ADAPT at Beta Festival 2025

Dublin’s Beta Festival returns from 7 – 23 November 2025, offering an exciting programme of exhibitions, performances, discussions and debates that explore the intersection of art and technology.

This year, Beta explores ideas of fluidity across water, language, information and quantum states – domains where form dissolves and reconstitutes, and binaries collapse into continuums. Flowing through spaces like Dublin Port, The Digital Hub and across screens and soundscapes, the festival challenges rigid structures and invites new ways of being.

ADAPT – Beta Research Partnership

The Research Ireland ADAPT Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology is the Research Partner for Beta Festival, with a key contribution being The Ethics Studio.

The Ethics Studio at The Digital Hub

‘The Ethics Studio’ is a dynamic, interactive space dedicated to exploring our attitudes, values, ideas and expectations of technologies past, present and those yet to come.

• It showcases current ADAPT research, allows a deep dive into the festival themes, and offers a library of tools used to navigate the ethics of technology and society.
• The studio functions as a living research environment, inviting voluntary input from attendees to learn, discuss, create, and play. Researchers and artists may invite attendees to join conversations or fun activities to gather insight.
• The Ethics Studio is open from 7 – 23 November, Wednesday – Sunday, 12PM-6PM.

Festival Highlights

Beta Festival 2025 offers a wide range of interactive activities and discussions that explore the theme of fluidity:

• Exhibitions at Dublin Port: Undercurrent: As Below, So Above brings together the work of Kat Austen, Lauren Moffatt and Siobhán McDonald developed during their participation in S+T+ART4WaterII in residence in Galway, Belfast and Dublin port. The projects explore and reflect on ports as interdisciplinary liminal spaces for reimagining our entanglements with water, technology, and ecology. Read more.
• Conference Weekend: Over three days, the programme moves from critical debate to poetic speculation: from the AI Art Assembly and keynotes on responsible AI and hydroacoustics, to sessions on information floods, innovation infrastructures, and quantum poetics. Read more.
• Discussions and Workshops: Key topics include AI, ecology, digital ethics, archival imagery, collective imagination and the unseen infrastructures of technology. Read more.
• Panel Discussion, 18 November: ADAPT will host a discussion exploring how real-life settings – such as festivals, university campuses or libraries – can be transformed as experimentation spaces for responsible AI development. Register.

Festival Dates and How to Attend

Beta Festival 2025 runs from 7 – 23 November, Wednesday – Sunday, 12PM-6PM. Whether you’re looking to immerse yourself in thought-provoking debates, participate in creative workshops or simply explore the future of technology, Beta Festival 2025 has something for everyone.

Visit the Beta 2025 website to see the full programme.