Shvembldr is a generative artist who creates interactive, code-based artworks that generate new visuals with every click.Working under the pseudonym Shvembldr, the artist is Ilja Borisovs, a Latvian citizen born in Riga.,He discovered generative art while working as a frontend developer, after using Math.random() to place lines on a screen for a game and finding the results endlessly unpredictable.
Before adopting the name Shvembldr, he released six albums of music under an earlier, undisclosed pseudonym. He released 100 works on Hic et Nunc, all of which sold out, before moving to Art Blocks. His Art Blocks project The Blocks of Art is conceived as a dedication to the platform, with individual pieces arranged like panels on cubes, each bearing one letter of the words ART BLOCKS. He followed it with the TBOA Club, a collectors' group open to anyone who assembles nine Blocks of Art tokens spelling out all its letters. On Art Blocks Playground he released Alien Clock, an infinite, deterministic animation that never repeats but reproduces identically each time its script is rerun.In 2023 he released Overload on Art Blocks, an interactive, layered work about the fragmentation and disorientation of digital information overload.He also lent the artist Piter Pasma his first tez to begin minting on Hic et Nunc.
In 2021 Borisovs minted and sold 3,557 NFTs on Ethereum, earning 4,253 ETH, and paid over €3.1 million in Latvian taxes on the income. On 10 February 2022 Latvian police froze his bank accounts and seized his assets on suspicion of money laundering. He documented the case on a website he published in July 2022, Art is Crime.,In February 2025 Latvia's Economic Court terminated the special process against his seized property and ordered the funds released, a decision the Riga Regional Court of Appeal upheld that October. The seizure was formally lifted on 16 October 2025. As of that date, the underlying criminal case had not been closed, and no compensation or apology had been issued.
