Beta – Ireland’s New Festival of Art and Technology – launches with ADAPT as Research Partner

The Beta Festival will explore the impact of emerging technologies on society with debates, live performances and exhibitions at The Digital Hub and the surrounding area of Dublin 8 from 2-5 November 2023. The exhibition will continue for a further two weeks until 19 November.

ADAPT is excited to be Research Partner on Beta, a new festival of art and technology, that opens on 2 November 2023 in various locations across Dublin 8. The festival will showcase and celebrate Ireland’s research and artistic communities through a combination of creativity, debate and experimentation. Visitors can engage playfully and critically with new technologies – essentially ‘beta testing’ ethical issues facing society.

At Beta ADAPT researchers present ‘The Ethics Studio’, a space where visitors can explore the ethical implications of new and emerging digital technologies, and examine attitudes, ideas, values and methods around the ethical design and development of such innovations. The studio is also a live research environment, where ADAPT researchers will conduct studies over the course of the festival, on using creative methods and tools to explore ethics and digital technologies. The Studio is presented by Dr Marguerite Barry, Dr Paul O’Neill and Danny Snow of ADAPT.

The Ethics Studio will be open to the public over the festival weekend and will continue to run until- 19 November 2023. There’s no fee to visit The Ethics Studio and booking is not required.

Other highlights from the festival include:

• The Beta Conference will take place 3 – 5 November in The Bank. The conference features speakers from ADAPT including Prof. Aphra Kerr (ADAPT, Maynooth University) and Dr Marguerite Barry (ADAPT, University College Dublin), who join journalist Elaine Burke for a panel on ‘Navigating AI: National Perspectives on Policy and Regulation’ at 3pm on Friday 3 November.
• Prompt Battle is an exciting live event where people go up against the machine and compete against each other to create images using text-to-image software like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
• miss-communication by Joanna Walsh encourages visitors to ‘talk’ with Markievcz Mark1, an AI trained on the historical records of Irish women’s words, and print out a receipt of your conversation.
• Dwelling is a new audience driven interactive performance, creating imperceptible, poetic worlds that allow the audience to pass through space, time, and memory to experience the lives of others. Created by Peter Power & Leon Butler and hosted by Project Arts Centre.

Beta is the only festival of its kind in Ireland for art and technology, bringing together artists, researchers, industry and members of the public to explore the role of emerging technologies in our lives.

The core Beta Festival runs from 2 to 5 November in various locations around Dublin 8. The Ethics Studio and the accompanying Beta exhibition continues in The Digital Hub and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) for a further two weeks until November 19th. View the full Beta programme.

The Digital Hub and Aisling Murray are being supported for Beta by SFI, The Arts Council, Project Arts Centre, Goethe Institut, Ambassade de France en Irlande, British Council, ADAPT Research Centre, and NCAD Gallery.

More information: https://betafestival.ie/