phenomena

Artist

phenomena · PhenomenaLabs.com ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/phenomena ↗

Based

Studio founded by Ronen Tanchum and based in Tel Aviv

Practice

Generative systems, immersive environments, interactive installations, and computational landscapes

Now

Human Atmospheres was presented at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos in January 2026

In the set

APEX ↗ · 377 editions
Longing ↗ · 247 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

phenomena is the generative-art identity of Phenomena Labs, an artist-led studio founded by Ronen Tanchum. Its practice joins code, real-time rendering, interaction, and spatial display to produce images that behave less like fixed representations than environments. The studio identifies growth, decay, emergence, environmental data, and human presence as compositional materials.¹² This position is crucial to the two works gathered in AB[500]. APEX and Longing are landscapes, but neither treats landscape as a stable view onto a knowable world.

Tanchum’s route into this practice passed through visual effects and interactive media. His biography traces a career that began with special effects for cinema and music videos before developing into computational art for public and institutional settings.²³ An earlier account of his computer-generated imagery records the perceptual paradox he encountered in visual effects: physical accuracy does not always look believable, while an altered simulation may appear more credible.⁴ The studio’s landscapes are technically elaborate, yet their argument is not a demonstration of software. It is an inquiry into when computational marks begin to carry atmosphere, memory, and emotional credibility.

This inquiry belongs to a broader practice spanning screen-based editions, immersive installations, architectural media, and public artworks. Phenomena Labs describes its works as real-time systems shaped by data, environment, and human presence.¹ That expanded context changes how the Art Blocks works should be read. Even when encountered as individual outputs, they imply duration, variation, and an environment larger than the frame.

A landscape assembled by perception

APEX is a collection of 377 editions released through Art Blocks on April 15, 2022.⁵ Its landscape begins not with topographical description but with elementary marks. Circles accumulate, blur, and resolve into ridges, craters, clouds, and distant geological masses. Contemporary profiles connect the series to Tanchum’s wider interest in organic behaviors, synthetic nature, computational error, and the unstable boundary between structured and chaotic images.⁶

The resulting images stage recognition as an event. A viewer may first register fields of color, rounded deposits, or patterned turbulence. Only afterward do these elements cohere into something like a mountain range, canyon, cloud bank, or planetary surface. APEX therefore locates landscape in the viewer’s interpretive labor. Nature is not simply depicted. It is inferred from enough visual evidence to make an environment plausible.

This gradual crossing from abstraction into representation gives the work its tension. Geological time is compressed into an algorithmic drawing process, while apparently monumental landforms remain visibly dependent on circles, noise, blur, and color. The sublime is reconstructed from procedural operations. The landscapes look discovered, but they also disclose their fabrication.

The collection reveals the importance of variation. Across 377 editions, similar rules generate differing atmospheres and spatial propositions. Some outputs suggest aerial surveys; others resemble miniature dioramas, remote planets, or romantic vistas. Repetition does not produce sameness. It clarifies the boundaries of a system, showing how a limited grammar can support divergent impressions of scale, depth, weather, and material.

APEX does not ask whether a synthetic landscape is real. It asks how little information perception needs before reality is felt.

Live on Art Blocks: apex-by-phenomena ↗

From generated image to living duration

If APEX asks when abstraction becomes landscape, Longing asks whether landscape can remain alive inside a digital frame. The collection comprises 247 editions and was released on Art Blocks on February 17, 2023.⁷ Its mountains, river, sky, and atmosphere evolve rather than settling into a definitive state. Within phenomena’s wider practice, this emphasis on continuous transformation places the image closer to an environment than a conventional landscape painting.¹⁸

The title establishes emotion as part of the system. Longing names desire directed toward what is absent, distant, remembered, or impossible to recover. Here the object of desire is a condition of unity with nature. Yet the work offers that unity through software, screens, and blockchain-based editions. The apparent contradiction is productive. The more persuasively the algorithm evokes flowing water, weather, and changing light, the more strongly it raises the question of whether mediation reconnects viewers with nature or inserts another layer between them and it.

Movement supplies the project’s distinctive temporal structure. Rather than treating animation as ornament, Longing makes transformation fundamental to the landscape’s identity. The changing scene binds algorithmic time to lived time, so the work is not exhausted by a representative still. This temporality also distinguishes the 247 editions from a sequence of interchangeable scenic views. Each is an authored possibility within a larger environmental model.

The result is a landscape understood through recurrence rather than permanence. Mountains and rivers supply recognizable anchors, while atmospheric change prevents the image from closing into a final state. As in weather, patterns can be anticipated while their precise appearance remains variable. The viewer encounters not only an image of a place, but a system for repeatedly producing the sensation of place.

Live on Art Blocks: longing-by-phenomena ↗

Synthetic nature beyond the edition

The movement from APEX to Longing anticipates concerns that continue across Tanchum’s installations: synthetic ecology, perceptual immersion, and systems that change through data or participation. In In Bloom, a real-time generative image cycles flowers through blooming and wilting. Tel Aviv Museum of Art explains that the balance between those conditions responds to data concerning green and polluting sources within electricity consumption.³ The work extends a proposition already present in the Art Blocks projects: an image of nature can also become an interface for thinking about environmental systems.

The studio’s public work reinforces this shift from picture to situation. Moments in Time was conceived for an architectural setting, where the activity of a building and environmental information contribute to a changing visual atmosphere on a large lobby screen.⁹ The artist’s exhibition archive records presentations across galleries, museums, public screens, and cultural forums, including APEX, Eternal Tides, Neo Botanica, In Bloom, and Rococo Diffusion Artifacts.¹⁰ Such contexts help explain why phenomena’s online works repeatedly feel spatial. Their compositions anticipate immersion even when viewed on a conventional display.

The recurring mountain, river, garden, and flower are not retreats from technology. They are forms through which the practice examines it. A detailed interview with Tanchum locates his work within relationships among natural phenomena, mediated perception, algorithms, collaboration, and public space.⁸ LOAD Gallery similarly describes Phenomena Labs through generative art, immersive environments, interactive installations, sensor data, and real-time experience.¹¹ The natural motif becomes a critical instrument, capable of holding beauty and unease at once.

The system as medium

phenomena’s achievement lies in treating computation as behavior rather than effect. Tanchum’s practice is repeatedly described through evolving outputs, real-time information, sensing, and technology used as an artistic material.¹⁸⁹ The artist’s catalogue frames works through their installation conditions, temporal structures, media, and exhibition contexts.¹² A generative artwork is not exhausted by its most attractive still. Its identity includes rules, dependencies, durations, and conditions of encounter.

Within that framework, APEX and Longing form a concise study in two modes of computational landscape. APEX culminates in a static image whose making remains perceptible in its layered circles and noise. Longing refuses culmination, continuing to change after its initial draw. One turns procedure into geological appearance; the other turns procedure into weather and time. Together they locate landscape between program and projection, between what the machine constructs and what the viewer is prepared to recognize.

This is why the works retain force beyond their technical novelty. Their questions are familiar and durable: how does an image become believable, why do imagined places produce real feeling, and what does it mean to seek nature through an artificial medium? phenomena offers no simple reconciliation. Instead, the studio builds systems in which those questions can remain active, changing with every output and every encounter.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the phenomena links page ↗.