This year, Beta Festival explores how technology is reshaping how we sense, perceive and understand the world around us.
Beta Festival 2026
13 – 21 November 2026
Bringing together artists working across installation, performance, sound, games, AI and digital media, the programme asks what happens when we de-centre the human perspective and begin to consider the intelligence of landscapes, plants, animals, machines and data.
Through immersive experiences and participatory artworks, audiences are invited to encounter technologies as systems that shape our relationships with each other and with the environments we inhabit. From biofeedback and environmental sensing to artificial intelligence, speculative ecologies and multispecies collaboration, this year’s festival explores the entangled boundaries between the digital and the living.
The festival takes place from 6-22 November 2026 across The Digital Hub campus, Project Arts Centre, Alliance Française and Goethe Institut. Beta Festival is co-founded by The Digital Hub and is an associate Festival with Project Arts Centre, with ADAPT Research Centre as its research partner. The Festival is supported by The Digital Hub, Project Arts Centre, Dublin City Council Arts Office, The French Embassy in Ireland, Goethe Institut, Alliance Française, Institut Francais, the German-Franco fund, British Council, German Embassy in Dublin, RTE Supporting the Arts.
Check out the full programme coming to Project
Artist talk – asses.masses
![Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim 3 [© Frank Sperling]](https://projectartscentre.ie/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Patrick-Blenkarn-and-Milton-Lim-3-©-Frank-Sperling-1536x1152.jpg "Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim 3 [© Frank Sperling]")
13 November , 6pm | Cube
Free, booking required
A chance to chat with one of the artists behind asses.masses, Milton Lim, about the creation process.
asses.masses is a custom-made video game about labour, technophobia and sharing the load of revolution, designed to be played from beginning to end in a live theatre. This is gaming as performance; an immersive, cheeky and highly original work. Brave spectators take turns at the controller to lead the herd through a post-Industrial society, where asses are valued more for their hides than their potential.
More about the artist, Milton Lim
Image by Frank Sperling.
Milton Lim (he/him, b. 1989) is an award-winning Canadian game designer, digital media artist, technologist, programmer, and performance creator based between Vancouver and Montréal. His research-based practice entwines publicly available data, interactive digital media, and gameful performance to create speculative visions and candid articulations of social capital. This line of inquiry aims to reconsider our repertoires of knowledge aggregation and political intervention in the contemporary context of big data and algorithmic culture. Milton holds a BFA (Hons.) in theatre performance and psychology from Simon Fraser University and is pursuing his PhD in the future of interactive storytelling at Concordia University. His work has been widely presented across Canada, the USA, Argentina, Germany, the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia. He is a co-artistic director of Hong Kong Exile, an artistic associate with Theatre Conspiracy, a recent artistic-leader-in-residence at the National Theatre School of Canada, and a creative developer on the Innovation Team at Moment Factory.
asses.masses
14 November, 12pm | Cube
Tickets €28/26
This is an all-day, durational piece. Food and snacks will be served at appropriate intermission times and are included in your ticket.
asses.masses is a custom-made video game about labour, technophobia and sharing the load of revolution, designed to be played from beginning to end in a live theatre. This is gaming as performance; an immersive, cheeky and highly original work. Brave spectators take turns at the controller to lead the herd through a post-Industrial society, where asses are valued more for their hides than their potential.
More about the event
Duration
7 h 30 approx. with 4 intermissions.
Please note: The length of the show is variable, depending on how long it takes the audience to finish the game.
asses.masses is not designed for audiences to come and go anytime, or to arrive late. We encourage you to get there on time or you will miss the introduction.
Intermissions take place every two episodes, approximately every 1.5 hours.
Catering Note
Food will be provided throughout the experience and served at each intermission. Food served will be vegetarian with vegan and gluten free options available.
Drinks will be available for purchase.
Content Advisory
asses.masses includes flashing lights, audience participation, violence, crude language, simulated donkey sex, simulated human sex, and references to drug use, suicide, and police brutality.
Recommended for mature audiences over the age of 14. This is not a performance that is suitable for young audiences.
Accessibility
All text in asses.masses is visually displayed on the screen. The show will be presented in English.
More about the artists, Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim
Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim are conceptual artists exploring urgent questions around the social value of art, digital labour, and the political potential of games. Mixing their backgrounds in performance, philosophy, psychology, and digital media, their collaborations have manifested in video games, participatory installations, digital archives, and card games.
In addition to their asses.masses, Patrick and Milton are also the co-founders of the Canadian national video archive of performance (videocan) and the co-creators behind a performing arts economy trading card game (culturecapital), a role playing game about cultural design (FARCE), and an escape room intervention in a German museum (FUNFUG FORUM). Their projects have been presented across Canada, as well as in Germany, Argentina, Mexico, Italy, Turkey, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the USA, in English, French, Italian, Catalan, Turkish, Portuguese, German, and Spanish.
