COMPU ‘82

Artie Galerie proudly presents COMPU ’82, by American artist Legio X, a series of six AI-assisted audiovisual works exploring the nostalgic interplay between human obsolescence and innovation. Six pieces, six brutal yet beautiful glimpses of what we thought progress looked like when machines were still machines. Each piece a memory of a world when computers were ugly, honest things sitting on desks like forgotten gods, humming with potential, their screens flickering promises they couldn’t yet keep.

There’s no warmth in the plastic machines rendered and no acknowledgment of the humanity surrounding them. The archetypal early 1980s-era computers just endure, indifferent to the faces and hands that hover, flicker, and dissolve into their architecture. The humans are not users of the machines, rather they are consumed by them.

The machine is the protagonist here, its cold, beige form steadfast and unyielding. But if the machine is the protagonist, then the music is the animating pulse. The score makes the machine breathe, transforming its stillness into something alive. The same machine becomes warm, then cruel, then infinite, its meaning endlessly reborn in the dialogue between image and sound.

The music also underscores the fragile, tentative dance between humanity and its technological future—a future in which these once-humble devices may grow to surpass their creators. In COMPU ’82, Legio X captures this uneasy balance, where innovation both elevates and consumes, leaving us to ponder humanity’s fate dissolving into our own invention.