Mentor on the residency, Dr Sean Clark, has written up an excellent summary of all activities here.

Our residents were:

alan jetzt

The work created during the residency was a representation of the poem “i carry your heart with me” by E.E. Cummings. This piece saw jetzt applying a generative process to the poem, using analogue computer equipment and algorithms to recombine the words. In this work, jetzt investigated the fusion of traditional literary forms with modern technological methods. This exploration offered a fresh perspective on the intersection of poetry, technology, and visual art, highlighting jetzt’s skill in blending various artistic mediums.

Paul Mazzitelli

During his residency, Mazzitelli initially focused on a style and idea influenced by the early works of Dominic Boreham. However, over the course of the residency, he began to explore the work of D.P. Henry, Jack Tait and Marcus West.This is reflected in the artwork he has created for the exhibition, which complements other works in the collections, and gave an opportunity to experiment using modern technology to reimagine early drawing machine and x/y plotter art.

All his work is informed by the idea that art is an artistic collaboration between man and machine.

Khush Kali

A Leicester-born and bred artist, Khush has been particularly excited and fascinated to learn about the city’s key role in the history of computer art, which she was unaware of before this project.

Drawing on her South Asian heritage, Khush has responded to the underrepresentation of women and artists of colour in the archive by exploring traditional Indian patterns and decorative techniques used for textiles - such as bandhani, kolam, and rangoli - through the lens of parameter- and rule-based generative art.

Inspired by hackathons and design sprints, the bootcamps are built around learning by doing. Artists come together to test ideas, share skills, experiment with new tools and support each other through the process of making.

Each bootcamp creates a practical, supportive space where artists can take risks, develop confidence and produce new work for exhibition or performance. The focus is not only on the final outcome, but on making together, learning from each other and building creative community.

New Media Art Club’s Artist Bootcamp Residencies are intensive short-term programmes for artists who want to develop new skills with code, digital media and experimental technologies. Each bootcamp offers structured workshops, mentoring and time to develop new work, leading towards an exhibition or performance opportunity.

For our 5th Bootcamp Residency, we are inviting artists from Leicester and the East Midlands to join us for a two-day programme exploring Hydra, a live coding tool for creating visuals, and Teachable Machine, a lightweight AI framework that can respond to movement, objects, sound or visual change. Together, these tools allow artists and performers to create reactive, real-time visual work using the body, camera and code.

The bootcamp will be led by Flor de Fuego and Naoto Hieda. Flor de Fuego is a digital-craft artist working with programming and live coding to create performative experiences, and is an active collaborator in the Hydra community. Naoto Hieda is a researcher and artist whose work explores coding, movement, neuroqueerness, decolonisation and new forms of collaboration between dancers and technologists.

Our artist residenst were:

Ngo Chun Phoenix Tse is an artist working across moving image, text, installation and lecture performance. His practice explores decolonisation, diasporic experience, technological images and the political histories of cinema. For the bootcamp, he is interested in using live coding and reactive visuals to extend his performance work through gesture, voice and movement.

https://ngochuntse.com/works

Jash is an artist working with sound, lens-based media, text and performance. Their practice explores queer identity, diasporic experience, emotional memory and the body as a site of grounding and reflection. Through the bootcamp, they hope to develop a sound-driven audiovisual work using Hydra and Teachable Machine to explore glitch, feedback and queer experience.

https://www.awesomejash.com/

Sian is a multidisciplinary artist, designer and educator based in Derby. Their practice spans 2D, 3D, motion, projection, interactive media and creative technology. They are interested in using the bootcamp to develop reactive visuals and interactive textures for future projection mapping, performance and exhibition projects.

@___cyanamber

Lead by artist Nicholas Delap, a Freelance Visual Artist, rewilding the mind through the exploration and re-discovery of British Folklore. Working with VR, AR, 3D modelling and 3D Animation with a background in Fine Art.

