On Saturday 27th June 2026 there will be CUAK 2026 - a “Creativity Unconference At King’s”, organised by Mike Cook and supported by the Centre for Digital Culture that I codirect with Zeena.

Further details can be found here and copied below. 🦆

CUAK 2026 🦆

(Creativity Unconference At King’s)
A friendly unconference for London’s digital creativity communities

27th June 2026, Bush House, London

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Welcome!

CUAK is a one-day, free event held at King’s College London, aiming to bring together people from across London interested in digital creativity, making weird stuff with computers, and having fun building artistic and creative communities! CUAK is an unconference meaning that we have no fixed schedule - you can turn up and take a slot in our schedule to give a talk, run a panel, teach a tutorial or do a performance!

Date: Saturday 27th June 2026, 10am - 5pm

Location: Bush House (South-East Wing), Strand, London WC2R 1AE (Google Maps)

CUAK 2026 is generously supported by the Centre for Digital Culture, and the Department of Informatics’ Creativity Hub at King’s College London. It also benefitted from input from many London creative communities including Pattern Club and London? Live? Coding? - thank you all! And a huge thanks to James Walker for copyediting and reformatting this welcome page.

Theme

Our theme for 2026 is tools. Digital creativity happens in lots of weird ways - sometimes with fancy professional software, but usually with busted old copies of art tools from the 90s, weird hacked-together custom software made for just one person, or repurposed apps that were designed for one use but found a new creative purpose in the right hands. We want to share this knowledge around London and learn what tools mean to you!

We’re hoping most sessions will be related to this theme in some way (but don’t be shy to pitch anything you want to share with us related to making stuff, creativity and the arts). We encourage people to get into this theme however they like, but here are some of the things we hope to see:

• Tutorials and Workshops - here’s a tool I use, and here’s how you can use it
• Use and Misuse - how people use weird tools for things they weren’t intended for
• Making and Breaking - accounts of people making tools for their own purposes, what they learned
• Wishes - what tools don’t exist, but could? What is your dream tool and what does it let you do?
• Inspiration - what are your favourite tools that aren’t for art? What stories do you know about tools from the past?
• Jamming - let’s make a tool right now! Let’s use one right now! Let’s make a mess together!

Nothing is too obvious, too boring or too normal. The event is going to be full of people from different backgrounds and fields and levels of experience - whatever you want to share, come and share it, someone will appreciate it!

These are only guides - if you have a session you want to propose, just turn up and propose it! We are open to anything digital creativity related.

Format

‘Unconference’ can mean slightly different things in different places. CUAK is inspired by the old Gamecamp unconference in London.

• The unconference will start in our main room, with a big whiteboard with the schedule mapped out on it, full of empty slots.
• We have three other rooms besides the main room, and each has its own schedule.
• Write your name and a title on a slot, and it’s yours!
• Before each block, you can (optionally) pitch your session to the main room.
• Head to the room when the slot starts and run your session!

You can use the session for a talk, with slides or without, or a workshop, a panel, a performance, you can have a session where everyone just sits quietly and play to some calming music. Whatever you want to pitch, you can come and do it.

FAQs

I’m a bit nervous/new to this!

We want this to be fun and open for everyone. If you want any advice or support in advance of the event, please contact us. On the day we will be tagging some slots with special labels - for example, one timeslot will be for Obvious Stuff Only to encourage people to pitch ideas that they think are ‘too simple’ or ‘too obvious’. We hope these labels ease the pressure on pitching things! We’ll also have longer and shorter slots, so you can grab 10 minutes if something longer is a bit too daunting.

The main room will always remain as a quiet space to return to if none of the sessions interest you, or if you want to talk quietly with people or share things/make things. If you have any concerns about this format, please get in touch too!

Do I need to prepare?

Nope! In fact, we hope you won’t. It’s completely fine to prepare slides or a talk or something fancy, but we also love it when people get inspired and excited from a morning conversation, and suddenly pitch a session idea for the afternoon! So don’t worry if you want to run a session but aren’t sure what on - just bring yourself and a kind attitude.

Can I prepare?

Oh, of course! Please feel free to bring slides along, props, a small theatre troupe (please register tickets for your troupe members as required). The rooms we have available should all have projectors with HDMI input, and seating (some rooms have seating that can be easily rearranged).

Can I really do anything?

A worrying question for sure but: no! We have to make sure we leave the rooms as we found them, so please leave the foam cannons at home, and we have to be considerate to other people in the building so although we encourage you to perform and show stuff off, we might not be able to crank the noise to algorave levels. If you have any doubts about what you want to do, just ask us!

Is Generative AI welcome?

We don’t want to host any sessions about generative AI at CUAK. This means sessions that are about the use of LLM-driven tools, and any other related technology (sessions about composite tools are okay, so if you want to talk about Adobe Illustrator, please come and do so, but don’t do a talk about Adobe Illustrator’s generative AI features).

While there are lots of reasons people might want to give sessions about generative AI (including critiquing it), many of the creative London communities we are inviting don’t welcome the use of these tools, and we want to respect that in creating a space for them to meet and talk. The impact of this technology on the livelihoods and work of artists and creatives around the world means their presence at CUAK would also not be in keeping with the values and intentions of the space.

There are lots of places around London throughout the year where generative AI is welcomed and can be discussed! CUAK just isn’t one of them. Thanks for understanding and respecting this choice.

Safety

We want CUAK to be a safe and enjoyable experience for everyone. This means that we won’t tolerate any harassment of attendees, and will ask people to leave if they do not comply with our requests to stop harassing behaviour. Harassment includes, but is not limited to, verbal insults or bigotry, inappropriate physical contact, unwelcome sexual attention, or intimidation.

If you experience or witness someone experiencing something that you think is in violation of our safety guidelines, please report it to one of the event organisers or nominated safety volunteers. These volunteers will be pointed out at the start of the event.

If you have any concerns about these guidelines, or the safety of the event as a whole, please reach out to us.

Getting Here

The nearest tube stops are Temple (District Line) and Holborn (Central and Piccadilly Line). It’s a 15 minute walk over the bridge from London Waterloo. The entrance for the event is Bush House South East, on the Strand. Find a map here.

Registration

Tickets are free, but necessary as we need to provide a full ticket list of attendees to security. Please only register for this event if you plan on coming along!

Please note we have some funding for tea and coffee, but we are not providing a lunch - there will be a long lunch break to go out and eat locally with other attendees.

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