Sat, 12th, Sept, 2026: Mel Huang Buntine; Radical Computing; National Communication Museum (NCM)
Celebrated local designer and technologist Mel Huang Buntine, has built a shrine to the tender and personal side of computing. Embracing code as a creative medium, Mel brings together people, communities and computers that push our understanding of what computation can be.
“My love letter to the personal computer” – Mel Huang Buntine
‘What if computation wasn’t about speed, automation and scale but building slower, tender and more personal systems? Radical Computing, guest curated by Mel Huang Buntine, is a love letter to the personal computer and to all those who tinker, weave, extend, stretch, hack, subvert and make with the materiality of code’.
.Owning your own computer was once a radical concept. When computers started entering our homes from the 1970s, computing was out of reach to most people.
Affordable, small computers that could be built by everyday people changed this. From the raw energy of the Demoscene, Australia’s early rave and hacker underground, to global creative coding and open-source software movements, Radical Computing celebrates those who have shaped, challenged and reimagined our world via code as a medium. Featuring commissions from artists like Chia Amisola and Chok Si Xuan, plus a revival of Laurie Spiegel’s groundbreaking work Music Mouse, this exhibition is anything but a computer graveyard. Explore a vast array of personal computers from the Buntine Computer Collection, plus see a rare piece of computing history – NCM’s latest acquisition, a Connection Machine CM-2, restored by our Collections and NCM Studio teams, in collaboration with its original industrial designer, Tamiko Thiel. Centring communities who have challenged traditional ideas of what computers are, how to use them and who they’re for, this is an interactive exhibition for all ages
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