Leicester Computer Art Pioneers II continues an ongoing exploration of Leicester and Leicestershire’s important, though often under-recognised, contribution to the history of computer art. Building on the first exhibition and catalogue, this second exhibition expands the story, revealing a broader network of artists, educators, researchers, and experimental practitioners connected to Leicester’s culture of systems thinking, cybernetics, interaction, and technological experimentation.

The first Leicester Computer Art Pioneers exhibition in 2023/2024 featured eight artists and sought to establish historical and creative connections that shaped early computer art activity in Leicester. This second exhibition introduces six additional artists - Susan Tebby, Pip Greasley, Dave Everitt, Bret Battey, Ashokkumar Mistry, and Antonio Roberts — whose work further demonstrates the breadth and diversity of computational art practices connected to the city and region.

Some of the artists represented here have identifiable links to the earlier pioneers through shared institutions, exhibitions, teaching environments, or overlapping research cultures. Others developed more independently and may not have had direct relationships to one another. Rather than presenting Leicester computer art as a single movement or style, the exhibition reveals a wider story in which many different approaches to computer art developed over time.

From the late 1960s onwards, Leicester became an important environment for experimentation with computers in art. The pioneering work of artists such as Stroud Cornock and Ernest Edmonds at Leicester Polytechnic helped establish ideas around interaction, systems, participation, and generative process that would influence many later artists and researchers in Leicester and beyond. Institutions including Leicester Polytechnic, later De Montfort University, alongside the wider Leicester–Loughborough research environment, became significant centres for experimentation in both art and human-computer interaction.

The artists brought together in Leicester Computer Art Pioneers II explore a wide range of approaches, including image making, interactive systems, generative imagery, sound, participation, moving image, and contemporary computational media. What connects them is not a shared visual style or unified artistic movement, but rather that they were born, lived, studied, taught, or worked in Leicester and Leicestershire, thereby contributing to the region’s wider computational art history.

This exhibition forms part of my personal research project at the Computer Arts Archive CIC, which is documenting Leicester and Leicestershire’s computer art heritage. At least four future exhibitions are being planned, which reveal an important history of innovation and creative innovation in the area that stretches back 60 years.

This exhibition was supported through a successful spacehive crowdfunding campaign, with match funding from the Leicester City Mayor’s Community Engagement Fund. Special thanks go to everyone who contributed support towards making the exhibition possible.

I will be exploring other ways of funding this work in the future. If you would like to contribute, be it financially or by sharing your computer art stories, please get in touch.

Dr Sean Clark
seanc@interactdigitalarts.uk
@seancuttlefish

Downloads

• Exhibition Poster

• Exhibition Notes

• Leicester Computer Arts Pioneers II - Exhibition Catalogue (PDF Document)

• Leicester Computer Arts Pioneers I - Exhibition Catalogue (PDF Document)

A limited number of printed copies of both catalogues are available to purchase from the Phoenix shop.

PDF copies of the Leicester Computer Art Pioneers exhibitions catalogues can be downloaded for free by clicking on the images above. A limited number of printed copies are available from the show in the Phoenix Cinema and Art Gallery in Leicester for £10 each.

This exhibition was organised by the Computer Arts Archive in collaboration with Interact Digital Arts.