Biography & Practice

Artist Statement

My practice begins with the instability between natural and artificial life. I work with generative systems, live data, sensors, robotics, and machine perception to create images and environments that behave like living organisms: growing, reacting, mutating, and dissolving in response to their surroundings.

Many of the works are built around forms of life and intelligence that are difficult to see directly: pollination, ecological rhythm, atmospheric change, machine interpretation, collective movement, and the emotional charge of presence. Rather than illustrating these systems, the work gives them a perceptual body.

Technology, in this practice, is not a neutral tool or a spectacle of progress. It is a material with memory, bias, energy, consequence, and behavior. Each system brings together code, image, space, and audience, asking how perception changes when machines and natural processes begin to mirror one another.

The work invites a slower attention to the environments we inhabit and the systems we are becoming part of. It proposes a world in which human, machine, and ecological intelligence are not separate categories, but overlapping forces acting on the same ground.

Biography

Ronen Tanchum is a contemporary artist whose work explores the shifting relationship between natural systems, machine perception, and human presence. Working across generative installation, moving image, sculpture, and interactive environments, his practice treats technology as a living material: responsive, unstable, and able to surface structure in ecology, behavior, and shared presence.

Tanchum's works often unfold as evolving systems. Images grow, react, and transform through live data, sensors, robotics, artificial intelligence, and real-time computation. Rather than using technology as spectacle, the work slows attention down, placing artificial and organic processes side by side.

He founded Phenomena Labs, the studio through which many of his large-scale public systems are developed, produced, and maintained. Through the studio, he leads multidisciplinary teams working across artistic research, software, spatial design, and long-term technical deployment.

Before focusing fully on his artistic practice, Tanchum worked in advanced visual effects and simulation for major film and media productions, a background that continues to inform the scale, precision, and spatial complexity of his work.

His projects have been presented at the World Economic Forum, TAMA, Samsung Space Germany, Times Square NYC, Art Blocks, Feral File, Design Museum Holon, Art Basel Miami, Expo 2020 Dubai, Galerie Met Berlin, and Artblocks Marfa. His work has been featured in Forbes, The Art Newspaper, Whitehot Magazine, VICE, Hyperallergic, and Creative Applications. He is a World Economic Forum Cultural Leader and a member of the OpenAI Alpha Artist Program.

Games & Films

Visual effects artist and supervisor on major Hollywood films and interactive media, including Deadpool, Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, The Walk, Alice In Wonderland, The Great Gatsby, Call of Duty, and more.

Awards / Nominations

• Grammy Award nomination, Best Music Video, 67th Grammy Awards (2025)
• Academy Award nomination, Best Visual Effects, The Walk (2016)
• Visual Effects Society Technical Award, The Walk (2016)
• D&AD Awards, Best Branded Content, The Future Of Music (2016)