Computala Launch – Robots for a Safer World

The launch of Computala unfolded less like an opening night and more like a listening exercise. Voices moved between artworks, machines hummed in the background, and conversations drifted from speculation to reflection. What emerged was not a single argument about artificial intelligence or digital culture, but a shared attempt to stay human while standing inside technological change. This podcast captures a series of conversations recorded among artists, curators, and participants as they encountered works shaped by code, systems, robotics, and generative processes. The tone is neither celebratory nor alarmist. Instead, it lingers in uncertainty, asking what it means to make art, music, and images at a moment when machines can imitate creative labour with unsettling fluency. Several artists speak about agency. Not agency as control, but as presence. The ability to choose how one works, what one resists, and where attention is placed. Salvaged electronics, evolving systems, live coding environments, and interactive installations become ways of testing this agency rather than surrendering it. Technology appears not as an external force, but as something already folded into cultural memory, labour, and imagination. There is a recurring concern with time. Nostalgia presses from behind, while visions of automated futures exert their own pressure. Between these forces, the present becomes the only workable ground. The conversations return again and again to this point: that culture is not something that happens later, nor something safely preserved in the past, but something reconstructed through action now. Listening closely, the exhibition reveals itself as a kind of collective thinking aloud. Questions surface about authorship, systems, ecology, and whether complexity can remain meaningful without becoming inert. AI is treated neither as oracle nor enemy, but as a condition that demands discernment, limits, and responsibility. This episode of the Radio Lear podcast offers space to sit with those questions. It does not resolve them. Instead, it invites a slower form of attention, one attuned to uncertainty, dialogue, and the unfinished nature of cultural work. In that sense, the broadcast mirrors the exhibition itself: an open structure, receptive to interpretation, and shaped by listening as much as by speaking. Visit the exhibition at LCB Depot.