Conference Day (1) Artists Panels & Keynote by Abeba Birhane(Beta Festival)

Exploring the relationship between technology and power, Beta Festival’s 2024 conference explores how digital infrastructures and software have reshaped society, culture, and politics. Spanning two days, the event delves into the ways technology influences institutions, political interests, and economic and cultural practices. Bringing together artists, technologists, and researchers, the conference participants will question the forms of power and control embedded in digital infrastructures and explore strategies for redesigning these systems to meet societal demands for both individual and collective autonomy.

On the first day, discussions will focus on the ethics of AI development, its impact on democracy, and the manipulation of political systems, as well as how artists are leveraging digital tools to resist surveillance and platform capitalism. The second day will explore the transformation of creative practices by these technologies, with sessions addressing copyright and intellectual property in the age of AI, the preservation of digital cultural memory, counter-archives, and new possibilities for immersive and interactive storytelling.

Throughout the conference, keynote speakers Abeba Birhane, an accountability expert, and Kay Watson, a specialist in art and technology, will offer insights into how AI is reshaping society and culture, while exploring the limits and possibilities of individual and collective agency in this rapidly evolving digital landscape.

CONFERENCE DAY (1)

• 13:00 | KEYNOTE: Abeba Birhane - AI: potential benefits, proven risks
  
• 14:00 | PANEL: Algorithmic Consent: AI and the Erosion Of Democracy | Eileen Culloty, Olga Cronin, Derek Curry
  
• 15:00 | LECTURE: Algorithms of Resistance - Emiliano Treré
  
• 16:00 | PANEL: The Art and Tools of Defiance" | Emiliano Treré, Noam Youngrak Son & Jennifer Gradecki, Paul O’Neill

KEYNOTE: Abeba Birhane - AI: potential benefits, proven risks

The past number of years have seen peak excitement, enthusiasm, and inflated optimism around AI, mostly predicated upon yet to materialise “benefits”, “potentials”, and “promises”. Actual deployed systems however continue to fail to live up to their promises, leading to numerous downstream impacts including erosion of public trust in AI. In this talk, we survey current state-of-the-art AI systems and their downstream impact on society and present recommendations geared towards reliable and equitable AI systems as well as mechanisms for accountability.

Abeba Birhane is a cognitive scientist, currently a Senior Advisor in AI Accountability at Mozilla Foundation and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her research focuses on AI accountability, with a particular focus on audits of AI models and training datasets – work for which she was featured in Wired UK and TIME on the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI list. Birhane also serves on the United Nations Secretary-General’s AI Advisory Body and the newly-convened AI Advisory Council in Ireland

PANEL: Algorithmic Consent: AI and the Erosion Of Democracy

*Eileen Culloty, Olga Cronin, Derek Curry.

In an age of increasing AI influence, political systems are being transformed by algorithmic tactics such as data mining, deepfakes, disinformation and facial recognition technologie. From voter manipulation to AI-generated content, these technologies are reshaping elections, fostering mistrust, and posing serious challenges to democracy. This panel brings together experts in digital democracy, media literacy, FRT and privacy advocacy to discuss how AI is impacting political processes. The conversation will feature insights from Dr. Eileen Culloty, disinformation researcher and media literacy advocate, and Olga Cronin, senior policy officer and privacy expert as well as artist and researcher Derek Curry. Together, they will explore strategies for safeguarding democratic systems from AI-driven manipulation and what governance structures are needed to protect electoral integrity in the future.

Dr Eileen Culloty is Deputy Director at the DCU Institute for Media, Democracy and Society (FuJo) and an Assistant Professor in the DCU School of Communications. She coordinates the Ireland EDMO Hub of the European Digital Media Observatory, which aims to advance research on disinformation, support fact-checking and media literacy, and assess the implementation of the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. Eileen’s book, co-authored with Jane Suiter, Disinformation and Manipulation in Digital Media was published by Routledge in 2021. Eileen previously worked on disinformation research as part of the H2020 project Provenance. She led a Broadcasting Authority of Ireland project investigating the diversity of public service media during Covid-19 and a Science Foundation Ireland outreach project on countering misperceptions about vaccines. She works with Jane Suiter and Lala Muradova on a DCU funded project investigating the use of mini-publics to counter Covid-19 disinformation. Eileen’s research has been published in Journalism, European Journal of Communication, Environmental Communication, Digital Journalism, and Critical Studies on Terrorism. Her co-authored paper on social media and political communication was awarded 3rd place in the International Communication Association’s Top Three Faculty Papers for 2018. She is vice-chair of Media Literacy Ireland, a national association facilitated by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, a member of Meta EU Affairs’ Digital Citizenship Group, and a member of the working group set up to develop Ireland’s National Counter Disinformation Strategy

Olga Cronin is a Senior Policy Officer of Enforce and the coordinator of the International Network of Civil Liberties Organisations (INCLO). She is focused on facial recognition technology, encryption, state surveillance, privacy and data protection. Olga worked as a journalist for almost 15 years. She leads ICCL’s work on police use of facial recognition technology. Her work to date, with academics and other NGOs, helped prevent use of the powerful mass surveillance without pre-legislative scrutiny or debate. She also leads ICCL’s work on several EU proposals, including the EU ‘ChatControl’ proposal which could mandate unprecedented mass surveillance of all public and private digital communications. Her work revealed that Irish police unlawfully retain files on innocent people wrongly flagged by error-prone image scanning technology as suspect sharers of child sex abuse materials. She is leading several complaints to the Data Protection Commission.

