Programme Announced for Beta Festival 2026

Ireland's Arts and Technology Festival returns November 6-22.

• Major exhibition across Digital Hub campus exploring nature and technology
• Festival launches new programming strand for ‘Non-Human Audiences’

Watch a typewriter take orders from an AI device. See moss breathing under a grow light. Follow an Ice Age elk through a landscape that never ends. Ireland’s arts and technology festival, Beta, returns from 6 to 22 November at venues across Dublin city centre.

This year nature meets the machine through a series of exhibitions exploring how technology is reshaping the way we sense, perceive and understand the world around us.

Speaking at the launch of the programme, festival curator Aisling Murray said:

“Beta is the only festival of its kind in Ireland, the place where art and technology meet. This year’s programme looks beyond the human, to the intelligence of landscapes, plants, animals and machines, and it is one you experience with your hands and ears as much as your eyes. Whether you come for the exhibitions at The Digital Hub, a day-long video game about donkeys or a workshop where you build your own computer, I invite everyone to come and be surprised.”

Flagship exhibitions

The flagship exhibitions run at The Digital Hub in The Liberties, Dublin 8, from Wednesday 6 November – Sunday 22 November, 12 to 6pm.

Among the highlights is the premiere of Unmasking Nature, a major interactive art installation by the acclaimed neurodivergent artist Alan James Burns, taking place at The Digital Hub’s Bank building. Described as a sanctuary made from materials foraged across Ireland, the installation invites visitors to experience a number of interactive sensory activities including running their fingers over a pinecone to hear it play a tune, and digging into a bowl of acorns to feel their temperature change.

The iconic St Patrick’s Tower on The Digital Hub campus will play host to an exhibition. SEED: Signal and Trace presents six new commissions by Adam Gibney, Cailean Finn, Cliona Harmey, Fiona Mc Donald, Shane Finan and István László, working with researchers at Dublin City University. Scientific instruments turn the environment into numbers, and the art works on display turn those numbers back into sound, scent, touch, breath and sight. Three vases release a scent when a heat record is broken, a text work wakes only when it rains, and living moss sits in a chamber lit by carbon readings radioed in from a restored bog. Together they ask what we learn about a changing climate when its data is felt instead of read.

At The Digital Hub’s Bay 1 space, four artists look at the world through eyes that are not our own. Two of the works come out of Beta’s Studiotopia residencies, a Creative Europe project pairing artists with scientists: Cezar Mocan’s End of Signal is told by a satellite that cannot explain what it saw, and Hung Lu Chan’s Becoming Red Dust sees Mars through its dust. Alongside them, the Local Artists Network presents 1iing heaney’s Elk_Agent, in which a prehistoric Irish elk is brought back to walk by machine learning, and Serena Devereux’s Cybernetic Ecologies reads the landscape as live weather data.

Non-Human Audiences

This year Beta Festival is launching a new strand of programming for non-human audiences.

Titled ‘The Other Audience’ the inaugural exhibition will begin with our most immediate non-human companions: our pets. Supported by Dublin City Council and The Digital Hub, artist Gabriela Waclawska is developing a new work that takes animals seriously as audiences, participants, and co-creators.

Waclawska’s ‘woofy woofy ૮֊˕֊ა੭ bow-wow hauhau’, is an interactive sound installation that explores what happens when dogs are given the freedom to play, explore and simply be themselves. The dogs will even make their own music and their owners are welcome to attend too. The installation will run at Project Arts Centre from 17 to 19 November.

Across The City

Beyond The Digital Hub, Project Arts Centre hosts a run of performances. On Saturday 14 November, asses.masses is a video game played from start to finish by the audience, who take turns at the controller to lead a herd of unemployed donkeys demanding their jobs back from the machines over 8 hours.

Xenocene: A Manifesto in Motion (20 and 21 November) is a performance by Peruvian artist Claudix Vanesix, who recently won the inaugural Blend Award at Venice and an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica, about the role of AI at the end of the Anthropocene, the age in which humans have been the dominant force on the planet.

On 21 November, UNDERGROWTH turns Bay 1 in The Digital Hub into a one-night world of roots, light and live synth, created by Dublin collective Mystify, that changes as visitors move through it.

The F Word brings together artists from Ireland, France and Germany, to explore fake news and fragmentation with a sound work by Samuel Julian Grace at the Goethe-Institut, a tour of a Dublin data centre in the year 2050 from Maureen Béguin, and a performance from Carys D. Coburn where the model won’t stop talking about who decides what is safe to show online. Elsewhere, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Roisin Agnew’s film Bog Communism looks at data centres, land rights and resistance in Ireland.

Force Quit: workshops for taking back your tech

Force Quit is a new strand of Beta programming about digital sovereignty: relying less on the big platforms, devices and networks, and more on tools people can build and understand themselves. Its three hands-on workshops ask what becomes possible when we stop accepting technology on the terms it is handed to us.

On Sunday 15 November at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, feminist sound technology organisation Synthesize_Her leads a four-hour session, commissioned by Beta, in which participants build a radio device that talks directly to others without going through a central network.

Annike Tan, widely known as @Ubeboobey, is a 22-year-old content creator and DIY tech enthusiast famous for starting a viral trend of building custom, hyper-feminine, and aesthetically unique “cyberdecks” or portable DIY micro-computers. On Saturday 21 November at The Digital Hub’s Digital Depot, Ube will be hosting a workshop showing people how to build their own cyberdeck. The electronics are supplied, and participants bring their own “shells” to house them, whether a box, a handbag or an old toy.

On Sunday 22 November, also at the Digital Depot, Colm O’Neill and Evan Kenny introduce permacomputing, a movement for sustainable and resilient technology. Participants build a simple website in HTML and CSS, link it to others in a webring, and look at ways of hosting it on solar power and recycled phones.

No previous experience is needed for the cyberdeck or mesh network workshops, and curiosity counts for more than technical skill.

Beta, the Arts & Technology Festival, will take place from November 6th to 22nd. Many events are free for the public to attend. To view the full programme, visit www.betafestival.ie/

For further information, high-res images for print or interviews contact:
Maria Rolston, CultureHead PR +353 85 100 7201 or email maria@culturehead.com
John Kenny, CultureHead PR +353 86 070 0440 or email john@culturehead.com

Aisling Murray Beta Festival founder and curator is available for comment.

Author
Digital Hub Team