# Ieva by Shvembldr

## The work and its context

Ieva is a 500-edition generative art series by Shvembldr, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 339, through Art Blocks Factory, with heritage placement in the AB500 set.[^S01][^S06] Each output is an arrangement of rounded, overlapping shapes and scattered dots drawn from one of twenty-two hand-picked palettes, and each is fully interactive: clicking regenerates the composition on the spot, an act the artist calls investigating.[^S01][^S07][^S10]

The registry description gives both the mechanism and the wound: "Ieva is an algorithm that creates a shape in a specific sequence from a random point on the grid and smooths out its corners. Overlapping such shapes creates endless possibilities of combinations that will always remain balanced and aesthetically pleasing." Then the title's origin: "The title of this project is the name of the investigator who made a criminal case against me for making art. This name occupied a big part of my mind while working on this project. And I decided that it should be perpetuated in art." The controls are stated as "click = investigate" and "space = automatic investigation".[^S01]

The series runs on p5.js 1.0.0 at a square aspect ratio with zero external assets, under the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.[^S01] Shvembldr, the Riga-based artist Ilja Borisovs, has seven works in the AB500 set and a collector-metric rank of 3 of 308, the highest of any artist in this batch.[^S06] The work belongs to a larger story the artist has documented himself: his own site, art-is-crime.com, maintains a public case file on the criminal proceedings that followed his NFT income.[^S07]

## Conception and development

The conception is autobiographical in a way few generative works are. On his own project page Shvembldr writes that Ieva was "the first project that was fully formed in my mind before I started programming it", and he lists its goals: "To slow down the almost exponential complication of visual forms and effects in generative art" and "to evoke an emotion in collectors and artists that takes them back to the beginning of 2021, when many of us were starting on our journey, the future seemed beautiful, and when most arts on Art Blocks were geometrically simple and memorable". Above all, "to imprint in art the name Ieva, which has become a noun for me. That name lived in my head for months next to the question 'Why'? Why am I being treated like this? Why do law enforcement officials hate me without even knowing me?" He adds of the investigator: "They have already resigned."[^S07]

The aesthetic program is deliberate retro-minimalism, "minimalism that is not minimal", complying with what he calls the canons of long-form generative art: "Huge variability. Strict concept. 100% recognizability."[^S07] The biography behind the practice runs from front-end development to generative art in 2018, experiments posted to Instagram, then a hundred sold-out releases on the Tezos platform Hic Et Nunc by 2021, each piece generating a new composition with every click, the direct ancestor of Ieva's investigate control.[^S06]

The work also builds a collector game. The artist writes that there are "only five unions, by the number of dots on the side of the grid", that he belongs to Union 4 because that is his mint number 0, and that beyond the prescribed features "there is one hidden", which he declines to disclose.[^S07] No project-specific interview exists; the registry interview field is null.[^S01]

## How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug ieva-by-shvembldr and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 339. The retrieved script is 14,735 bytes with SHA-256 digest 51f8d35bf1f124a06b704dc6d9f17465bfdee3e9e54eb2d3e1ce21c2e31c5958, and it was read in full.[^S01][^S02]

Randomness comes from a xorshift-family generator seeded from four 8-character slices of the token hash, the same compact construction used elsewhere in this cohort.[^S02] The script computes named features from the hash, including palette, grid size drawn from 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 with weights favoring the middle values, and a shapes parameter stepped min, mid and max with weights favoring min. The palette table begins with hex triples such as E26D02, 252926, E5DDC1.[^S02] The artist's own page explains the drawing algorithm: from a random grid point the algorithm walks the vertices of the squares along the edge of the future figure, connects them while smoothing the gaps, rounds the corners, and overlaps several such elements, some filled, some transparent, with circles placed partly on the grid and partly on the corners "to maintain a balance", and some elements "designed specifically to upset the balance and make the picture less than ideal".[^S07]

The interaction layer is a single keydown listener plus click handling: pressing Space toggles an interval that regenerates the composition every 200 milliseconds, the "automatic investigation"; pressing a digit key regenerates at a different pixel density; pressing s saves a PNG named after the token hash.[^S01][^S02] In the live renderer all of this was exercised: the reported hash matched the chain record exactly, the image is static when idle, a click produces a new composition, Space starts the automatic cycle and a second Space stops it. The page holds six canvases, including offscreen buffers, and no audio or video elements.[^S09]

## The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, shows a two-phase sale.[^S01][^S04] Edition 0 was minted on July 28, 2022 at 07:44:11 UTC, and the project was activated the next day, July 29, 2022 at 00:06:03 UTC.[^S01] A pre-sale phase ran on July 31: editions 1, 10 and 20 minted at 16:58:40, 17:15:25 and 17:49:29 UTC respectively, all before the announced public start.[^S04] The registry's sale-start timestamp reads August 1, 2022 at 17:00:00 UTC, and the official collection page carries "Released Aug 1, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC".[^S01][^S03]