Derek Curry (US) is an artist-researcher whose work investigates the role of new technologies in society and technological power structures using an approach that combines academic research with critical artmaking. His artworks often reverse-engineers and replicates technologies of control to better understand their implications and where assumptions or ideologies may have played a role in their development. His academic research draws from media theory and the social sciences, while his artistic practice is grounded in tactical media and institutional critique. Curry holds an MFA in New Genres from UCLA (2010) and a PhD in Media Study from the State University of New York at Buffalo (2018). He is currently an Associate Professor in Art + Design at Northeastern University in Boston. Curry has exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica, ISEA, National Gallery X (London), NeMe (Cypress), and the Athens Digital Arts Festival. His research has been published in Leonardo, Big Data & Society, Digital Culture & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. His artwork has been funded by Science Gallery (Dublin, Detroit, Atlanta), NEoN Digital Arts Festival, and MediaFutures. He is the recipient of the 2023 MediaFutures Best Artist(s) in the Artists for Media track award.

LECTURE: Algorithims of Resistance - Emiliano Treré

Emiliano Treré is a Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC) at Cardiff University, UK. He is a widely cited author in digital activism, social movement, critical data and disconnection studies with a special focus on Latin America and the Global South. Fluent in three languages, he has authored two books and published more than 80 publications in 7 languages in peer-reviewed publications. He is one of the co-directors of the Data Justice Lab and the co-founder of the ‘Big Data from the South’ Initiative. His book Hybrid Media Activism (Routledge, 2019) won the Outstanding Book Award of the ICA Interest Group ‘Activism, Communication and Social Justice’. He recently published Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power.

PANEL : The Art and Tools of Defiance"

Emiliano Treré, Noam Youngrak Son & Jennifer Gradecki, Paul O’Neill

Throughout history, artists have wielded the tools of their time to challenge political power and resist oppressive systems—from Dada photomontages to video art in the counterculture of the 1960s. In today’s algorithmic age, artists continue this tradition of subversion, using creative practices to push back against the encroachment of digital surveillance, platform capitalism, and data exploitation. This panel brings together contemporary voices in art and activism to discuss how critical and creative practices can serve as powerful tools of resistance. Join Emiliano Trere, a leading scholar in digital activism, Noam Youngrak Son, a cultural worker and design theorist, and Jennifer Gradecki, an interdisciplinary artist, for an exploration of how art can defy the structures of control in the digital age. Moderated by Paul O’Neill.

Noam Youngrak Son is a communication designer, design theorist, and cultural worker. Their design work encompasses small-scale publishing projects, speculative worldbuilding, workshops, lectures, writing, net art, and occasional performative interventions. As a cultural worker, they have co-organized the Ghent-based queer publishing collective Bebe Books since 2021. Son has expanded their focus from design to theory in order to critically engage with the ontology of the design industry, media, and broader material culture. This turn is informed by their observations of cultural assemblages that echo the extractive operations of capitalism on racialized and more-than-human populations. They are particularly attentive to the interconnected notions of speculation—both as an open artistic approach and as a process of value increase in capitalism. They research the tendency of the former in design to be subjugated by the latter and explore alternative methods for speculative design practices to realise their transindividual potential through collective organisation and workshop facilitation. In this process, Son utilises queer publishing as a technology for mobilising attention beyond the financialized “scarce resource” of the attention economy. In this context, publishing extends beyond mere printed matter to encompass the maintenance of communities and the cultivation of interspecies relationships. The term "queer" here is not used as a statement of identity but as a process—small yet collective strategies of publishing that challenge the modern myth of the heroic designer.

Paul O’ Neill is an artist-researcher based in Ireland. His practice and research are concerned with the implications of ourcollective dependency on networked technologies and infrastructures. Paul is a lecturer in Digital Media & Culture at the University of Galway and an academic collaborator with the ADAPT Centre for AI-Driven Media Technologies. He has exhibited and presented his work at various cultural institutions and events including Science Gallery (Dublin), Ars Electronica festival (Linz) and InSpace (Edinburgh) and his writing has featured in publications from the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam) and ANNEX – Ireland’s representative at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. He has also been awarded residencies with the Media Archaeology Lab (University of Colorado Boulder) and as part of the European Media Art Programme (EMAP).

Jennifer Gradecki (US) is an artist-theorist who investigates secretive and specialised socio-technical systems. Her artistic research has focused on social science techniques, financial instruments, dataveillance technologies, intelligence analysis, artificial intelligence, and social media misinformation. Gradecki has presented and exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), NeMe (Cypress), Media Art History (Krems), ADAF (Athens), and the Centro Cultural de España (México). Her research has been published in Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. Her artwork has been funded by Science Gallery Dublin, Science Gallery Detroit, and the NEoN Digital Arts Festival

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