James Bloom (British, b. 1975) is a London-based artist who, in his own words, “uses technological innovation as a method to generate perceptual problems”.Also known as crashblossom, he pushes 3D software, AI models, and blockchain smart contracts past their intended use until they fail, treating the resulting errors as evidence rather than accident. He began exhibiting with small London galleries as a teenager, before spending years working in technology and advertising.
Bloom minted his first works on Ethereum in 2021, then released Physical Stock Photos on Tezos that April, extrapolating flat stock photographs into distorted 3D objects using the modeling tool Rhinoceros.He went on to produce a body of work using blockchains as an artistic medium, having pieces respond to live transactions and networking hundreds of participants together.In 2023, he released Gold, 500 interconnected pieces whose on-chain SVGs change according to their owners' market activity, including price, trading behavior, and whether resale royalties are paid.,
In 2024, he released Mass, a shared 3D relational space that records every transaction made by its 300 owners and relays the activity back to the group through live changes to the artwork. The work then introduces failures that break this communication, replacing straightforward network relations with a different, glitch-driven sense of shared presence. Mass was shown at ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe from October 2025 to February 2026.In Half Cheetah, he pits two reinforcement-learning agents against each other, mapping the resulting movements onto de-identified 3D scans of human bodies to stage a critique of cultural narratives around progress and optimization.The series was presented as a solo show at the Outliers section of Abu Dhabi Art in November 2025, and is accompanied by a flipbook made in collaboration with Mousse Publishing.,
For Contingent, Bloom collaborated with Gottfried Jäger, a pioneer of generative photography, transposing two of Jäger's 1967 pinhole photographs into a networked series of digital objects whose appearance changes for every viewer in real time.,The work opened the Museum of the Moving Image's Tezos-backed commission series on its Media Wall in New York in 2026, curated by Regina Harsanyi.,His work is held in the permanent collections of ZKM and the Francisco Carolinum Museum.
