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.
