• 10:00 | AI Art Assembly (Tickets free but separate registration required)


• 12:00 | LUNCH (provided by Shaku Maku)


• 13:00 | KEYNOTE: Dr. Oonagh Murphy - Responsible AI in the Cultural Sector - From Theory to Practice - followed by in conversation with Elaine Burke


• 14:00 | PANEL: FLOOD RISKS - Drowning in Content | Dr. Constance De Saint Laurent, Daniel Murray, Brendan Spillane, Eugenia Siapera (Moderator)


• 15:00 | PERFORMANCE: Poetics of Entanglement: Quantum States and Fluid Realities - Jennifer Redmond, Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan


• 16:00 | PANEL: From Lab to Studio: Rethinking Innovation Through Artistic Research | Jose Luis de Vicente, Hilary O’Shaughnessy, Florian Schneider, Dr. Fiona McDermott (Moderator)

KEYNOTE: Dr. Oonagh Murphy - Responsible AI in the Cultural Sector - From Theory to Practice

This session brings the conversation on AI’s impact in the cultural sector from abstract theory into grounded practice. Drawing on innovative R&D projects by Arts Council England, MUNCH Museum in Norway, and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Switzerland, the talk explores how public cultural institutions can lead in a digital age. It focuses on governance, ethical commissioning, and public programming as practical ways to shape technology through a values-driven lens, prioritising people and the planet. Attendees will discover hopeful, actionable pathways to responsibly manage AI’s evolving role in creativity and culture, fostering critical dialogue and inclusive innovation in arts institutions.

Dr. Oonagh Murphy is redefining how cultural organisations navigate the digital age. She works closely with museums, galleries, government bodies, and funders to shape digital strategies and policies that sit at the intersection of technology and culture. She's a trusted advisor, critical thinker and influential voice in conversations about tech policy, data rights, and the role of public institutions in our digital world.

PANEL: FLOOD RISKS - Drowning in Content

Brendan Spillane, Dr. Constance De Saint Laurent, Daniel Murray, Eugenia Siapera (Moderator)

How do our information systems echo the flow of water? And can we learn anything from this? In Werner Herzog’s “Lo and Behold” Ted Nelson, one of the pioneers of the information technology, described how “ interconnection and representation and sequentialization all… similar to the issue of water” and how interconnection and water were and are driving forces for his computer work. How can and does water inform our digital connection?

This session will look at everything from online flooding and how viral content and dark creativity can pollute and contaminate information ecosystems to hypertext and algorithmically served content.

Dr Brendan Spillane is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies in University College Dublin (UCD) and a Funded Investigator in the Research Ireland ADAPT Centre where he leads the Harmful Information Working Group. He is the Principal Investigator of the Horizon Europe VIGILANT project (www.vigilantproject.eu) which will equip European LEAs with advanced technologies from academia to detect and analyse disinformation campaigns that are linked with criminal activities. He is also a partner in Horizon Europe ATHENA project (https://project-athena.eu/) which is focused on detecting and countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) and disinformation targeting Europe.

Dr Constance de Saint Laurent is Assistant Professor of Sociotechnical Systems at Maynooth University’s Department of Psychology. Her research explores how technology and social change affect individuals and social groups, with a particular focus on creativity, social thinking, artificial intelligence, and misinformation. She is also interested in innovative research methods, especially in how technology and data science can be used to support new approaches in psychology. Constance’s recent book, Pragmatism and Methodology (Cambridge, 2024), features examples of how digital tools and large datasets are reshaping qualitative and mixed-methods research.

Eugenia Siapera is Professor of Digital Technology, Policy, and Society and co-Director of the UCD Centre for Digital Policy, alongside Elizabeth Farries. Her research explores the intersections of digital technologies, media, and society, with a focus on political communication, journalism, platform governance, and the role of technology in shaping social justice. She has a particular interest in the dynamics of hate speech, racism, and misogyny online. As Principal Investigator, she has led several major research projects funded by bodies including the Irish Research Council (IRC), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), and the EU’s Horizon programme. She has published widely in academic journals and edited volumes, contributing significantly to scholarship on the societal impacts of digital media.

__PERFORMANCE: Poetics of Entanglement: Quantum States and Fluid Realities

Jennifer Redmond, Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan
In celebration of the UN Year of Quantum Science, this double performance brings together poet Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan and artist Jennifer Redmond to explore quantum theory as a metaphor for identity, matter, and meaning.

