CUAK 2026 Highlights!

I was lucky enough to attend the Creative Unconference At King's this weekend, an unconference hosted by Mike Cook at King's College, London. I was joined by a large group of lovely individuals who find themselves firmly at (as frequently memed during the day) the intersection of art and technology — as Mike pointed out at the end of the day, there's a certain genre of person for whom the "right job" hasn't been invented yet, and they keep finding themselves at events like this. For lack of a better description, it was a real "if you feel like you belong here, you do" sort of crowd. And, as someone who's been slowly burning out both professionally and creatively lately, it was a much-needed injection of inspiration for me. Without gushing too much, I wanted to share some highlights and things I'll be carrying forward into my practice and future events!

- Dr. Kate Compton (galaxykate) helped us start off right by blessing us with a "Temu Hoard" of beadable ballpoint pens and a giant bag of beads to bead them with (I believe they were these) which made for both a good icebreaker and a reliable fidget toy for the day.

- SO many folks from the London live-coding scene, which in retrospect I should have expected! Rosa from dreamemulator.mp4 gave the opening talk about the indelible effects that our tools have on our art, from what material you make a statue out of to which program(s) you use to design an event poster. She also gave a talk later on about breaking VLC which I was sad to have missed, but afterwards she explained that in most cases you just find interesting things when cranking any dial you can to its maximum value, which I think you can feel in a lot of her art (in a good way). I am absolutely going to make time for the next season of films and parties later this year.

- Mike had mentioned bubble tea enough times that we turned one of the afternoon sessions into literally just going to get bubble tea (highly recommended for all conferences, un- or otherwise).

- Also met a few people involved in AlgoRhythms, another London event I didn't know existed until now. Will have to check it out!

- v buckenham showed off a WIP live-coding tool that I won't spoil, but am very excited to see more of.

- Boris is working on a London "map" that skews the city such that distance == travel time? Difficult to explain in words but it makes perfect sense visually, so excited to see how he improves on it.

- Mai (spelling? please say hi if you're reading this!) read my... tarot? Kind of? I think this was another Dr. Kate game that I arrived late to, but the gist is that it's read like a past/present/future tarot spread, with "cards" pulled from a "deck", but the "cards" are all object pulled from the pockets of whoever's present? My reading featured an empty blister pack of medication, a Starbucks gift card from Denmark, and an old concert ticket, the owners of which were then able to describe the significance of their objects (to them) which informed the final reading. Super fun idea that I'll be bringing to future events!

- During the bubble tea break, I was able to chat with Dr. Janna Joceli Omena about a project her team is working on for visualizing image networks. It's tough to talk about "generating" anything visual these days (that difficulty was a lot of what we talked about) because so often a "generated image" on the internet is little more or less than a tool of pure evil, but (as far as I can understand it) it seems like Dr. Omena and her team have built an actually good and useful tool to be used for research, and the "generating" happening is just pulling a bunch of actual images together into a board with context and metadata. Sort of like (forgive me I know this is a bad analogy) a super-powered Pinterest.

- I showed off a few of my weirder spreadsheets, and got into a nice talk with one of Mike's students (Xi, I believe?) about their idea for a physical grid with computational rules in each cell, creating a physical computer a-la Three-Body Problem. I introduced them to Magic the Gathering as a smaller version of that idea (it's turing complete, for example), and now I'm slightly worried that I may have dropped them into an even bigger financial sinkhole than academia. 😅

- As with all events like this, some of the best moments came in-between the "official" events! Lots of great chats around the theme of "Tools" — what is a tool, how are tools used (or how should they be used), what tools are we using without realizing, what are rituals and how are they useful, etc. It's hard to summarize them all (at least for me, I'm sure someone will do a better job soon) but I'm always grateful for planned downtime like that.

I'm sure I've missed something, might update later if so — thank you to everyone I spoke to there! I'm always surprised and delighted when I find people who seem interested in my practice, as that's so opposite my normal experience in life, and I'm so thankful to have had so many like-minded folks all in one place for the day. I went in looking for inspiration, and I'm positive I found it. Now to figure out what to do with it. 😂