Beta Festival Conference Pass - Day 2 (Saturday)

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.

• 11:00 | KEYNOTE: Jose Luis de Vicente - Deep Sound Histories
  
• 12:00 | PANEL: Tidal Thresholds | Adam Gibney, Martina O’Brien, Siobhán McDonald
  -13:00| LUNCH: provided by Shaku Maku
  
• 14:00 | BOOK LAUNCH: AMATEURS! by Joanna Walsh in conversation with Rachel O’Dwyer
  
• 15:00 | PANEL: Liminal Digital Interfaces | Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Roisin Berg, Arnaud Laffond, Hung Lu Chan
  
• 16:00 | PANEL: Politics of Water | Lauren Moffatt, Shane Finan, Ami Clarke
  

Keynote: Jose Luis de Vicente - Deep Sound Histories

Between 600 and 1,200 meters deep beneath the ocean, there is a layer of water where sound behaves differently. In the SOFAR channel, sound waves can travel thousands of kilometers without losing their strength; a whale in South Africa can hear the songs of another off the coast of Ireland. At the beginning of the Cold War, the two world powers began systematically capturing and analyzing underwater acoustic signals to extract sensitive information.

In this acoustic territory, the voices of sperm whales, orcas, and dolphins intersect with submarine sonar, the murmur of storms, and the creaking of icebergs and mining drills.

This lecture performance is a visual journey through seven decades of attentive listening to the complex ecologies of underwater sound, exploring its scientific, military, political, and artistic dimensions.

The talk investigates the origins of hydroacoustics and the physics of sound under water; military hydrophone networks, cetacean hearing anatomies, whale corridors and technologies plotting whale geographies, anthropogenic sound pollution, new applications of AI for marine audio analysis, and underwater recordings in sound art and experimental music.

José Luis de Vicente is a curator, cultural researcher, and artistic director based in Barcelona and working internationally. He is the co-founder of FAST, a new transdisciplinary creative unit addressing current and future challenges through the convergence of culture, technology, architecture, and design. Previously, he served as director of Barcelona’s Design Museum, DHUB, and was the founder and artistic director of Sónar+D, the culture and arts program of the acclaimed Sónar Festival. His work explores the intersection of social innovation, new ecological practices, and the aesthetics and politics of computation. He has curated more than 25 exhibitions in institutions around the world, including CCCB (Barcelona), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), Somerset House (London), MIT Museum (Cambridge, US), DOX (Prague), Museo Reina Sofía, and Espacio Fundación Telefónica (Madrid), among many others. He teaches at Columbia GSAPP (New York).

PANEL: Tidal Thresholds

Siobhán McDonald, Adam Gibney, Martina O’Brien

Ports are thresholds between land and sea, between local histories and global flows. As sites of exchange, extraction, and ecological change, they hold the traces of our intertwined industrial, social, and environmental systems. This session explores how artists are reimagining the port as more than infrastructure - as a living archive, a site of transformation, and a metaphor for the fluidity of contemporary life.

Through works that listen to the tides, translate weather into sound, and map invisible systems of power and ecology we explore artists whose work uncovers new ways of sensing and understanding our maritime environments. Together, they reveal how artistic intervention can reorient our perspectives on ports - not as end points, but as portals for new forms of coexistence between technology, ecology, and community.

BOOK LAUNCH: AMATEURS! by Joanna Walsh

Since the nineties, platforms have invited users to create in return for connection. From blogs to vlogs, tweets to memes: for the first time in history, making art became the fundamental form of communication.

What started as fun soon became currency, something vital to finding friends, work, and love. Then, as meatspace job security eroded, online creativity became work itself. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge users. Whatever it is we’re creating online, it isn’t amateur anymore. But is it art?

In this scintillating philosophical history of the internet, Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online, in conversation with Rachel O'Dwyer, author of Tokens, examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.

__ PANEL: Liminal Digital Interfaces__

Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Roisin Berg, Arnaud Laffond, Hung Lu Chan

In a world increasingly defined by acceleration and information overload, what does it mean to slow down with technology? This conversation brings together artists Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil, Hung Lu Chan, Róisín Berg and Arnaud Laffond whose practices explore the poetic, sensorial and spiritual dimensions of digital media. From Berg & Laffond’s reflections on perception and relation in networked space as part of their Cybernate Digital Arts Residency Residency, to Hung Lu Chan’s vision of symbiotic coexistence between human and non-human intelligence, and Mac Cathmhaoil’s sculptural alchemy of body, signal and dream - each artist transforms technology from instrument to meditation. Together they consider how digital systems can become sites of contemplation rather than extraction, where code, consciousness and material form flow into one another. Moving through fluid states of being, between virtual and embodied, mechanical and spiritual - the panel asks: can technology help us listen more deeply to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us?

__ PANEL: Politics of Water__

Ami Clarke, Lauren Moffatt, Shane Finan

Water connects every living system on Earth, yet it is increasingly a site of political, technological, and ecological tension. This panel brings together artists and researchers exploring the infrastructures (visible and invisible) that govern our relationship with the liquid world. From Lauren Moffatt’s Chorcorallium, an immersive VR reef that entwines artificial intelligence and marine regeneration, to Shane Finan’s investigations into water memory, local ecologies, and sensory mapping, and Ami Clarke’s explorations of data toxicity, pollution, and the economics of extraction, each artist approaches water as both material and metaphor. Together, they examine how the politics of water reveals deeper currents of power, from data colonialism to environmental governance, and consider how creative and scientific practice might help us navigate toward more fluid, equitable futures.

Lunch included (from 12PM)

Please Note the AI Art Assembly is ticketed separately.

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