From Redmond’s The Foam Diaries a multisensory fabulation on extinction, consciousness, and quantum foam, to Narayanan-Mohan’s Beautiful Workings, a lyrical mapping of migrant identity through the lens of superposition, both artists inhabit the thresholds where science becomes story.

Through words, sound, and image, they draw audiences into a world where boundaries dissolve and being itself is fluid, mirroring quantum and poetic entanglements.
The performances will be followed by an in-conversation between the artists, reflecting on how quantum ideas can offer new languages for connection, transformation, and uncertainty.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan: Beautiful Workings
When poet Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan first learned about superposition, she felt that she finally had the right language to explain how her migrant identity, and other identities, all co-existed within her. In autumn 2024 she was selected for Studio Quantum, a quantum artist-in-residence programme by Goethe-Institut London in partnership with King’s College London and Science Gallery London. She set out create a series of poems based on interviews with quantum physicists who identified as migrants to see whether aspects of their research resonated with their complex sense of identity as well. Instead of a clear answer, Chandrika found stories that danced between disciplines, defying expectations and confronting assumptions. This resulted in an installation piece that is a love letter to both the scientific and artistic research process, bringing together poems she wrote during the residency alongside images, notes and memories which map her journey through the world of quantum. In this event she will walk audiences through this journey and perform pieces from the installation.

Jennifer Redmond: The Foam Diaries
This 15 minute performance is narrated and expanded by an audio-visual essay. Fabulation is applied to social, scientific, philosophical and literary theories, with the aim of conjuring a different kind of reality. Fiction is used to counter the foundational principles of human society and of hominid intelligence predicated by cultural myth. It is a making and unmaking of sense, a performance of anarchy mobilised against the present. That considers multispecies extinction and the abandonment of the sacred as an organising principle.
Foam as a curious material/non-material becomes a vehicle with which to consider interdisciplinary problems of culture, ecology and technology. To think about the space forming effect of humanity on an overcrowded planet and the degrees of our entanglement with one another and with other species. The foam metaphor undermines the expectation that iterations of humans will replicate in historical societal structures. It anticipates different forms of social synthesis, mysterious solidarities, some of which already exist in social dyadic units. It is suggested that these will come to the forefront of cultural mythopoesis rendering the state and current political structures unnecessary.

The performance will be followed by an in conversation with the artists.

__ PANEL: From Lab to Studio: Rethinking Innovation Through Artistic Research__

Florian Schneider, Jose Luis de Vicente, Hilary O’Shaughnessy, Fiona McDermott

Innovation has become one of the defining buzzwords of our age - with the language invoked across governments, industries, and cultural institutions alike. But what happens when the language of innovation begins to shape how and why artists create? This conversation explores the uneasy intersections between artistic research, policy-driven experimentation, and the infrastructures that claim to support “creativity.” Bringing together leading practitioners who work between culture, research and technology, the discussion asks: Who benefits from the current innovation paradigm? How might artists reimagine these systems - or even build new ones? With insights from international curators and creative strategists including José Luis de Vicente and Hilary O’Shaughnessy, this session unpacks the politics of innovation and the role of artistic practice and multidisciplinary practice in redefining its possibilities.

Florian Schneider is the founding director of the Institute for Creativity, a new research institute at the University of Galway, where he holds a full professorship. He is also Visiting Professor of Art Theory and Documentary Practices at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where he has been teaching and conducting research since 2013. He has more than 25 years of experience in artistic practice, creative entrepreneurship, higher education teaching and academic leadership. As an artist, filmmaker and curator he has been involved in projects at all scales to rethink the impact and value of documentary practices in creative sectors and artistic disciplines.

José Luis de Vicente is a curator, cultural researcher, and artistic director based in Barcelona and working internationally. He is the co-founder of FAST, a new transdisciplinary creative unit addressing current and future challenges through the convergence of culture, technology, architecture, and design. Previously, he served as director of Barcelona’s Design Museum, DHUB, and was the founder and artistic director of Sónar+D, the culture and arts program of the acclaimed Sónar Festival. His work explores the intersection of social innovation, new ecological practices, and the aesthetics and politics of computation. He has curated more than 25 exhibitions in institutions around the world, including CCCB (Barcelona), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), Somerset House (London), MIT Museum (Cambridge, US), DOX (Prague), Museo Reina Sofía, and Espacio Fundación Telefónica (Madrid), among many others. He teaches at Columbia GSAPP (New York).