​Our AR Bootcamp Residents were:

Hanna Paniutsich | XYANA

A multimedia artist, designer and researcher based in Glasgow.My work is a collage of personal stories and hi(r)stories, video footage, physical devices and biomatter. It is heavily informed by scientific research in the fields of ecology, architecture, chemistry, biology and emergent technologies, which are reassembled into installations, moving images and writing. Through this, I explore different types of Exclusion Zones that exist in both physical and digital realms. I navigate through different biomaterials, physical computing pieces, 3D models and scans, online comments, footage and photographs, satellite imagery, data, and coding languages.

Hogweed Invasion

This AR experience is based on a research project into Giant Hogweed plants and their intelligence. These plants are known to be dangerous for humans because of their photosensitive sap that causes burns when exposed to human skin. The plants are also notoriously invasive and known to take over other species of plants. They bloom once in their life, after having accumulated enough starch, and then release hundreds of seeds. These seeds might hibernate in the ground for up to 5 years before propagating and more mature plants usually look after them. This AR experience is a Giant Hogweed invasion of the exhibition space.

@xyana.xyz.

Lena Helikia Ngoudjo Siewe

A multidisciplinary artist woven by her obsession with undressing the raw beauty of the bare soul. Untangling the strangeness of humanity amongst nature and exploring black expression through my fondness of all things poetic, sonic and visually palpitating. In particular, I specialise in the creation of Performance & Multi-media art as well as Spoken word poetry. My practice indulges in devising and workshopping Intersectionality within art and documenting the rising and dying cultures & politics thriving within our BIPOC youth & diverse communities.

​Fairy Wings

In my first journey of exploring AR technology and 3d modelling, I’ve learnt you can turn the trees and grass of parks into fairy lakes
‘In the new year, I would like to grow fairy wings’

https://lenasiewee.wixsite.com/lena-ngoudjo

Miriam Bean

Working with sound as both a medium and a subject, I primarily use pure tones to create indeterminate installations. My research into sound perception ranges from physiology to musicology, as I seek to understand how the brain interprets some sounds as jarring noise and others as expressive, concordant music. By comparing cultural receptions of dissonance with physiological evidence, I explore how the physicality of noise shapes psychological responses to dissonant art and music.

Listening to the Gallery

This work explores the translation of data between space, sound, and light. Created during the AR Bootcamp between 7-8th January, Miriam began by 3D scanning the interior of the LCB Lightbox Gallery using LiDAR. The scan was reconstructed in Blender using traced planes, forming the foundation for an oscilloscope animation. The audio in the video is a direct translation of the visual data into soundwaves, which are created and edited via oscilloscope software. Through this cyclical process, the work examines the relationship between auditory and visual data, and how forms and frequencies interact.

@miriambean.art

miriambean.com

New Media Art Club proudly presents Paint by Style Sheet, an exhibition featuring works created during their 4th artist bootcamp residency. This intensive, two-day residency brought together artists to explore the creative potential of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as a medium for drawing.

Held on April 1st and 2nd, 2025, the residency provided structured workshops and collaborative projects led by Ben Evans, a seasoned practitioner in creative coding and digital art.

Participants received mentorship, technical guidance, and access to resources, creating a dynamic environment for experimentation. With no prior knowledge of CSS required, artists embraced the challenge of transforming web design principles into visual art forms.

Our Residents were:

Abbie Canning

Abbie Canning is an artist, curator and creative producer whose studio is based at Haarlem Artspace in Wirksworth, Derbyshire.

Abbie’s conceptual practice is driven by queries and investigations, resulting in an eclectic output. Encompassing installation, sculpture, photography, text and video, her work frequently presents inconclusive narratives or relational challenges about art, culture, the verbal and visual semiotics of contemporary society and the mundanity of the everyday. Often her work simultaneously draws attention to fault lines between communication and interpretation, between the object and its given context, and the artist and their audience - upending the established stability of the viewer’s relationship to art.

