Programme Announced for Beta Festival 2025 Ireland’s Arts and Technology Festival returns November 7th – 23rd
Landmark exhibition at Dublin Port, Notre-Dame Cathedral Virtual Reality Experience and conference on Artificial Intelligence & creativity announced as part of festival.
A digital journey to the ocean depths, a virtual reality exploration of Notre-Dame Cathedral, and an international conference on art and technology on everything from artificial intelligence to slow tech are among the events announced today for Ireland’s arts and technology festival, Beta. Supported by The Digital Hub, this annual event, open to the public, will be held at various locations throughout Dublin from November 7th to 23rd.
This year’s theme explores concepts of water and fluidity and speaking at the programme announcement the festival’s curator Aisling Murray invited members of the public to dive right in:
“Beta Festival is the only festival of its kind in Ireland that merges art and technology. We are bringing together some of the leading minds from both fields to present cutting-edge ideas to the public and together imagine new possibilities. From immersive exhibitions, to quantum-inspired poetry performances and virtual reality experiences, I invite everyone to come and find inspiration in our carefully curated programme of exhibitions, workshops, and international guests.”
Festival Highlights
A centrepiece of the festival is a landmark exhibition titled “Undercurrent: As Below, So Above,” which will be hosted at Dublin Port. This exhibition will feature interactive artworks by artist Kat Austen, who confronts the vital problem of marine microplastic pollution. An immersive experience created by Lauren Moffat takes visitors on a journey to the ocean floor and multimedia works by Siobhan McDonald examine Dublin Port as a centre of exchange.
As part of the festival, The Digital Hub, in partnership with Project Arts Centre, will present the Irish premiere of “Foolish Flame.” Crafted by artists Peter Power and Leon Butler, this immersive installation addresses themes of climate change and cultural trauma. Combining the old with the new, the work draws inspiration from traditional Sean-nós dance archives, reinterpreted by choreographer Robyn Byrne, and features music composed by Peter Power, performed by Uilleann Piper Muireann Ní Shé.
This year’s festival is filled with public workshops and technology demonstrations. The Virtual Reality Notre-Dame Experience, created through 5,000 hours of historian-guided graphic work, will allow participants to explore the cathedral like never before, including areas of the cathedral that are not open to the public. A related panel discussion entitled “AI, Design & Cultural Heritage” will explore how contemporary designers are using AI as both a creative and interpretive tool for historic architecture.
For the festival’s opening weekend Beta will host the Irish premiere of “HeartBeat, Son cœur a trouvé sa cadence dans le silence des rencontres”, the Venice immersive biennale experience by French artist Bonnie Lisbon (ENTER.black). The installation offers a non-verbal encounter between two strangers, sharing their pulse and exploring emotional relationships.
Local Artists Network
The Local Artists Network strand of the programme is dedicated to new work by some of Ireland’s most exciting artists working with new technology. Pallas Projects will present an exhibition by Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, artist Istvan Lazslo will present an augmented reality work reconstructing the removal of Queen Victoria’s statue from Leinster House, and a large-scale installation by Aoife Dunne will be presented within the historic Riddel’s warehouse.
Conference
The Beta Festival annual conference gathers artists, researchers, policymakers, and tech experts to discuss how art connects with technology and the environment.
Among the conference highlights, Dr. Oonagh Murphy will deliver a keynote address titled “Responsible AI in the Cultural Sector,” focusing on ethical practices, responsible technology use, and public programmes that prioritise people and the environment. A performative lecture from Jose Luis de Vicente will investigate the SOFAR channel, an area of water deep beneath the ocean where sound waves can travel thousands of kilometers without losing their strength.
Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online, will launch her new book “Amateurs!” and engage in a discussion with Rachel O’Dwyer, examining how amateur creativity has shaped the internet. Poet Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan and artist Jennifer Redmond will create once off performances that use quantum theory to explore ideas of identity and meaning.
Elsewhere at the festival the Irish Museum of Modern Art will showcase screenings on their outdoor Living Canvas, including Liam Young’s “The Great Endeavor,” which envisions a planetary-scale carbon removal initiative and reframes the environmental crisis as a design challenge.
To celebrate the opening of the festival on Friday 7th November, Lullahush will play a one off gig before embarking on his international tour fusing traditional Irish folk music with provocative contemporary electronic production.
Beta, the Arts & Technology Festival, will take place from November 7th to 23rd. Many events are free for the public to attend. To view the full programme, visit 2025.betafestival.ie.
For further information, high-res images for print or interviews contact: John Kenny, CultureHead PR +353 86 070 0440 or email john@culturehead.com
Aisling Murray Beta Festival founder and curator is available for comment.
About Beta Festival
Beta Festival is Ireland’s only festival of art and technology which aims to both platform Irish digital and new media artists as well as engage with public in programming underpinned by AI & digital literacy. Founded in 2023 by Aisling Murray and The Digital Hub, the festival takes place for two weeks in November overlapping with Science Week and Irish Design Week.
For the 2025 festival, Beta explores ideas of 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, we consider how flow – of bodies, ideas, and information – challenges rigid structures and invites new ways of being.
Beta flows through the spaces where boundaries blur – between water and data, identity and system, science and story. Across digital oceans and porous infrastructures, speculative reefs and sensing sculptures, the festival invites audiences to think with water, through data, and beyond the binaries of fixed form. From artificial coral choruses and AI imaginaries to quantum indeterminacy, artists and researchers ask: how do we live with uncertainty, and find resilience and imagination in flow rather than form? Across ports, screens, and soundscapes, Beta becomes a temporary space for the poetics and politics of change.
Discussions on AI, ecology, and digital ethics sit alongside workshops on archival imagery, collective imagination, and the unseen infrastructures of technology. Exhibitions at Dublin Port reimagine our entanglement with water and data, while performances trace quantum indeterminacy through language and sound. Irish and international artists transform research into art, ports into portals, and technology into a medium for empathy, listening, and renewal.
AuthorDigital Hub Team