Creative Data Exchange

Woman in red skirt in abstract art installation

About Creative Data Exchange

New technology has been disrupting creative practice long before the invention of the paintbrush. Yet it has been some time since a single wave of innovation held the potential to fundamentally transform how we create — across artistic disciplines and at every stage of the creative process.

And as with many moments of profound change, the Data & AI hype emerged around serious ethical and safety concerns, as well as mysticism, fueling curiosity but also provoking unease, scepticism, and hesitation to engage.

"Creative Data Exchange" is the antidote to this. It provides a space for open, grounded conversations about working creatively with data - where you can share questions and ambitions and to find routes to answers in good company.

Creative Data Exchange is presented by the Contemporary Narratives Lab in partnership with Goldsmiths Futures of Creativity Institute (FOCI) and Fuel. It is supported by the Software Sustainability Institute via an SSI Fellowship 2026.

What are we inviting you for?

Up to 2 hours of an online conversation about creative practice, AI and data.

The driving questions are:

"how can data and AI help develop (your) creative practice?" and
"how can creative practice help develop data & AI technologies?"

And within those main questions, we want to hear what you would like to discuss in the call to help us develop the Creative Data Exchange activities programme. Places are limited, but you can register your interest via the form below. Even if you don't get a place for this first event, there will be other opportunities to attend online calls, workshops and engage with our online discussions on Slack.

When

Sep 4th, 10am-12pm

What happens after the conversation?

We are forming a community of interested artists, creatives, and researchers to keep the conversation going. You will be invited to join the Alan Turing Institute's AI&Arts group, where we can continue to meet online via the group's Slack space. We will have a Creative Data Exchange channel to be in touch with everyone who engages with the programme, and you also will have access to an international community of over 500 members who are arts practitioners, researchers, policymakers and funders, based in all continents, who are interested in working in the intersection of art and data.

Your contributions to the online calls will feed a free programme of in-person, hands-on, workshops to be advertised to the community first.

Who is going to be there?

We are inviting experienced creative practitioners with little to no experience using data who are curious to learn more.

The people facilitating the meeting will be:

André Piza, who is leading this project as a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow 2026, is a community developer at heart, with a background as a creative practitioner, producer and research programme manager. For over 7 years, he has managed and coordinated research delivery of the Alan Turing Institute's flagship Digital Humanities programmes, like Living with Machines and the Research Software Engineering Capability Roadmap. Previously, he has managed major international creative and research projects at People's Palace Projects, an arts research centre based at Queen Mary University of London where he also worked as Knowledge Exchange Manager for the Creative Industries. His work there included collaborating with arts organisations, policy institutions, and independent artists and activists.

He has written about cultural exchange practice in The Art of Cultural Exchange (2019) and is an Organiser of the Turing's AI&Arts interest group. He currently manages the CoSTAR Foresight Lab, based at Goldsmiths University of London.

Kaspar Beelen is a digital historian who explores the impact of datafication and machine learning on humanities research. After obtaining his interdisciplinary PhD in history and linguistics (2014) at the University of Antwerp, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, as a researcher on the Digging into Linked Parliamentary Data (Dilipad) project. In 2016, Kaspar moved to the University of Amsterdam, where he first worked as a postdoc and later became an assistant professor in Digital Humanities (Media Studies). Between 2019 and 2023, he worked at the Alan Turing Institute as a research associate for the Living with Machines project, where he focused on understanding biases in large historical collections. Currently, he works as Technical Lead Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, exploring the use of multimodal and vision models for cultural heritage.

Rosie Wood is a Research Software Engineer working at the Alan Turing Institute. From 2023 to 2025 she worked as part of the Living with Machines and Data/Culture projects where she was core developer for MapReader - a computer vision pipeline for analysing large collections of historical maps. Since then, she's been part of the Research Computing team at the Turing, where she works with High Performance Computing (HPC) systems - including providing training and support for Turing researchers wanting to use HPC, benchmarking HPC applications and running model training and inference on GPU. She is also part of the t0 team, which focuses on applications of local LLMs and agentic AI.

Lydia France is an AI engineer at Marker and an Ai in Science research fellow at the University of Oxford. After obtaining her PhD in bird flight (2019) at Oxford, she worked as a Research Software Engineer at the Alan Turing Institute between 2021 and 2026. Lydia worked on cross-disciplinary projects including Digital Humanities and AI for climate forecasting. Earlier this year she moved to Marker, a startup making software for writers that puts human creativity and writing first (and not writing for you!). She is currently working on training small language models that are energy efficient and privacy first. Her university research uses data-driven methods to understand coordinated movement in animals, particularly wings in bird flight. She also regularly performs and teaches Improv Comedy as part of the Oxford Imps and has been previously involved with Young Fiction Writing communities.

Why are they facilitating these conversations?

We are passionate about art and technology but we have seen the recent advances increasing the digital divide. Those who had experience and felt confident to onboard the AI boat have done so. But there hasn't been much opportunity for artists who are unfamiliar with this technology to get clarity beyond the hype. This is a systemic problem because this debate has many implications for creative practice, not least related to copyrights, visibility and funding of their own work, digital or not. This is bad for technology development, which gets narrower, involving a smaller set of artistic questions and practice. And it is bad for artists too, who may miss out on opportunities and debates that are crucial for their development and that of the creative industries more generally. So we want to understand from this community what it takes to break those barriers and create opportunities for the community itself to drive this change.

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