The public phase was fast: the AB5D treasury's edition 227 minted at 17:15:19 UTC and the final edition 499 at 17:16:07 UTC, the recorded completion time, sixteen minutes and seven seconds after the announced start.[^S01][^S04] The minted count equals the maximum of 500, and the project is marked complete, locked and active, with the paused flag false.[^S01] The registry's current price field reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout administrative value; no dated 2022 source inspected here states the original mint price.[^S01] The AB5D collection holds exactly one edition, number 227, held by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045.[^S04][^S05]

## Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC 4.0" for Ieva, with the terms URL recorded in the record.[^S01] This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC 4.0.[^S01] Unlike the NoDerivatives licences elsewhere in this batch, the deed grants two freedoms: to Share, to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to Adapt, to remix, transform and build upon the material, under two conditions: Attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes, and NonCommercial, no use for commercial purposes.[^S08] A collector or reader may therefore make and share derivative arrangements of an Ieva composition, for non-commercial purposes, with credit.[^S08]

The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.[^S02] The registry lists zero external asset dependencies; the sole runtime dependency is the p5.js 1.0.0 library noted in the script type.[^S01][^S02] Owning an Ieva token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.[^S04]

## Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.[^S09][^S10]

Edition 227 (token 339000227, minted August 1, 2022 at 17:15:19 UTC, fifteen minutes into the public sale), the AB5D-held header, is the delicate one: on a pale pink field, outlined rather than filled shapes, their red and black doubled contours snaking around a scattered field of black and red-centered dots.[^S01][^S04][^S05][^S10] In the live view it sat still until clicked, then regenerated instantly; Space set it cycling through new compositions five times a second until Space stopped it again.[^S09]

Edition 0 (token 339000000, the July 28, 2022 pre-activation mint, the artist's own Union 4 member) is bold red and deep blue on off-white: a tall cross of overlapping rounded shapes with concentric circle targets and a patch of exposed grid at the lower left.[^S04][^S07][^S10] Edition 1 (token 339000001, first of the July 31 pre-sale) is yellow and midnight blue on bright blue, three horizontal elements stacked with dark dots.[^S04][^S10]

Edition 10 (token 339000010, also July 31) is the densest: red, navy and cream interlocking shapes with several grid patches and many circles, nearly filling the frame.[^S04][^S10] Edition 20 (token 339000020) is the sparsest: a single red and cream formation on navy with dots drifting to the left margin, the balance-upsetting elements the artist describes made visible.[^S04][^S07][^S10] Across the five, the rounded-overlap grammar is constant; palette, density, fill and contour treatment vary.[^S10]

## Significance and limitations

Ieva turns a criminal investigation into a permanent record: the investigator's name fixed on Ethereum in 500 balanced, clickable compositions, from an artist ranked 3 of 308 in the set.[^S01][^S06][^S07] It is also the batch's most direct statement of the Hic Et Nunc-era click-to-regenerate aesthetic carried into Art Blocks, and its CC BY-NC licence, without NoDerivatives, makes its imagery the most freely adaptable of the batch's non-public-domain works.[^S01][^S06][^S08]

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

- The original mint price at the August 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.[^S01]
- No project-specific interview exists; the registry interview field is null, though the artist's own site is unusually confessional.[^S01][^S07]
- The registry records a script count of 2 while the retrieved blob is a single self-contained script; the count's semantics are unresolved.[^S01][^S02]
- The hidden feature the artist mentions, "bug or feature?", is not identified in the inspected sources and was not located in the script read.[^S07]
- The criminal case file figures displayed on the artist's site, including a timeline counter and a euro amount, are self-reported by the artist and were not corroborated against court records.[^S07]

[^S01]: Art Blocks. [Ieva by Shvembldr: project registry record (projects_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:03Z.
[^S02]: Shvembldr. [Ieva full artist script (projects_metadata.script)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:03Z.
[^S03]: Art Blocks. [Ieva: official collection page](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/ieva-by-shvembldr). Accessed 2026-09-20T14:55:00Z.
[^S04]: Art Blocks. [Ieva token records (tokens_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:52Z.
[^S05]: Art Blocks. [AB5D linked wallet set (user_profiles query)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:22:10Z.
[^S06]: AB5D. [Shvembldr artist dossier](https://ab5d.xyz/artists/shvembldr/). Accessed 2026-09-20T14:55:30Z.
[^S07]: Shvembldr. [Ieva: artist's project page on art-is-crime.com](https://www.art-is-crime.com/articles/ieva). Accessed 2026-09-20T14:56:00Z.
[^S08]: Creative Commons. [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International deed](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:30:00Z.
[^S09]: Art Blocks. [Ieva live renderer, token 339000227](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/339000227). Accessed 2026-09-20T15:02:00Z.
[^S10]: Art Blocks. [Ieva static preview media, tokens 339000000/339000001/339000010/339000020/339000227](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/339000227.png). Accessed 2026-09-20T14:58:00Z.