Ronen Tanchum

Artist, technologist, and creative developer Ronen Tanchum designs living, generative systems that bring nature into public space — galleries, museums, lobbies, even a cave. In this Future Spaces session with host Josh Goldblum, Ronen traces his path from music production to a decade of film VFX (Spider-Man, Happy Feet, The Great Gatsby) to founding his studio Phenomenal Labs, and shares the ideas behind his recent work at Davos, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and beyond.

Along the way: why a spoon in Houdini changed how he thinks, the shift from offline render farms to real-time "living" systems in TouchDesigner, how AI and agentic tools are opening up a new kind of relationship between people and the machine, and why the work is never about how beautiful it looks — but about how it makes you feel standing in front of it.