“Board” is the outcome of a two day bootcamp residency working in CSS coding, supported by designer Ben Evans and New Media Art Club. Throughout the duration of the residency Abbie sought to explore the relationship between her sculptural studio practice and her socially engaged practice which is underpinned by creative digital technologies.

Board is an attempt to bridge these two disparate strands of Abbie’s practice, alongside being a visual depiction of her increasing frustration at the laborious nature of CSS coding.

“Being and Nothingness (After Sartre)” is the outcome of the above detailed two day bootcamp residency as was Abbie’s first attempt at producing an artwork through CSS coding. Increasingly, Abbie began giving consideration to the part that creative digital technologies play in our everyday lives and the increasing role of AI. What gives our lives significance, Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, is not pre-established for us by God or nature but is something for which we ourselves are responsible. Being and Nothingness plays on the ideas behind Sartre’s seminal text whilst exploring the use of CSS coding as a tool for visual output.

​@abbiecanningimages

www.abbiecanning.com

David John Scarborough

David John Scarborough is a British-Australian artist, musician and curator based in Charnwood, East Midlands, UK. His practice follows the desire lines between digital technology, ecology, and place, drawing from autobiography, heritage and natural history. He creates immersive environments that integrate multidimensional narratives, visuals, and sound to explore the knotty relationships between language and land. From video games set in underground forests to visual albums crafted from samples and stock footage, each project is a distinct world that responds to contemporary themes and experiences.

​

Untitled (The Cartographers) is an experimental video-work combining a screen recording of CSS coding, a scripted conversation, vocal and midi recordings and a virtual woodland. The video work uses CSS code as a real and imagined navigation tool to think through how we might locate our selves across and within webspace, landscapes and our own histories. The design of the video-work has been made with collaborators, musician Claire Lleshi and designer Ben Evans. It features excerpts from the author Robert Macfarlane.

Untitled (The Cartographers) is part of the development for And The Forest Housed The Song, an online multiplayer woodland world launching in 2025. It offers an emotive experience in and through virtual landscapes carefully assembled from animations, music and dioramas through geo-fiction, song-craft and collaborative processes.

@davidjohnscarborough

https://davidjohnscarborough.cargo.site/

Fania Raczinski

Fania is a lecturer, researcher, and artist.

She has a long-standing interest in the Blaue Reiter group of Expressionist artists, especially Franz Marc (1880-1916) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and this piece is a continuation in a series of artworks that create digitally animated interpretations of Blaue Reiter originals.

Her previous focus was SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) but for this exhibition she specialised in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to create the drawing and animation and a little bit of JavaScript to include a camera for basic motion triggers. There are 86 different individual components on the screen that make up the image - on 9 different layers!

https://fania.uk

Tickets: HERE

In this workshop we will look at using the web browser to design and make real zines for printing. Using p5.js we will look at p5.genzine, a library of code created by Munus Shih and Iley Cao.

We will look at zine making, browse the Leicester Zine Library collection and find some inspiration. The second part of the workshop will be collecting digital materials. We will take and prepare images and get them ready for the web

Bring your own files, or use free online repositories like Gif Cities, Texture Town, King PNG, etc.

Finally we will look at the code examples provided from the library and spend some time making and printing our zines!

Knowledge of P5.js would be a big help but is absolutely not essential

This workshop is suitable for someone who:

• Is interested in zine making

• Has interest in the creative web.

• Has some knowledge of coding or is willing to learn

This workshop is not for someone who:

• Expects a formal learning environment.

• Wants to be a professional web developer.

You will need:

• Laptop that connects to the internet.

• A web browser of your choice installed. (Chrome recommended)

About the tutor:

Sean Carroll is a UK-based programmer, artist, and cultural producer, with a recently awarded doctorate integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into contemporary archival practice. Over the past decade, Sean has worked across numerous festivals and exhibitions that explore the intersection of technology and creativity.

Tickets: HERE

In this workshop we look at how you can create your own Machine Learning Model using the Micro:bit.

