Teachable Hydra bootcamp
During COMPUTALA 26 we learnt about controlling Hydra.js with Google Teachable Machines
In January 2026, New Media Art Club hosted its 5th Bootcamp Residency, a two-day intensive held at our studio at LCB Depot in Leicester. The residency brought together a small group of artists from Leicester and the East Midlands to explore live coding, reactive visuals, and lightweight machine learning, culminating in work shown at COMPUTALA Digital Arts Festival 2026.
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.