Oscar Santillán is a visual artist, cybernetician, and writer who lives between The Netherlands and Ecuador. His practice emerges from the notion of 'Antimundo' which he understands as "a way of identifying and generating realities that do not fit in the world". For this purpose he has resorted to forms of knowledge production and imaginaries overlooked by mainstream Western thinking such as cybernetics, science-fiction, Andean and Amazonian cosmologies, a more inclusive history of science, and plant intelligence. This 'Antimundo' toolbox is complemented by emerging fields, currently disrupting modern paradigms, such as AI and synthetic biology.
Santillán's 'Antimundo' can be perceived in projects such as 'Baneque'; 'Solaris', which mixes Soviet sci-fi and Andean cosmology; 'A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History'; 'Spacecraft'; 'How Rivers Think'; and, 'Chewing Gum Codex'.
A work of Santillán, 'The Intruder', stirred a heated controversy in England as the artist claimed to have shrunk the country by one inch after taking away the top inch from its highest mountain.