Beta Festival returns to Dublin with special programming for your pets.
In its fourth year, the 2026 Beta Festival explores how technology reshapes the way we interact with and understand the world. Running November 6th-22nd, the festival will be housed mainly in the Digital Hub campus.
Through exhibitions, performances, workshops, and games, the programme aims to decenter the human perspective and give more consideration to landscapes, plants, animals, and machines.
Aisling Murray, founder and director of Beta Festival, said the festival comes from a combination of exploring art across mediums and providing audience-centered programming underpinned by tech and digital literacy.
This year’s festival features a new strand of programming for non-humans. Specifically, dogs.
The installation forces artists to think about what it means to create a piece of art for something other than humans. Titled “The Other Audience,” the exhibition was created by Irish-based artist, Gabriela Waclawska, and will be in Project Art Centre for three days.
Humans are welcome, but they are not the main audience. Our four-legged, furry companions are the stars of this show. The interactive installation will allow the dogs to move around the space and interact with music and other elements within the piece.
In her own life, Murray was struck by how much her social circle expanded since she got a dog, and was interested in bringing in groups of people who maybe wouldn’t usually go to an exhibition, but might be interested in bringing their dog along to something.
“As a dog lover, it’s inspired by my dogs. I’m obsessed with her, and I’m really excited to see how that goes,” Murray said.
The installation was inspired by artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Murray said, someone she had worked with during her time with the Science Gallery. Murray was thinking about the concept of symbiosis — how humans and technology can exist in a more symbiotic way.
“I suppose it had me thinking: what would it look like then if you were to genuinely start to think from another species’ perspective, or if you were to make a piece of art for a dog,” Murray said. “A dog was the easiest place to start, in a way, because they’re one of our closest companions.”
The festival is associated with the Project Arts Centre for the first time this year, with three performance pieces, including the dog-centered installation. Other performances include Xenocene by Peruvian artist Claudix who will perform a work through a queer, decolonial lens using real time generative media. Audiences will be able to interact with a seven to eight hour video game called Asses Masses, collectively playing the video game about labour and collective agency.
Beta Festival features renowned artist AlanJames Burns’ new exhibition, Unmasking Nature, an interactive installation that utilizes multi-sensory artworks. Forage from Ireland’s rich biodiversity, the exhibition explores how society pressures neurodivergent people to “mask,” or suppress natural neurodivergent traits to avoid stigma or fit in. Burns, a renowned neurodivergent artist, challenges that nature depends on diversity, not masking conformity.
The F Word programme at the festival combines the efforts of the French Embassy and the Germany Embassy in Dublin to bring together artists, researchers, and young people across Ireland, Germany, and France to ask questions about disinformation, facism, and authoritarian narratives. The 2026 F Word artists are Carys D Coburn, Maureen Beguin and Samuel Julian Grace, who have all developed works for the festival. The pieces will premiere as a part of the opening weekend, and will take place in the Allianz Française and also the Gut Institute.
The festival also offers several workshops, including a Cyberdeck Workshop run by Annike Tan on November 21st. Tan, widely known as @Ubeboobey, is a creator known for teaching young women to build their own computers. The final weekend of the festival has a workshop for participants to learn to build and decorate a personal lo-fi computer.
Words: Roxy Ekberg
Feature Image: Aisling Murray, founder and director of Beta Festival
More information is available at betafestival.ie
