Shvembldr (38 years old) is an artist and TBOA club founder from Latvia who is passionate about generative art and also works in web development and music creation.

Professional Life

Early Start

Shvembldr has been fascinated by creativity since childhood. He has always drawn, sculpted, designed something. His real name is Ilya Borisov and his nickname is the name of one of the creatures he drew as a child.^[1]  His main profession is frontend-developer and has worked for various media companies, and his job was to develop small games.

Pursuit of Generative Art

Shvembldr was working on the game's aesthetics and sketching some lines when it occurred to him that he could set them randomly and have them position themselves differently each time.^[2][3]

That's exactly what he did. Then he raised their number and clicked for a while, watching the anarchy that ensued. When the word "generated art" came to mind, he opened Google and delved into an incredible and incredibly beautiful realm that he was completely unaware of.

Joshua Davis and Manoloide were his first inspirations. After gaining some good knowledge, he started his first attempts at doing something of his own and after a while, Shvembldr joined the Generative Artists Club^[4]. He started with fairly simple shapes and colors and experimented a lot. ^[5]

Blocks of Art

The inspiration: Blocks of Art is the first case. During an interview session, Shvembldr stated that "

I had two ideas in my head at the same time. One is generative art, which is in constant motion and can have an infinite number of copies, keeping the basic concept, but is also a finished work, stopped at any moment, or printed.

The second idea is the concept of blocks of art, which are small fragments of art in harmony with each other. These ideas are implemented in his project at Genesis (Art Blocks).

According to him " A lot of generative art is very geometric because there are numbers and algorithms behind it, so I decided to make something bright and associated with generative art". Shvembldr went further to indicate that he used a Hexagonal grid, which using isometrics turn into blocks, each side of which is a small generative art. ^[6]

NFT platforms

Shvembldr started by releasing his NFT art on hicetnunc.xyz. He choose the site because there was an opportunity to do interactive art.**** He did 100 releases, all of which were completely sold out.

He has two releases on artblocks.io in curated and playground (and he plans to do one release each month on the playground during the year).

Generative art on-chain

A platform that connects artists and true connoisseurs of generative art. In essence, generative art is a one-of-a-kind, artist-created code that may generate an infinite number of distinct images while maintaining the underlying principle.

Allegations

In February 2022,, Shevmbldr revealed that his bank accounts were frozen and his property seized, but he was given no notice or reasoning for the seizure. Latvian government charged Borisov of avoiding from paying taxes and his assets worth €8.7 million were also seized.  After attending court many times, he was told that he was being investigated for money laundering and given 45 days to prove the legal source of the money he had deposited in his account. On 25th July 2022, he tweeted -^{[7] [8] [9]}

Today I discovered that
@SEB_Latvia
is "terminating its business relationship with me and unilaterally terminating all of its contracts." Now I'm a debtor without a bank account, facing up to 12 years in prison for painting and selling my art.

Shvembldr has described his version of the situation on his website - https://art-is-crime.com .^[10]