose marked a special moment in the history of cryptoart. [It] also something made from the border, the margins, the Hic Et Nunc underground, from where maybe we could say whatever cause most weren’t listening.”
When the global community struggles to interpret and connect through language the results can be problematic, humorous or perfectly indicative of how universal art bridges our gaps in language.
While not a native English speaker santiago manages to convey and communicate ideas of individuality and value extraction from individuals through a side project, regardless of any perceived barrier in understanding.
With what seems a constant stream of creative thinking, process and writing, santiago manages to perfectly articulate his intent with each work so that we all may understand as if we shared a language.
