Conference Day 1
Beta Festival’s annual conference brings together artists, researchers, technologists, cultural practitioners and critical thinkers to explore the rapidly changing relationships between art, technology and society. Previous editions have moved between keynote talks, panel discussions, performances and conversations, tackling questions around AI, digital culture, power, creativity and our relationship with emerging technologies.
This year’s conference will continue that spirit of critical exchange, bringing together Irish and international voices to examine some of the ideas, tensions and possibilities shaping our technological present and future.
11:00 - Down the Feed: Playing with Perspectives on Misinformation
Vlad Glăveanu
12:00 - The Limits of Seeing Everything
Cezar Mocan and Paul O’Neill
13:00 - Lunch provided by Shaku Maku
14:00 - Data as Medium: SEED - Sensory Experiences of Environmental Data
Dr Trish Morgan, Shane Finan, Cailean Finn, Adam Gibney, Clíona Harmey, István László, Fiona McDonald and Paul O’Neill (facilitator)
16:00 - Bog Communism
Róisín Agnew and Niamh O’Beirne
FRIDAY
11:00am - Down the Feed: Playing with Perspectives on Misinformation
Why does the same social media post convince one person and leave another sceptical? Join us for a playful, interactive workshop exploring the human side of misinformation. Through the card game Down the Feed, you’ll step into different characters' shoes, imagine their reactions to misleading posts, and debate what might change their minds, or make things worse. Together, we’ll explore how creativity, perspective-taking and critical thinking can help us navigate our shared digital world. No prior knowledge needed, just curiosity and a willingness to play!
Vlad Glăveanu is Professor at DCU Business School and Director of the Centre for Possibility Studies. His work explores creativity, imagination and how people discover and act on possibilities together. He is President of the Possibility Studies Network and author of Creativity: A Very Short Introduction and The Possible: A Sociocultural Theory.
12:00pm - The Limits of Seeing Everything
In this session artist Cezar Mocan and artist and Researcher Paul O’Neill discuss Cezar’s most recent body of work End of Signal, part of which was commissioned through Beta’s Studiotopia programme. What does it mean, under contemporary earth-observation regimes, to see everything and still misread? What space can uncertainty retain when observation is coupled to adjudication, when vision is engineered not to dwell but to authorise? In End of Signal, Cezar Mocan takes this tension as a point of departure.
The conversation explores the limits of machine vision, the politics of environmental surveillance, and our growing dependence on technological systems to tell us what is real. As satellites generate ever more detailed images of the planet, does seeing more necessarily mean knowing more?
Speakers: Cezar Mocan and Paul O’Neill
14:00 Data as Medium: SEED - Sensory Experiences of Environmental Data
SEED is a Research Ireland funded project at Dublin City University that brings researchers in the Social Sciences and STEM together with artists to turn environmental data into sensory experience. The exhibition SEED: Signal and Trace presents six new commissions which emerged from this project by Shane Finan, Cailean Finn, Adam Gibney, Clíona Harmey, István László and Fiona Mc Donald.
Here the artists share short presentations on their work followed by a conversation with Paul O’Neill. What do we come to know about environmental change when its data is felt rather than read, and what do the readings leave out?
The SEED project is funded by a Research Ireland COALESCE Strand 2A grant. It is led by Dr. Trish Morgan from DCU’s School of Communications as Principal Investigator, along with Dr. Shirley Coyle from DCU’s School of Electronic Engineering as co-PI.
Speakers: Dr Trish Morgan, Shane Finan, Cailean Finn, Adam Gibney, Clíona Harmey, István László and Fiona Mc Donald.
16:00 Bog Communism
This session explores land, extraction, and the stories we tell about both. Artist Niamh O’Beirne opens with a poetry reading, followed by a talk from filmmaker and researcher Roisin Agnew on Bog Communism, which grew out of her PhD research into data centre expansion in Ireland. Roisin’s work imagines a form of resistance to tech imperialism rooted in land rights and in questioning what counts as “wasteland.” Roisin and Niamh then come together in conversation. Niamh’s practice draws on folklore, vernacular culture, and more-than-human ecologies to explore our relationship with land, sacred sites, and the unseen world. Together they ask who gets to call a place waste, what the bog remembers, and how we can imagine life beyond the cloud. Niamh closes the session with a final reading.
Speakers: Róisín Agnew, Niamh O’ Beirne
Featured Artists
