Conference Day 2
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 am - New Experiments in Art and Technology
What does it take to create the conditions for artists to experiment with technology, and how can that experimentation shape the world beyond the arts?
As Somerset House Studios marks its tenth anniversary, Director Marie McPartlin joins artist and researcher Sven Anderson for a presentation and conversation exploring the evolving relationship between art, technology and cultural institutions.
Drawing on her recent contribution to Why Technology Needs Artists and 3 Evenings, a programme of experimental performance and technology inspired by the groundbreaking collaborations of the 1960s, Marie reflects on what meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration looks like today. Together, they explore how institutions can support artistic risk-taking, challenge conventional models of innovation, and create space for artists to influence not just how technologies are used, but how they are imagined and developed.
Speakers: Marie McPartlin and Sven Anderson
12:00pm - BETAxCFD "Bog Readings"
What happens when environmental data shows up in the art world? Probes in peat, hydrophones in rivers, chambers monitoring what a bog exhales, water samples run through a laboratory and returned as a score — artists are borrowing the instruments of environmental science and turning their output into work. What are the entangled politics of our landscape with the technological world? What does a river or a bog gain from being made legible? And when a landscape is rendered as a live signal, who is invited to listen, and what do they do with what they hear? The Culture File Debate investigates.
Speakers: Fiona McDonald, Luke Casserly, 1iing Heaney, Trish Morgan moderated by Luke Clancy
The SPACE Programme (presentation & artistic intervention)
This year The SPACE Programme comes to Beta Festival with an afternoon of installations and presentations by the artists of SPACE 2026. Seven Irish artists working across sound, sculpture, performance, film, game engines and virtual reality share recent work in the iD8 space.
The afternoon opens at 2pm with Jo Mangan, co-founder of The SPACE Programme, on its 18 years to date. The artists will then introduce their work and audiences are free to move between the spaces where they are installed. The session closes with a conversation with the artists chaired by SPACE co-founder Dr. Hanna Slättne.
About The SPACE Programme
Since 2008 The Performance Corporation has run The SPACE Programme, Ireland’s longest-running international multidisciplinary artists residency. It brings artists from different disciplines together with the tools of immersive technology, without the pressure to produce a finished piece. Since 2018 it has focused on augmented, mixed and virtual reality, spatial sound, motion capture and, more recently, artificial intelligence. Over 100 artists from Ireland and abroad have taken part, with editions in Ireland, Paris, Venice and Austria, and many have gone on to make work together as well as at national and international festivals and events.
Participants: James Riordan, Emily Aoibheann McDonnell, Fionnuala Conway, 1iing Heaney, Conan McIvor, Tamsin Snow and Serena Devereux. Facilitated by Jo Mangan and Hanna Slätte
4pm - BETA x CFD | Beyond Humans: Who Is Art For?
What happens when art moves beyond the human point of view? As artists increasingly create for other species, collaborate with non-human organisms and machines, and explore different ways of sensing and experiencing the world, BETA x CFD asks us to reconsider who art is for.
What can we learn from making art for dogs? What happens when we stop seeing ourselves as separate from nature and technology, and start recognising that we're all part of the same interconnected system? How might the diversity of the natural world challenge our assumptions about human perception? What happens when we imagine the perspective of extraterrestrial dust?
From sound and sensory environments to ecological systems and interactive technologies, these artists challenge the idea that there is one universal way of experiencing or creating art. Together, they invite us to rethink whose perspectives matter, what participation can look like, and how art might open us up to radically different ways of being in the world.
Speakers: Serena Devereux, Gabriela Wacławska, AlanJames Burns and Hung Lu Chan moderated by Luke Clancy
Featured Artists
