Studiotopia
(2023 - 2026)
Studiotopia is a Creative Europe project that aims to explore the intersection of art and science, delving into the symbiotic relationship between these two disciplines to shed light on the pressing issues of our time. The consortium is comprised of 11 prominent European cultural and science organisations including: Beta Festival / The Digital Hub (IE), Cyens (CY), Hexagone (FR), Gluon (BE), Laboral (ES), Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia (PL), Kersnikova (SI), MEET (IT), Bozar (BE), Ars Electronica (AT), Cluj Cultural Centre (RO).
Studiotopia x Beta Festival residency: Over the course of 2025, Cezar Mocan and Hung Lu Chan will work closely with Irish researchers in AI and ethics, guided by the mentorship of Dr. Nora O’Murchú (University of Limerick), an internationally recognised curator and academic working at the intersection of art, design, and technology. Their projects will premiere at Beta Festival 2026.
Stay tuned as their residencies unfold - through workshops, talks, and prototypes - leading to the unveiling of two major new works at Beta Festival 2026.
Meet the artists
Cezar Mocan
Cezar Mocan is a Romanian artist and technologist whose practice explores what happens when technological systems begin to develop forms of awareness and affect. His past works, such as Arcadia Inc. and World Upstream, look at landscapes shaped by infrastructure, and at the ghosts of what is erased in the name of progress.
For his Beta residency, Cezar is investigating satellite networks as more than instruments of surveillance or monitoring: what if these orbital technologies develop their own environmental consciousness? What if satellites could grieve ice loss in Greenland, or obscure landscapes out of a refusal to see? Through speculative narratives, real-time cartographies, and immersive installations, he is asking how our “extended nervous system” of planetary sensors might learn to feel, and what this means for how we see and know the Earth in a time of climate collapse.
Hung Lu Chan
Hung Lu Chan
Hung Lu Chan, based in the Netherlands, works with imagination and science to dismantle anthropocentric views of the world. His practice often explores “aliens” not as extraterrestrials but as any form of otherness - plants, dust, AI, or climate systems - that reveals new ways of perceiving the self.
During the residency, Hung Lu will develop an immersive installation that merges participants’ biosignals - like heartbeat and breathing - with real-time environmental data. Instead of seeing nature as numbers on a graph, audiences will feel environmental change through sound, touch, and guided imagery. By embodying the rhythms of the climate, the work invites participants to experience AI not as an abstract machine, but as part of a shared ecosystem. This layered approach imagines a new form of collaboration between humans, machines, and the environment—an artistic step towards the “symbiocene.”
The Studiotopia programme at Beta asks what it means to move from a data-driven, extractive view of the world to one that embraces ecological complexity. Both Cezar and Hung Lu push us to imagine technologies that are not only smarter, but also more empathetic, more entangled with the rhythms of the planet.
