Beta Festival of Art & Technology opens in Dublin this week
Now in its fourth year, Beta, Ireland’s festival of art and technology, opens to the public this Friday, 6 November, running until 22 November at venues across Dublin city centre. This year nature meets the machine, as artists turn environmental data into scent and sound, bring an extinct Irish elk back to its feet and make music with dogs. Many events are free and open to the public.
Flagship exhibitions
The Digital Hub in The Liberties, Dublin 8, hosts the premiere of Unmasking Nature, a major interactive installation by acclaimed neurodivergent artist AlanJames Burns, which invites visitors to explore a series of hands-on sensory activities linked to biodiversity.
Scientific instruments turn the environment into numbers. The artists in SEED, a Research Ireland-funded project, turn those numbers back into something we can hear, smell, touch, breathe and see. SEED features new works by Adam Gibney, Cailean Finn, Cliona Harmey, Fiona Mc Donald, Shane Finan and István László.
Also at The Digital Hub, Lisbon-based artist Cezar Mocan presents End of Signal, a computer-generated story about a network of satellites that watch a toxic lake vanish and struggle to explain what they’ve seen. Hung Lu Chan’s Becoming Red Dust imagines Mars from the point of view of its red dust, and Kildare artist 1iing Heaney uses machine learning to teach a digital Irish elk, a giant deer extinct for thousands of years, to stand and walk again. While Serena Devereux draws real-time local weather data to create a hybrid installation.
Speaking ahead of the festival opening this week, Beta Founder Aisling Murray encouraged audiences to explore the programme:
“Beta is the only festival of its kind in Ireland, a place where art and technology meet. This year we’re looking beyond ourselves, to what we can learn from landscapes, plants, animals and machines. Whether you come for the exhibitions at The Digital Hub, an eight-hour video game about donkeys or a workshop where you build your own computer, I’d invite everyone to come along and be surprised.”
Fiach Mac Conghail, CEO of The Digital Hub, which co-founded Beta, added:
“This festival is important as it gives artists the opportunity and space to critically explore and challenge how technology is impacting the lives of our fellow citizens, in particular technology’s impact and engagement with nature.”
Non-human audiences
Most art is made with people in mind. This year, Beta is asking: what about everyone else? The Other Audience is a new strand dedicated to non-human audiences, and its first exhibition starts close to home, with our pets. Supported by Dublin City Council and The Digital Hub, artist Gabriela Waclawska has created a new work that treats animals as real audiences, participants and co-creators. Her interactive sound installation, woofy woofy ૮֊˕֊ა੭ bow-wow hauhau, runs at Project Arts Centre from 17 to 19 November. It gives dogs the freedom to play, explore and simply be themselves, and as they do, they make their own music. Owners are welcome too, but for once, they’re not the main audience.
Force Quit: workshops for taking back your tech
A new strand, Force Quit, offers three hands-on workshops for anyone who wants to take back control of their tech from the big platforms.
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. On Saturday 21 November at The Digital Hub’s Digital Depot, 22-year-old content creator Annike Tan, known online as @Ubeboobey, hosts a cyberdeck-building workshop. Tan is known for kicking off a viral trend for custom, hyper-feminine cyberdecks, portable DIY computers built into unexpected cases. The electronics are supplied, and participants bring their own “shell” 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, long-lasting technology. Participants build a simple website in HTML and CSS, link it to others in a webring, and look at ways of hosting it using solar power and recycled phones.
Across the city
At Project Arts Centre on 14 November, asses.masses is an eight-hour video game in which the audience take turns at the controller to lead a herd of unemployed donkeys demanding their jobs back from the machines. Also at Project, award-winning Peruvian artist Claudix Vanesix presents Xenocene: A Manifesto in Motion (20 and 21 November), a performance about the role of AI at the end of the human age.
On 21 November, UNDERGROWTH transforms The Digital Hub into a one-night world of roots, light and live synth. The F Word brings together artists from Ireland, France and Germany to take on fake news, and at IMMA, Roisin Agnew’s film Bog Communism looks at data centres and land rights in Ireland.
Beta, the arts and technology festival, runs from 6 to 22 November. Many events are free. For the full programme, visit www.betafestival.ie
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