Your tutor will show you how a closed off, small data set AI model can be trained and used to recognise movement and gestures. You will collect motion data, train a machine learning model to detect patterns, then program the micro:bit to run that model.

Micro:bit CreateAI is a free, browser-based tool that lets you train a micro:bit to recognise your physical movements (clapping, waving, jumping, etc.) using the device’s accelerometer. Micro:bit Educational Foundation

You will finish the workshop with your very own personally trained interactive artwork, and an insight into pop culture AI tools.

This workshop is suitable for someone who:

• Anyone with an interest in AI and what happens under the hood.

• Wants to do practical work and discuss how the tech is developing.

This workshop is not for someone who:

• Is hoping for a high level programming course.

• Is not for making generative artworks with Language or Image models.

• Doesn’t want to broaden their understanding of AI.

You will need:

• Laptop that connects to the internet.

• A web browser of your choice installed. (Chrome recommended)

• Micro:bit with micro usb cable.

** If you need to borrow a laptop or Micro:bit please select the item as an add-on when selecting your ticket.

About the tutor:

Dr Sean Clark is an artist researcher and curator based in Leicester with over 20 years experience in art and technology. He makes use of AI in his own work and is interested in its influence on creativity.

http://interactdigitalarts.uk

Tickets: HERE

In the present times of continuously scrolling feeds of adverts and fomo, we must remember that the internet can do more. Let’s make websites that are artworks; that are useless; that are playful.

We’ll explore examples of the old web and more recent works and use them alongside in-workshop discussion to create your own browser based artwork

You will not need to know anything about code going in. This won’t be a deep dive into web development. It will be informal and hopefully fun.

You will learn just enough to:

• Give a webpage a structure: headings, paragraphs, images, links (HTML).

• Make it look how you want: colours, fonts, layout, maybe some blinking and wiggling (CSS).

• Make it respond to you: things that change when you click, hover, or move your cursor around (Javascript)

We’ll finish the session by presenting what we’ve made to each other!

Optional reading list:

• Dreaming of a Poetic Web

• There is an internet that is mine & I would like you to live in it with me

• Building a website like it’s 1999… in 2022

• Net Art Anthology

• My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

This workshop is suitable for someone who:

• Knows little to nothing about web design/coding.

• Has an artistic practice.

• Likes to experiment and ask questions.

• Likes browser based art/net art/art games.

This workshop is not for someone who:

• Expects a formal learning environment.

• Wants to be a professional web developer.

You will need:

• Laptop that connects to the internet.

• A web browser of your choice installed.

• A free neocities account (set up before you arrive).

About the tutor:

Anoushka Carroll has dabbled in web 1.0 web design since adolescence, and still hasn’t progressed. She most recently took part in Httpoetics at the School For Poetic Computation in January 2026. She thinks websites should be liminal and delightful third spaces to play in. She is by no means an expert and will be googling and asking claude for help.

Tickets: HERE

🔊Your Laptop is an Instrument 💻

Learn Pure Data from scratch. We’ll cover the basics of this powerful open-source tool for creating interactive music and sound. Perfect for beginners ready to explore building synthesizers, live coding, and digital composition.

You will need: A laptop with internet connection

We’re going to look at the PlugData version of Pure Data for the workshop: https://plugdata.org/download.html

If you have any trouble downloading please drop us a message

In the workshop we will start with some pre-built building blocks and patch them together to make our own sequencers and synthesisers. We will then think about how we could perform together

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Participants Tengjin Bian, Marlon Foster, Tilly Hawkins and Kiera Sanderson came together working across spoken word, movement, sound, music, and live visuals. Over three days, participants took part in structured workshops, collaborative experiments, and peer exchange. The focus was on using AI in a playful and exploratory way, with an emphasis on liveness, presence, and improvisation rather than technical mastery.

The programme was led by Leonie Dubarry-Gurr, who guided participants through a series of hands-on sessions examining how human–machine interaction can shape performance. No specialist coding knowledge was required, and the tools introduced were free, open source, or browser-based.

