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.

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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.

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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