Kitel is a Ukrainian generative artist and network engineer whose long-form fxhash series Fields of the Abandoned Homeland, 2023, reimagines his country as a peaceful landscape of wheat fields and pylons rather than a war zone. He began learning to code by watching online tutorials, and started making generative art on fxhash shortly before Russia's invasion forced him to flee his home in Kharkiv in 2022.
Kitel works as a network engineer for one of Ukraine's largest internet providers and taught himself JavaScript by watching the YouTube channel The Coding Train, after earlier working as a technician who fixed customers' internet and television connections. He was drawn into generative art after buying NFTs on fxhash and contacting the artist Jacek Markusiewicz to congratulate him on his 2021 work reborn, which reminded Kitel, a hobbyist metal detectorist, of old maps from medieval Europe. On the morning the invasion began, in February 2022, Markusiewicz was the only person from Twitter who wrote to check on him.
Fields of the Abandoned Homeland is an uncurated, 128-output long-form project built with deliberately simple, unobfuscated code, in which Kitel focused on rendering wheat fields, a motif drawn from the countryside he had travelled for metal detecting before the war. The series recalls the metaphysical landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico and the digital work of Igor Piwowarczyk.It was followed by Idem Locus, created for the Blind Gallery x Feral File Vistas Edition, an exhibition curated by Casey Reas and Kaloh.
In 2025 he contributed The Longest Night to “Cure³”, a fundraising exhibition on fxhash for Parkinson's disease research curated by Alex Estorick and Foteini Valeonti. Built from entirely new code, the work is visually related to Fields of the Abandoned Homeland but more introspective, exploring the erosion of emotion and desire in a person living with constrained freedoms. Kitel described “Cure³” as his “first offline exhibition”.
