For the 2025 festival, Beta explores ideas of fluidity across water, language, information, and quantum states – domains where form dissolves and reconstitutes, where binaries collapse into continuums. In a time of accelerated change, we consider how flow – of bodies, ideas, and information – challenges rigid structures and invites new ways of being.

Beta flows through the spaces where boundaries blur – between water and data, identity and system, science and story. Across digital oceans and porous infrastructures, speculative reefs and sensing sculptures, the festival invites audiences to think with water, through data, and beyond the binaries of fixed form. From artificial coral choruses and AI imaginaries to quantum indeterminacy, artists and researchers ask: how do we live with uncertainty, and find resilience and imagination in flow rather than form? Across ports, screens, and soundscapes, Beta becomes a temporary space for the poetics and politics of change.

Discussions on AI, ecology, and digital ethics sit alongside workshops on archival imagery, collective imagination, and the unseen infrastructures of technology. Exhibitions at Dublin Port reimagine our entanglement with water and data, while performances trace quantum indeterminacy through language and sound. Irish and international artists transform research into art, ports into portals, and technology into a medium for empathy, listening, and renewal.