Compiler

Meet Oscar and Tanya, the incredible duo behind digital art collective Compiler 👾 It was when Tanya was part of the @tatecollective Producer programme over a decade ago, that she saw how digital technologies could engage young people with arts and culture. For Oscar, he was drawn to digital art when he realised it could bring together his interests from school - art, drawing, photography, computers and maths. The two met while doing an MA in Digital Culture at @goldsmithsuol , with a shared interest in wanting to make technology feel accessible. And @compilerzone was born! For their summer commission ‘Tracing Together’, they ran a series of community-led workshops where local people learnt how to encode their own personal journeys into a collective digital tapestry. Compiler then brought this tapestry to life via LED screens, which you can see here at the Women’s Museum, Thursday-Saturday, 12-5pm 🖥️ Drop by before the exhibition closes on Sat 13 Dec! [Image descriptions: A series of photographs of Tanya and Oscar from Compiler leading workshops at the Women's Museum, alongside photos of their LED digital installation, and quotes from them about their work.]

This weekend we filled a gallery with the hopes of our neighbours, and then left them on display for the world to see! In a small corner of the window is this incredible work by @compilerzone reminding us that HOPE IS CRITICAL. 🟩✅💚✅💚🟩 Promoted by Cassie Thomas, on behalf of Waltham Forest Green Party, both at PO Box 78066, London SE16 9GQ

🛜 Hyperlocal Hotspot Lab 🛜 @sladeschool Art+Tech Join us for a workshop exploring the roles and potentials of localised, offline networks and self-hosted infrastructures (without relying on ready-made big tech solutions) for research and cultural projects. 🗓️ Fri 22 May 2026, 2-5pm 📍Slade Studio, One Pool Street, UCL East, London The session will introduce practical and critical approaches to working with local servers, network protocols and open-source software, presenting an opportunity to take part in the process of setting up a Mini-PC as a local server, deciding on its functionality collectively, with the aim of creating a space to share digital objects and communicate independently from the internet and cloud platforms. 💻📁🎇📗💿🎞️🫟🎶 Bring a digital file from your practice (an image, gif, video file, sound file, text document, pdf or something else!) to be hosted in an experimental configuration that will remain accessible to local users for as long as the server is up and running. Please also bring a laptop if possible. The workshop frames infrastructure as an active site of inquiry and experimentation, highlighting how artistic and DIY approaches can act as critical interventions in dominant systems of data circulation and control. Through practical exercises and discussion, the session will create space for collaborative learning and reflection on how transparent, ethical and sustainable self-hosted systems can support new pedagogical approaches and strengthen digital literacy within art and humanities education. 🔗 Book via the link in our bio! 📸 2-5 by @lily.has (from our internal workshop back in February) Many thanks to @siusoon and @lily.has for the invitation and support! 💙 This workshop is organised by the Slade Art+Tech Research Lab and is made possible by the UCL Centre of Humanities Education, supported by The Lord Randolph Quirk Endowment Fund.

🌀 As creative software becomes increasingly automated, how do we build creative skills that stay adaptable, critical, and future-facing? 🌀 Across 13-16 March, we co-produced and delivered Making Weird Work: Art & Technology Jam with the Emerging Media Space and a wonderful team of academics, technicians, students and graduates @uniwestminster . We brought together students across the Westminster School of Arts to work in interdisciplinary teams and develop experimental prototypes blending different skills and approaches. Using 3D scanning as a starting point, students brought their practices into digital spaces and prototyped artworks with unexpected outcomes, pushing into hybrid directions: 3D modelling, game engines, physical computing and projection mapping. We enjoyed tapping into different types of aesthetic and technical weirdness across disciplines while exploring emerging technologies and developing new creative methods. Big thanks to @hellocatfood and @tinapulejkova for generous support to students, and for inspiring talks that opened up rich conversations about hybridity in artistic practice and working with partners across art, tech and science. Huge thanks to everyone at the University of Westminster who helped make it happen, and to the students for their openness and genuinely weird prototypes! 🎛️🧪🍄‍🟫🫶⚙️🦠🔮📡 Making Weird Work is part of the Emerging Technologies and Advanced Technological Literacies for Creative Disciplines project, led by Liz Allen and @tadejvindis , generously funded by the Quintin Hogg Trust.

It was a pleasure to take part in the Peckham Digital: Artist and Computer podcast last year, hosted by @bats1996 ! Inspired by Ruth Leavitt’s ground-breaking 1976 anthology Artist and Computer, these podcast series revisit the original ten questions posed to early computer artists, asking a new generation how and why they use computers in their creative practice, what role technology plays in their work, and how they imagine its impact on the future of art. Thank you to @peckhamdigital for having us! We reflected on our journeys into working with digital technologies and talked about critical technical practice, collaborative digital making with audiences and communities, and why we work both with and against computers. “Computers”, for us, are always something to deconstruct, question and repurpose in live, playful contexts. 🔗 Hopefully, we did okay! 😊 Check out our episode (and so many other inspiring ones) via the link in our bio. 🎨 Episode cover by Lonni Omarii @rgb.lon 🎶 Music by Nell Lang @n.ell_lang

🦾🤖 Digital/Body Collage workshops @somersethouse next Thursday 19th of February! Join us for the family-friendly workshops exploring images as performance and thresholds of the human body in digital environments. Responding to @studiowaynemcgregor ’s Infinite Bodies exhibition, we’ll create robotics-inspired collages, experiment with AI-assisted 3D depth effects, and remix the images in virtual space using custom-built digital tools. Everyone’s creations will contribute to a collaborative online gallery that will grow over the course of the workshops. This is part of the Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies - Family Day produced by @ial_christine , alongside other exciting activities by @tinapulejkova and @hold_artcollective . 🔗 More info via the link in our bio!

