Maksim Hapeyenka

Artist

Maksim Hapeyenka

Raster

raster.art/artist/maksim-hapeyenka ↗

Practice

Generative art built through code, geometric constraints, animation, and interactive controls

In the set

Squares and Triangles ↗ · 80 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Maksim Hapeyenka came to generative art through software development. In a 2021 account, he described beginning to code at fifteen, taking his first software engineering job at eighteen, and working across mobile applications, games, and backend services.¹ A project translating Xbox Kinect data into particles introduced him to Processing, whose rapid visual feedback encouraged experiments beyond conventional application development.¹

That experience produced a self-imposed exercise: make images from only one or two simple shapes. Hapeyenka initially worked with squares, scaling them repeatedly at a fixed point while rotating the sketch. Triangles entered later, after he found that their angles complemented the square structure.¹ The resulting work treats limitation as a generative resource. Its visual complexity does not come from an expansive vocabulary, but from repetition, layering, opacity, color, and motion.

Geometry as a moving system

Squares and Triangles was released through Art Blocks on December 16, 2021, as a collection of 80 editions.² The official record identifies it as project 218 and confirms both its artist and final edition count.³ Across the series, nested outlines accumulate into spirograph-like formations that can resemble apertures, flowers, tunnels, or rotating mechanical diagrams. Those associations remain unstable because the images are generated from squares and triangles rather than modeled objects.

Hapeyenka states that the shapes move linearly and that the core movement does not use sine or cosine functions. Sine appears only in the pulsating color effect assigned to certain outputs.⁴ This distinction matters to the project’s construction: an appearance associated with curved, cyclical motion emerges from straight-edged primitives and comparatively direct transformations. The work therefore stages a productive disagreement between what the viewer perceives and how the system operates.

Live on Art Blocks: squares-and-triangles-by-maksim-hapeyenka ↗

Variation and interaction

The collection organizes variation through three named tiers: Normal, Rare, and Legendary.⁴ Normal outputs use unfilled shapes. Rare outputs can introduce filled forms, while Legendary outputs add rotation, shifting opacity, overlap glow, and consistently bright color behavior.⁴ These distinctions make rarity visible as a change in the program’s conduct, not simply as a metadata label.

Interaction further reveals the work as software. The space bar pauses or resumes the animation, while number keys control the visibility of square, triangle, and filled-shape layers. Legendary outputs also allow their spin to be paused.⁴ The collector can consequently isolate components of the composition or arrest a preferred moment. Each edition remains a bounded algorithmic object, yet its presentation is temporally variable.

Hapeyenka’s account of the project emphasizes trial, interruption, and return. The first version emerged during a night of experimentation, followed by weeks of refinement; years later, encountering Art Blocks prompted another sustained period of adaptation for release.¹ This extended development clarifies the series’ compact formal premise. Two shapes become a framework for testing how little code and geometry are needed to produce perceptual abundance.

His later writing on Birth, an algorithmic project conceived for Bitcoin, indicates a continuing interest in on-chain generative systems and symbolic narratives.⁵ Within that trajectory, Squares and Triangles remains the foundational public statement: 80 editions in which elementary forms behave less like static geometry than like instruments for drawing time.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Maksim Hapeyenka links page ↗.