Beta Festival Conference Pass - Day 1 (Friday)

The annual conference at Beta Festival brings together artists, researchers, policymakers and technologists to explore how art can shape - and be shaped by - our technological and ecological realities. This year’s edition, Fluid States, dives into ideas of flow and transformation across quantum, digital, and ecological systems.

• 10:00 | AI Art Assembly (Tickets free but separate registration required)
• 12:00 | LUNCH (provided by Shaku Maku)
• 13:00 | KEYNOTE: Dr. Oonagh Murphy - Responsible AI in the Cultural Sector - From Theory to Practice - followed by in conversation with Elaine Burke
• 14:00 | PANEL: FLOOD RISKS - Drowning in Content | Dr. Constance De Saint Laurent, Daniel Murray, Brendan Spillane
• 15:00 | PERFORMANCE: Poetics of Entanglement: Quantum States and Fluid Realities - Jennifer Redmond, Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan
• 16:00 | PANEL: From Lab to Studio: Rethinking Innovation Through Artistic Research | Jose Luis de Vicente, Hilary O’Shaughnessy, Florian Schneider, Fiona McDermott

KEYNOTE: Dr. Oonagh Murphy - Responsible AI in the Cultural Sector - From Theory to Practice

This session brings the conversation on AI’s impact in the cultural sector from abstract theory into grounded practice. Drawing on innovative R&D projects by Arts Council England, MUNCH Museum in Norway, and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Switzerland, the talk explores how public cultural institutions can lead in a digital age. It focuses on governance, ethical commissioning, and public programming as practical ways to shape technology through a values-driven lens, prioritising people and the planet. Attendees will discover hopeful, actionable pathways to responsibly manage AI’s evolving role in creativity and culture, fostering critical dialogue and inclusive innovation in arts institutions.

Dr. Oonagh Murphy is redefining how cultural organisations navigate the digital age. She works closely with museums, galleries, government bodies, and funders to shape digital strategies and policies that sit at the intersection of technology and culture. She's a trusted advisor, critical thinker and influential voice in conversations about tech policy, data rights, and the role of public institutions in our digital world.

PANEL: FLOOD RISKS - Drowning in Content

Brendan Spillane, Dr. Constance De Saint Laurent, Daniel Murray

How do our information systems echo the flow of water? And can we learn anything from this? In Werner Herzog’s “Lo and Behold” Ted Nelson, one of the pioneers of the information technology, described how “ interconnection and representation and sequentialization all… similar to the issue of water” and how interconnection and water were and are driving forces for his computer work. How can and does water inform our digital connection?

This session will look at everything from online flooding and how viral content and dark creativity can pollute and contaminate information ecosystems to hypertext and algorithmically served content.

__PERFORMANCE: Poetics of Entanglement: Quantum States and Fluid Realities

Jennifer Redmond, Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan
In celebration of the UN Year of Quantum Science, this double performance brings together poet Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan and artist Jennifer Redmond to explore quantum theory as a metaphor for identity, matter, and meaning.

From Redmond’s The Foam Diaries a multisensory fabulation on extinction, consciousness, and quantum foam, to Narayanan-Mohan’s Beautiful Workings, a lyrical mapping of migrant identity through the lens of superposition, both artists inhabit the thresholds where science becomes story.

Through words, sound, and image, they draw audiences into a world where boundaries dissolve and being itself is fluid, mirroring quantum and poetic entanglements.
The performances will be followed by an in-conversation between the artists, reflecting on how quantum ideas can offer new languages for connection, transformation, and uncertainty.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Beautiful Workings
When poet Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan first learned about superposition, she felt that she finally had the right language to explain how her migrant identity, and other identities, all co-existed within her. In autumn 2024 she was selected for Studio Quantum, a quantum artist-in-residence programme by Goethe-Institut London in partnership with King’s College London and Science Gallery London. She set out create a series of poems based on interviews with quantum physicists who identified as migrants to see whether aspects of their research resonated with their complex sense of identity as well. Instead of a clear answer, Chandrika found stories that danced between disciplines, defying expectations and confronting assumptions. This resulted in an installation piece that is a love letter to both the scientific and artistic research process, bringing together poems she wrote during the residency alongside images, notes and memories which map her journey through the world of quantum. In this event she will walk audiences through this journey and perform pieces from the installation.

Jennifer Redmond: The Foam Diaries
This 15 minute performance is narrated and expanded by an audio-visual essay. Fabulation is applied to social, scientific, philosophical and literary theories, with the aim of conjuring a different kind of reality. Fiction is used to counter the foundational principles of human society and of hominid intelligence predicated by cultural myth. It is a making and unmaking of sense, a performance of anarchy mobilised against the present. That considers multispecies extinction and the abandonment of the sacred as an organising principle.
Foam as a curious material/non-material becomes a vehicle with which to consider interdisciplinary problems of culture, ecology and technology. To think about the space forming effect of humanity on an overcrowded planet and the degrees of our entanglement with one another and with other species. The foam metaphor undermines the expectation that iterations of humans will replicate in historical societal structures. It anticipates different forms of social synthesis, mysterious solidarities, some of which already exist in social dyadic units. It is suggested that these will come to the forefront of cultural mythopoesis rendering the state and current political structures unnecessary.

The performance will be followed by an in conversation with the artists.

__ PANEL: From Lab to Studio: Rethinking Innovation Through Artistic Research__

Florian Schneider, Jose Luis de Vicente, Hilary O’Shaughnessy, Fiona McDermott

Innovation has become one of the defining buzzwords of our age - with the language invoked across governments, industries, and cultural institutions alike. But what happens when the language of innovation begins to shape how and why artists create? This conversation explores the uneasy intersections between artistic research, policy-driven experimentation, and the infrastructures that claim to support “creativity.” Bringing together leading practitioners who work between culture, research and technology, the discussion asks: Who benefits from the current innovation paradigm? How might artists reimagine these systems - or even build new ones? With insights from international curators and creative strategists including José Luis de Vicente and Hilary O’Shaughnessy, this session unpacks the politics of innovation and the role of artistic practice and multidisciplinary practice in redefining its possibilities.

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Host or Publisher Beta - An art & technology festival in Ireland