The residency ran from 22–24 January 2026 at New Media Art Club’s studio at LCB Depot. Participants worked on developing new ideas and approaches within a supported environment, with access to equipment, space, and mentorship. Each artist received a £700 fee to present work developed during the bootcamp.

The programme culminated in performances at the Ceremony × COMPUTALA Closing Party on 30 January 2026, where participants shared outcomes ranging from live audiovisual sets to experimental performance pieces. These works reflected a range of approaches to AI, from subtle augmentation of existing practices to more direct exploration of machine-driven interaction.

The bootcamp focused on artists based in Leicester and the East Midlands, contributing to ongoing efforts to support local digital art practices and build a more connected regional community around emerging media.

Over the 7th and 8th of January, participants worked with two incredible workshop leaders: Flor de Fuego, a digital-craft artist and active Hydra community collaborator, and Naoto Hieda, a researcher and artist whose practice sits at the intersection of dance, technology, and neuroqueerness. Together, they guided the group through the live coding language Hydra and Google’s Teachable Machine, tools that in combination allowed artists to generate glitched, reactive visuals controlled by their own bodies, objects, and movements in real time.

The two days were structured but open. Mornings began with workshops familiarising participants with the tools, and afternoons gave way to brainstorming, experimentation, and building toward a finished work. There was something genuinely exciting about watching people who had never written a line of live code start to shape visuals that responded to how they moved.

The work created across the residency was presented the following evening at COMPUTALA, making the exhibition opening on January 9th a direct continuation of everything that had been made and discovered over those two days.

Participants Ngo Chun Phoenix Tse , Jash and Sian Morrel worked with Flor and Naoto to create an amazing interactive zine/projection that was part of our exhibition.

Check out the final Zine here.

Zine Download

As part of COMPUTALA 2025, we hosted a workshop with artist, game designer and creative technologist V Buckenham, exploring the history of fortune-telling games and devices from paper oracles to mechanical curiosities. Participants used Downpour, V's own smartphone-based game-making tool, to create their own digital fortune-tellers. Downpour is built around the idea: that anyone, without prior knowledge, should be able to make something interestingly interactive in a spare ten minutes, and without needing access to a computer.

Check out the games made!

Downpour Workshop

Supported by Midland 4 Cities

Speakers

Joey Holder

Multimedia artist, Joey Holder’s work draws on scientific expertise to build immersive installations where she explores the impermanence and interchangeability of human, natural and technological experience. Holder has recently been part of the British Art Show and Frieze 2022.

Samantha Lindley

Samantha brings over 20 years of leadership and creative expertise across the cultural sector, with a track record in public art, film, community engagement, education, talent development, live events, and commissioning.

As CEO and Creative Director of Threshold Studios, Samantha is dedicated to advancing the organisation’s mission of leveraging arts and culture to drive social impact and foster change on local, regional, national, and international levels.

Heath Bunting

British contemporary artist known for his work in the areas of net art, street art, and activist art. Bunting emerged in the 1990s as a pioneer of internet-based art, using digital technologies to explore issues related to identity, systems of control, and the boundaries between virtual and physical spaces. His projects often involve challenging institutional structures and social norms, blending art with activism. Bunting is also one of the co-founders of the cyberfeminist group “irational.org” and has been involved in works that focus on the intersection of technology, law, and personal data. His “Identity Bureau” project, for instance, explores the creation of legal identities through bureaucratic systems.

Francesca Franco

Her current project “Documenting digital art: re-thinking histories and practices of documentation in the museum and beyond” is a collaboration between leading researchers in the fields of performance and digital art documentation with world-leading museums.

Antonio Roberts

A curator, working with video, code, and sound. He is engaged with the themes surrounding network culture and in his practice explores how technology shapes ideas of creation, ownership, and authorship.

Uzma Johal

Uzma Johal is co-founder and former CEO of Threshold Studios, and director of Frequency Festival. Uzma works to deliver digital strategies and facilitate organisations to embrace technology into their futures, as well as brokering partnerships with the Higher Education Sector.