Their next projects include, dam.nation, following the true story of twenty Canadian beavers acquired by the Argentinian government in 1946, and DRAGONS, a performance for young audiences about power, hierarchy, toxicity, and teenage dragons.
Image by Frank Sperling.
Patrick Blenkarn (he/him) is a Canadian artist working at the intersection of performance, game design, and visual art. He is a director, writer, programmer, animator, musician, and polyglot. Often engaging with the politics of participation and interactivity, his recent works feature sustained investigations into the subjects of language, labour, democracy, and the art economy, with projects ranging in form from video games and card games to stage plays and books. His work has been featured in film festivals, galleries, and performance festivals across Canada, and recently in Argentina, Mexico, Germany, and the Arctic. Patrick has a degree in philosophy, theatre, and film from the University of King’s College and an MFA in interdisciplinary art from Simon Fraser University.
Image by Frank Sperling.
Milton Lim (he/him, b. 1989) is an award-winning Canadian game designer, digital media artist, technologist, programmer, and performance creator based between Vancouver and Montréal. His research-based practice entwines publicly available data, interactive digital media, and gameful performance to create speculative visions and candid articulations of social capital. This line of inquiry aims to reconsider our repertoires of knowledge aggregation and political intervention in the contemporary context of big data and algorithmic culture. Milton holds a BFA (Hons.) in theatre performance and psychology from Simon Fraser University and is pursuing his PhD in the future of interactive storytelling at Concordia University. His work has been widely presented across Canada, the USA, Argentina, Germany, the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia. He is a co-artistic director of Hong Kong Exile, an artistic associate with Theatre Conspiracy, a recent artistic-leader-in-residence at the National Theatre School of Canada, and a creative developer on the Innovation Team at Moment Factory.
woofy woofy ૮֊˕֊ა੭ bow-wow hauhau
17 – 19 November, 12pm – 6pm | Cube
Free, booking required
This is a limited capacity event. Each half hour slot welcomes 5 dogs and their owners into the space
woofy woofy ૮֊˕֊ა੭ bow-wow hauhau is a playful, interactive sound installation that explores what happens when dogs are given the freedom to play, explore and simply be themselves. It is inspired by the importance of play in adulthood and by the idea that play does not have to be productive, controlled or performed. While researching the project, sound artist Gabriela Wacławska became particularly interested in dog toys and how they naturally encourage movement, curiosity and interaction.
More about the artist, Gabriela Waclawska
Gabriela Waclawska is a Polish multidisciplinary artist, composer, and performer based in Dublin whose practice explores the intersection of sound, technology, and participation. Trained in electroacoustic composition and media technologies at Trinity College Dublin, she works with live electronics, interactive systems, synthesisers, field recordings, electromagnetic pickup, and experimental sound methodologies. Her work investigates AI, interspecies listening, urban sound environments, and sensory experience through performance, installation, and technology-driven artistic research. She has presented work at festivals and artist-led programmes across Ireland and the UK, including Sonorities Festival, Scene + Heard, Liberties Festival, and Complex Kirikos Takeover.
Xenocene: A Manifesto in Motion
20 & 21 November | Cube
Tickets €20/18
The prefix “xeno”, meaning “other” or “foreign”, signals a shift from anthropocentric reality towards a multiplicity of intelligences and forms of agency. Claudix Vanesix uses their own body, as well as texts, images and sounds from non-human species as input for the AI image generator Stable Diffusion.
Vanesix combines recognition of these life forms with techno-critical activism. In this way, “Xenocene: A Manifesto in Motion“ exposes the supremacist fetishes embedded in projects such as bioengineering, cryptoeconomies, space colonization, and the race toward Artificial General Intelligence.
More about the artist, Claudix Vanesix
Claudix Vanesix (they/them) is a performance and XR artist from Peru based in France. They are the artistic director of FIVIA – Festival International de Vidéo et Intelligence Artificielle in France, and Co-Founder of AMiXR, peruvian collective dedicated to the research of feminist and decolonial AI and XR in film and performance art.
Their work is critical of sexism and racism in the digital social life and reflects about its impact on the physical world. Claudix creates performance and Virtual Reality art that challenges the narrative of technological inevitability by mixing new technologies with ancestral traditions. Their recent work is a provocation about the human embodiment of Extended Realities and Artificial Intelligence, as a form of liberal transhumanism.
Festival support credits
Beta Festival is co-founded by The Digital Hub and is a Project Arts Centre Associate Festival with ADAPT Research Centre as research partner.
Dates
13 – 21 November 2026
Space
Cube
Genres
Festival
https://vimeo.com/
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