RVig

Artist

RVig (Richard Vigniel) · site ↗

Based

1976, Lyon, France; lives in Geneva, Switzerland

Raster

raster.art/artist/rvigart ↗

In the set

Flowers · 6,158 editions; Nebula · 154 editions; Volute · 200 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

RVig was born in 1976 in Lyon, France, and currently resides in Geneva, Switzerland.¹ He has been a digital artist since 1999, a career that began after studies in computer science and engineering at the National Institute of Applied Science in Lyon and McGill University in Montreal.² This dual formation, equally technical and visual, allowed him to build a personal toolkit of custom scripts, filters, and transformations that he has continuously refined across two decades.³ His early work was shaped by the constraints of late-1990s hardware: overnight renders of 3D scenes and fractal images, produced deep in the French countryside with no internet connection.⁴ Those limitations instilled a discipline of efficiency that still characterises his code today.

From Screen to Blockchain

Before entering the NFT space, RVig exhibited extensively in Europe. His work appeared at the FT Weekend Festival in London, the Lausanne Art Fair, the Paris Metaverse Summit, the Predict Conference in Dublin, and multiple exhibitions at InkGallery in Geneva.⁵ In 2017 his generative pieces were shown on giant screens at Basel Airport during Art Basel, and in 2018 he created reactive generative visuals for a harp concert at the Conservatoire de Musique de Geneve.⁶ These experiences established a practice of presenting code-based work in physical, often public, contexts.

The shift to blockchain arrived in 2021. RVig discovered Art Blocks and NFTs at the end of 2020, submitted his first proposal in February 2021, and released Flowers on Art Blocks Factory that August.⁷ The drop was extraordinary: all 6,158 editions minted within a single hour during a peak period for generative art.⁸ The project remains one of the largest long-form generative collections on the platform, a testament to both the simplicity of the underlying algorithm and the visual richness it produced.

Flowers variety grid · live on Art Blocks ↗

The Trilogy: Flowers, Nebula, Volute

Flowers (2021, 6,158 editions) is built from a short, proficient algorithm that generates thousands of distinct still images while maintaining coherence across the collection.⁹ Each output is a dense bouquet of intersecting curved lines, rendered in palettes extracted from nature. The artist describes the work as his first creation in long-form generative art, made possible by the Art Blocks paradigm, and notes that he had little prior experience with p5js in web browsers.¹⁰ The learning curve was steep but decisive: the project proved that a compact algorithm could produce infinite botanical variation.

Nebula (2021, 154 editions) followed shortly after. Where Flowers was static, Nebula is animated and interactive, drawing thousands of intersecting and overlaying curved shapes that drift like interstellar clouds.¹¹ The project marked RVig's move from p5js to pure vanilla JavaScript and HTML canvas, a technical evolution that gave him finer control over motion and layering.¹² The reduced edition count, 154, reflects the greater computational cost of animation and the artist's desire to explore a more intimate scale after the mass release of Flowers.

Left: Nebula. Right: Volute. · live on Art Blocks ↗

Volute (2022, 200 editions) completes the trilogy. Released on Art Blocks Presents in December 2022, the project returns to concepts RVig developed earlier in his career, rewritten for WebGL2 and the Art Blocks environment.¹³ The title refers to the spiral, scroll-like form found in classical architecture and shells; here, gentle spiralling motions create what the artist calls the calming effect of marveling at flowers in nature.¹⁴ Most colour palettes are extracted from photographs of everyday life and nature, grounding the abstract geometry in observed reality.¹⁵ The edition count of 200 sits between the intimacy of Nebula and the scale of Flowers, suggesting a calibrated relationship between technical complexity and collector access.

Poetry, Prize, and Print

RVig's practice extends beyond the Art Blocks trilogy. In 2024 he was awarded the ABS Digital Art Prize for Les Fleurs du Mal, a generative video work that translates Charles Baudelaire's 126 poems into evolving ribbons whose paths and colours are determined by the structure of the text.¹⁶ The prize, presented by Arab Bank Switzerland and judged by a panel including Claire Silver, Dave Krugman, and William Mapan, recognised the work's visual elegance and its demonstration of generative art's potential to engage with literary tradition.¹⁷ The collection exists as a three-minute UHD video loop, NFT editions, and certified fine-art prints, reflecting the artist's commitment to multiple formats.¹⁸

This cross-format approach is consistent with RVig's earlier practice. He has produced print editions of Flowers, offering giclee prints on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag and Baryta paper, and has maintained a studio practice that includes aluminium dibond prints since at least 2011.¹⁹ The tension between the immateriality of on-chain code and the physicality of print has been a productive one for the artist, who sees each medium as revealing different qualities of the same algorithm.

Geneva and the Generative Community

RVig's base in Geneva has placed him at the intersection of several European digital-art networks. He has spoken at the Computer Art Congress in Geneva, the Digital Art Expo in Megeve, and conferences organised by The Good Token Society at the Geneva Contemporary Art Center.²⁰ In 2023 he participated in ONCHAINED, a Swiss NFT show curated by Georg Bak at unpaired. NFT Gallery in Zug, and in 2025 he collaborated with Medecins Sans Frontieres on Field Impact, an exhibition at Artverse Gallery in Paris that explored the intersection of digital art, data, and humanitarian practice.²¹ These activities position him not only as a studio practitioner but as an advocate for generative art in institutional and public contexts.

His advice to emerging artists reflects this outward-facing ethos: work hard, be original, refine your artworks, make yourself visible, join artist communities, attend conferences, meet people, and submit your projects to competitions.²² Equally important, he argues, is evangelising digital art to the general public, giving talks outside the web3 space, and explaining the value of code-based creativity to audiences unfamiliar with blockchain.²³ This pedagogical impulse, combined with a technical rigour honed over twenty-five years, makes RVig a central figure in the generative art landscape.

Bibliography

For the complete bibliography see the RVig links page ↗.