Shvembldr

Artist

Shvembldr (Ilja Borisovs) · site ↗

Based

Riga, Latvia

Raster

raster.art/artist/shvembldr ↗

In the set

7 works · 3,518 editions total

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Shvembldr discovered generative art in 2018 while working as a front-end developer for a media company, experimenting with Math.random() to place lines on screen.¹ What began as a hobby, posting experiments to Instagram, became a full-time practice after he discovered the work of Joshua Davis and Daniel Shiffman, joined the Generative Artists Club, and began minting interactive works on Hic Et Nunc.² By 2021, he had completed 100 sold-out releases on the Tezos platform, each piece generating a new composition with every click.³

The Blocks of Art and the birth of TBOA

Shvembldr's Art Blocks debut, The Blocks of Art (May 2021, 500 editions), was conceived as a tribute to the platform itself: a three-dimensional arrangement of panels on cubes, each face a small generative work, with every piece containing one letter of the words ART BLOCKS.⁴ Collectors who assembled all nine letters gained entry to the TBOA Club, a membership system that Shvembldr built to reward sustained engagement.⁵ The club offered early access to future drops, exclusive tokens, and a direct channel between artist and collector, transforming a single series into an ongoing ecosystem.

Alien Insects variety grid · 1,000 editions · live on Art Blocks ↗

Alien Insects and the expanding universe

Released in August 2021 as an Art Blocks Presents project, Alien Insects (1,000 editions) introduced what Shvembldr described as military alien insects: symmetrical and asymmetrical forms existing simultaneously across several dimensions.⁶ The series became a flagship, with outputs ranging from delicate biomorphic structures to dense, weaponized geometries. It was followed by Alien DNA (April 2022, 512 editions), a Playground release that extended the alien taxonomy into chromatic and structural variations, and Alien Clock (October 2021, 362 editions), an infinite, deterministic animation that runs without repetition yet remains tied to each token's unique seed.⁷

444(4) and the experimental edge

444(4) (October 2021, 444 editions) was billed as an extremely experimental project, the quintessential generative art: each instance an infinite, deterministic system that runs forever without repeating.⁸ The title's numerical palindrome and the edition count's self-referential quality signaled Shvembldr's interest in pushing the boundaries of what a long-form generative series could be, not merely as a set of images but as living algorithms.

Ieva and the personal turn

Ieva (August 2022, 500 editions) marked a shift toward autobiographical content. The algorithm creates shapes from random points on a grid, smoothing corners through overlapping forms, but the title carries the name of the investigator who opened the criminal case against Shvembldr in Latvia.⁹ The piece is interactive: clicking initiates an investigation, a gesture that turns the viewer into a participant in the artist's legal ordeal. It is generative art as testimony, code as witness.

Overload and the late style

Overload (July 2023, 200 editions), released on Art Blocks Presents, is Shvembldr's most recent major series: a dense, layered exploration of chromatic and structural complexity that reads as a culmination of the techniques developed across his earlier works.¹⁰ With only 200 editions, it is his smallest long-form series on the platform, suggesting a move toward scarcity and concentration after years of expansive, high-edition projects.

The TBOA Club and community architecture

Beyond individual series, Shvembldr's most significant contribution to generative art culture may be the TBOA Club, which evolved from a collector reward system into a full platform for on-chain releases.¹¹ In collaboration with Art Blocks, the club launched internal projects like AIXXA and [post]-konstrukt, limited editions for members and token holders.¹² The model, in which collecting one series grants access to future works, anticipated the loyalty and engagement mechanics that would later become standard across NFT platforms.

Art is Crime

On 10 February 2022, Latvian police seized all of Shvembldr's assets without notice, opening criminal proceedings for alleged money laundering under Section 195(3) of Latvian criminal law, punishable by three to twelve years in prison.¹³ The artist responded by creating art-is-crime.com, a public case file documenting his income, tax payments (over 3.1 million euros in 2021 alone), court decisions, and procedural status.¹⁴ In February 2025, the Economic Court terminated the special process and ordered seized funds released; the Riga Regional Court of Appeal upheld this decision in October 2025, and the asset seizure was formally lifted.¹⁵ No compensation was paid, and no apology was issued. The case has been widely cited in discussions of NFT regulation, artists' rights, and the failures of legal systems to adapt to blockchain-based creative economies.¹⁶

Start selling your art and pay all your taxes, and you will be declared a criminal. Art is crime.

Legacy and influence

Shvembldr's influence extends through direct community support: he lent Piter Pasma his first tez to mint on Hic Et Nunc, enabling one of the most significant careers in contemporary generative art.¹⁷ His work has been exhibited at Digital Art House in Riga, where the 2022 show FLEETING INFINITY allowed visitors to generate paintings in real time by pressing a button.¹⁸ Across seven Art Blocks series, the TBOA Club, and the art-is-crime.com archive, Shvembldr has demonstrated that generative art is not merely a set of techniques but a way of building communities, documenting struggles, and insisting on the legitimacy of code-based creativity.

Bibliography

For the complete bibliography see the Shvembldr links page ↗.