Runtime was an open call exhibiton and commisioned bootcamp where 6 artists spent 2 days under the guidance of Antonio Roberts (AKA Hellocatfood) to learn live coding.

Using TidalCycles for audio and Hydra for visual elements, the artists applied their new skills in real-time to produce work during the event. Each artist made a short film about their learning and shoing the work they made as part of the exhibition.

The exhibition displayed the outcomes of their learning, showcasing the practical application of the live coding tools they were introduced to.

The Artist Residents:

• Adam Stephenson

• Anoushka Goodwin

• Gino Attwood

• Kush Khali

• Leonie Dubarry-Gurr

• Les Hayden

Download the Zine

We produced a little zine to act as the exhibition statement and have the artists talk about what they made.

Download the Zine

View on Github

We had to translate the work over from Glitch this year after the shutdown!

View on Github

This year’s programme brought together exhibition, workshops, tours and live events. The festival opened with a launch and private view on 9 January, included curator tours during the exhibition period, hands-on activities such as Music with Robots and CreateAI & Art, and closed with Slop, an evening of experimental audio-visual performance.

Robots for a Safer World

Taking its cue from a government initiative to automate the dangerous and difficult work of manual labour, this exhibition asked what happens when that same logic is applied to creative practice, and whether automating the hard parts of making art frees us or diminishes us. The works on show offered no single answer, ranging from sharp reflections on commodification and servitude to more playful explorations of music, puzzles, and the strange intimacy of cyber pets.

The exhibition Robots for a Safer World helped frame that approach by putting questions about AI, robotics and creative practice at the centre of the season.

CQ Earlies Family Open Day

On the first weekend of the festival we took over LCB as part of their monthly kids open day CQ Earlies welcoming over 300 people into the exhibition to take part in coding and junk robot building.

What made COMPUTALA 2026 work for us was the mix of critical discussion and accessible activity. The programme made room for artists exploring AI in different ways, while also giving people a direct route in through workshops, talks and informal encounters with the work.

Ceremony X COMPUTALA - SLOP

For the second year we’ve been lucky enough to have Ceremony close COMPUTALA for us. SLOP was a night of live experimental AV performaces that explored interaction with computers in new and interesting ways.

It includes items like extension leads, projectors, a Kinect camera, green screens, media players, display fixings, and other useful tools for creative tech/media/digital art projects

check out the tool library

Currently undergoing a revamp and update. We expect to launch our new membership scheme soon. Until then, get in touch if you want to borrow anything

For the closing of the exhibition we invited Leonie Dubarry-Gurr to curate an edition of Ceremony. An electronic music avant guard night that for this evening turned the galery into a performance space.

COMPUTALA Images

Artists

Mateus Domingos
Matt W
Murilo Gasparetto
Ollie Scoble
Sandra Crisp
Sean Clark
Shanique Thompson
Tengjin Bian
Timothi Ellim (Timothi Lim)
varvara pekhota
Zander Porter

Andy Jenkinson
annaro.se
Ben Fredericks and Mateus Domingos
Courtney Askey
David John Scarborough
Elliot Smith

Harvey Ryan
Jake Pink
Jen Nesbitt
John Coster – collaboration with Jas Singh
Lena Helikia Ngoudjo Siewe
Linh Dao

About

New Media Art Club is an artist-led digital arts organisation based in Leicester.
We support artists working with computation, code, sound, moving image, and machine systems through exhibitions, workshops, research, and publishing.

Main Website

newmediaart.club
https://newmediaart.club

Programme information, exhibitions, open calls, and organisational overview.

Instagram

@newmediaartclub
https://instagram.com/newmediaartclub

Current activity, documentation, events, and announcements.

GitHub

New Media Art Club – GitHub
https://github.com/newmediaartclub

Code repositories, research materials, datasets, and technical documentation.

Linktree

Linktree
https://linktr.ee/newmediaartclub

A consolidated list of social and project links.

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