A year after launching Data as Culture’s University of Sheffield commission Constant Washing Machine by Blast Theory, we’re totting up a Christmas count of eight bars of soap, seven organisations, three workshops and an Impact Award from UKAIRS.
Cheesy carol references aside, 2025 has been a good year for the work. We’ve taken it to the UK AI Research Symposium in Newcastle, where the team was honoured with the inaugural ‘Impact Award’ for “extraordinary contribution and commitment” and to the University of Leipzig where we joined other teams exploring playful and imaginative engagement methods for collaboratively defining future frameworks for action. Most recently, almost a year to the day of our launch performance, we were delighted to bring the experience to Fantastic Futures, the AI4LAM (Artificial Intelligence for Libraries Archives and Museums) annual conference at the British Library.
Fifteen international libraries, archives and museums professionals joined us to explore the responsible AI within their own working lives. We introduced them to the questions the Framing Responsible AI Implementation & Management (FRAIM) project raises - what is responsible AI and what does it look like in practice? - and shared the research findings that across sectors, responsible AI is fragmented into many different principles and ideas, producing a cacophony of different understandings and approaches. Informal feedback from participants suggested that this is currently a global condition which invites deep thought and consideration about what our “responses” might be, what we might be “able” to do, practically and theoretically, depending on what control we and our places of work really have, and where and how we could or should apply activism to keep emerging technologies aligned with our values.
Lead artist Matt Adams reflected on how using soap as a metaphor for the daily habits necessary to enact responsible AI came about through using fragmentation and the slipperiness of language as a starting point for the art before inviting workshop participants to join us in selecting from the eight soaps for a spot of collective hand-washing and personal reflection. Reasons for choosing ‘Care’, ‘Transparency’, ‘Practice’ or any of the other embossed words were shared along with water, germs and personal detritus, through our consensual public display of the usually private practice of hand-washing. A feminist ‘silent brainstorm’, writing responses to written questions on a shared piece of paper where everyone is also invited to read the other contributors’ offerings before responding themself, followed this before we split into small groups to discuss key questions.
It was brilliant to hear individual, international and institutional perspectives and practices through our workshop and the entire conference. People across libraries, archives and museums are asking amazing questions around the cultural principles in new epistemologies, around access to their collections, protecting artists’ and arts workers jobs, copyright protections, the differences between Machine Learning and GenAI and how we embrace complexity. The importance of media literacy was discussed (with many hats tipped towards Finland’s advances in this area), as was the need to “choose our dragons” - identify problems that careful research and experimentation with AI could reveal otherwise unlikely solutions for, while not being afraid to go at a slower pace than that suggested by Big Tech. As Careful Industries keynote Rachel Coldicutt flagged, “FOMO is not a strategy”. Libraries, archives and museums are responsible for so many of our shared cultural assets in every form of data imaginable. As British Library interim CEO Jeremy Silver noted, however open-eyed and alert we need to be to the challenges and threats, it’s inspiring to imagine futures that might be fantastic too, with care, experimentation and consideration by all.
‘Constant Washing Machine’ will feature at the REMIX Summit in London in January 2026. It is available for tour, further public engagement and research dissemination opportunities. Contact [email protected]
Constant Washing Machine is a Data as Culture commission with the University of Sheffield, developed as part of the University of Sheffield Framing Responsible AI Implementation & Management (FRAIM) Project. The Constant Washing Machine workshop team are Matt Adams, Lead Artist, Blast Theory, Denis Newman-Griffis, FRAIM Project Lead, University of Sheffield, Susan Oman, FRAIM Partnerships Lead, University of Sheffield and Hannah Redler-Hawes, ODI Associate / Curator and Director of Data as Culture. Full FRAIM impact and credits here. FRAIM is a Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) scoping project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the broader UK Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) programme to bring out the essential role of arts and humanities perspectives in shaping Responsible AI dialogues.
Photo credit: Constant Washing Machine by Blast Theory. Workshop performance at the British Library Fantastic Futures conference. Photo by Claire Leach.
