At the nexus of art and technology, Beta Festival founder Aisling Murray introduces this year's edition — a deep dive into 'ideas of fluidity across water, language, information, and quantum states'.
There were a few things I was thinking about when developing the themes for Beta Festival 2025. One was a project we had around ports and water, another was that this year marks the UN Year of Quantum, and the third was language - how it evolves, connects, and transforms. While pondering these ideas, I rewatched Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World by Werner Herzog. In it, internet pioneer Ted Nelson recalls running his hand through lake water as a child and watching how it flowed around his fingers, "kind of the same, but different." He said this simple observation shaped his lifelong fascination with interconnection and representation and approach to his IT work, ideas "similar to the issue of water."
That image pulled together so many of the threads I’d been thinking about. The theme found its anchor: exploring fluidity across water, language, information, and quantum states - domains where form dissolves and reconstitutes, where binaries collapse into continuums. In a time of accelerated change, flow - of bodies, ideas, and information - challenges rigid structures and invites new ways of being.
Now in its third edition, Beta is still a young festival but one with a growing audience curious about the intersection of art and technology. My belief is that Ireland not only punches above its weight in digital arts but should also foster a critically literate public, especially given our role as home to so many major tech companies. Festivals and cultural events like this can help build that literacy, supporting access to technology while also exploring the ideas and ethics that underpin it.
We do this through exhibitions, discussions, performances, and workshops. Our conference, running at various Dublin venues from 7–9 November, moves from critical debate to poetic speculation: from the AI Art Assembly and keynotes on responsible AI and hydroacoustics, to sessions on information floods, innovation infrastructures, and quantum poetics. The opening concert by Lullahush will blend electronic and traditional sounds - a sonic embodiment of the festival’s theme.
That weekend also features the Irish premiere of Heartbeat by ENTER.black, which debuted at the Venice Immersive Festival. Created for two visitors at a time, it invites a non-verbal encounter between strangers, mediated through technology.
There are three main exhibitions this year: our thematic exhibition at Dublin Port, the Local Artists Network, and the Ethics Studio.
The Local Artists Network highlights new Irish digital art through partnerships with Pallas Projects and Digital Art Studios Belfast. Pallas presents Aer Milam by Caroline MacCathmhaoil, linking death practices, commercial flying, and queer feminist electronics in an act of technocratic resistance. DAS Belfast shows Aoife Dunne’s Obsidian, exploring transformation as a continual state of flux between the human and the digital. At The Digital Hub, we’ll feature István László’s augmented reality work Suspended Protocols and Mollie Mia Murphy’s sculptural glitch Tonóg Chladaigh. For the closing weekend, Beta in partnership with The Digital Hub and Project Arts Centre will present Peter Power and Leon Butler’s Foolish Flame, an immersive installation merging performance and technology to explore climate change and inherited trauma.
The festival’s centrepiece exhibition, Undercurrent: As Below, So Above, takes place at Dublin Port’s Substation and culminates a year-long European programme, S+T+ARTS4WaterII, led by ADAPT Research Centre and Beta. Artists Kat Austen, Lauren Moffatt, and Siobhán McDonald reimagine the port as a site of exchange between the human and the oceanic, the below and the above - transforming our relationship with water, technology, and the world in flux around us.
In addition to all of these we have a partnership with IMMA’s Living Canvas, workshops, VR experiences and more, but I have been asked for only 500 words, and I’m already over.
The festival runs 7-23 November and you can check out the full programme here.