🤳 Every Picture Tells a Story 🪞 is a new project as part of Drawing the Line: An RAi Exhibition, currently on show at the @cityartsnotts Window Gallery, alongside two other brilliant projects by @beth.xia and @leocrane77 . In this work, we investigate how smartphone camera apps, particularly iPhone Portrait mode, use embedded AI to emulate cinematic/SLR camera lens aesthetics. The project examines Al-generated depth maps by manipulating digital photographs in 3D environments, comparing the iPhone’s depth maps with those produced by contemporary image-to-image AI models. Focusing on landscapes in transitional states, the resulting images expose glitches and anomalies, questioning authorship and “realness” in photographs shaped by artificial synthesis and automation. 🗓️ City Arts Exhibition 11-13 Hockley, Nottingham, NG1 1FH January 6th - February 25th Monday to Thursday 🗓️ Nottingham Central Library Exhibition @nottmcentrallibrary 1 Carrington St, NG1 7FH February 16th - April 15th Monday to Saturday 🔗 Learn more about the process at art-i.compiler.zone or via the link in our bio. This work is commissioned by the ARTificial Intelligence: Show Me a Story about AI research project led by @uniofnottingham , @lifeatkings , @theopenuniversity , @uni_southampton and @uniofwarwick . Supported by the UKRI-funded Responsible AI UK (RAi UK) programme. [Depth maps created using Depth-Anything-V2-Small (Apache-2.0 license).]

Poster design for Compiler’s Tracing Together exhibition at the Women’s Museum. It features a grid printed on the reverse, inviting visitors to create analogue patterns which can be scanned and immediately translated and displayed on LED panels. Showing at The Women’s Museum until December 2025 The digital art collective Compiler (Tanya Boyarkina and Oscar Cass-Darweish) are currently showing Tracing Together at the Women’s Museum. Responding to the theme Desire Lines, Tracing Together combines the traditions of cross-stitch and digital pattern-making, inviting people to map their own memories and experiences into a collective textile that reveals how personal stories can be woven together to express connection. The design was developed from the creations produced during the exhibition’s community workshops + conversations with the brilliant Tanya and Oscar of Compiler. 297 x 420mm, Riso printed 500 copies @compilerzone @thewomensmuseum

Poster design for Compiler’s Tracing Together exhibition at the Women’s Museum. It features a grid printed on the reverse, inviting visitors to create analogue patterns which can be scanned and immediately translated and displayed on LED panels. Showing at The Women's Museum until December 2025 The digital art collective Compiler (Tanya Boyarkina and Oscar Cass-Darweish) are currently showing Tracing Together at the Women’s Museum. Responding to the theme Desire Lines, Tracing Together combines the traditions of cross-stitch and digital pattern-making, inviting people to map their own memories and experiences into a collective textile that reveals how personal stories can be woven together to express connection. The design was developed from the creations produced during the exhibition’s community workshops + conversations with the brilliant Tanya and Oscar of Compiler. 297 x 420mm, Riso printed 500 copies @compilerzone @thewomensmuseum

Explore our exhibition theme of ‘desire lines’ in this free panel event with digital art collective Compiler 👾 Join Compiler and other invited artists and practitioners for a series of Show & Tell presentations followed by a panel conversation. Building on Compiler’s summer commission ‘Tracing Together’, the panel will be discussing playful, accessible approaches of working with digital technologies. Hear from artists, producers, filmmakers and game-makers: Ama Dogbe (@artyfartyama ), We’re All Human (wereallhuman.uno), Di Mainstone (@dimainstone ), and Compiler (@compilerzone ). The event is taking place 6:30-8:00pm on Thursday 13 November. Book your free space on our website or via the link in our bio 🎟️ #DigitalArt #WomensMuseum #Barking [Image description: A graphic saying ‘Show & Tell, In this event curated by Compiler, explore how socially-led digital making can hold local memory and open new “desire lines” between people and place, 13 November 6:30-8:00pm, Book your free space’. This is followed by images of the speakers alongside an image of Compiler’s digital work.]

What an urgent and inspiring programme of art, workshops, talks and performances @peckhamdigital last week! 🌐💘 Thank you to the Photo Fakery workshop participants for such a brilliant evening last Thursday. As part of Photo Fakery, we created dreamscape collages using old photography magazines, and produced AI-generated depth maps to play with depth-of-field simulation and point-cloud aesthetics. ✂️🌠👾🔍 Everyone’s creations fed into a collaborative digital gallery exhibited at the festival, inviting audiences to play with the workshop outcomes - blur, focus and navigate around the works in 3D with our custom keyboard. Lovely meeting so many new digi allies and sharing ways of resisting embedded automation in creative tech. 🙀 And a special huge thanks to @bats1996 and team for such thoughtful and smooth curation and production, facilitating space for exploration and learning! 📸 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 @matigranica #peckhamdigital #digitalart #digitalmaking #digitalculture #digitalworkshop #depthoffield #compiler #compilerzone

What matters to you in Barking & Dagenham? Tracing Together is the new digital tapestry by @compilerzone , which was developed through free workshops with the local community. The participants created digital patterns and images that spoke to what mattered to them in their local area, from green spaces to the Abbey. You can see these digital designs in-person at the Women’s Museum, or online via the link in our profile 💙 #artlondon #barking #womensmuseum