Uncreative Writing is a site-specific participatory work exploring the relationship between humans and generative AI. Across St John’s College, Cambridge, participants encounter ordinary objects—a stone, a decaying leaf, a curled piece of paper—which lead them into experiences of sound, poetry, drawing and space.

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These material encounters are first translated into handwritten reflections, then fed into a generative AI writing system to produce new poems. Moving between touch, memory, language and computation, the project explored how experience changes as it becomes data and generated text.

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Inspired by critical ideas of uncreative writing, the project approaches AI writing as a site of questioning: when machines can generate poetry from our words, what happens to embodied experience, ambiguity and memory—and what might be lost in the process?

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Credits: Dramaturgy, Site-specific Design, Digital tech by Jing Wang Thomas; Poem by Girinandini Singh, Participants: Dr Annouchka Bayley, Ning Chen, Yaxin Li, Lushi Liu, L.S Nguyen, Edward Parkhouse, Yuanting Qiu, Sarah Sharp, Jolin Tang, Sandy Yueran Yang, Mika Yang, Videography by Jing Wang Thomas. Thanks to Cambridge ACRG research group.