Art’s Birthday 2016


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Art’s Birthday” is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou. One million years ago on January 17, someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. And so, art was born. Filliou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. In recent years, the idea has been taken up by a loose network of artists and friends around the world who exchange audiovisual parties, first via the post, telephone, fax, and later internet streams and public radio satellite. Each year the Eternal Network evolves to include new partners – working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications art.

This year for the 1,000,053th birthday of art, and I’ve jumped on a plane or two from California to Vienna, Austria, to perform on-site, on-line, and on-air nationally on ORF Kunstradio, the radio art program on the national cultural channel of Austrian national public radio. I’ll be joining good friends Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann (aka Mobile Radio), Ralf Wendt, and lots of other sonic tricksters here in Vienna on Sunday January 17, from 17:00-20:00 Austrian time (GMT +1).

Later that evening, from 23:00-1:00 (overnight to monday morning), we’ll be live on-air in the Kunstradio slot. Tune in online to the audio stream, the video stream, on-air. We’ll be listening and exchanging with any and all birthday streams circulating internationally, and do our best to infiltrate available bands with tenacious earworms and parasitic refrains, powered of course by high quality Viennese birthday cake!

Drop in, tune in, eat cake. Happy Art’s Birthday! Remember: the End is just pretend!



Art’s Birthday rebroadcasts


Bidet cake

The art and mayhem continues, even with a sugar hangover…. For those of you in the Greene and Columbia counties of New York state, WGXC is rebroadcasting our full NRRF Art’s Birthday radio shenanigans tonight (Saturday, January 19) from 22h to 4h overnight (that’s GMT -5).

ORF Kunstradio is also remixing audio from many different international nodes on January 20 and Feb 17, including some NRRF nuggets.

Flaming cake by Jonny Farrow. Piñata supplied and modified by Jeff Kolar.

Thanks to free103point9 for streaming help on January 17!

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If not winter…. then birthday!


hotr2photo by Julie Shapiro

Who’s Art? Oh, THAT art.

Art’s Birthday” is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou. One million and fifty years ago today, someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. And so, art was born. Filliou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. In recent years, the idea has been taken up by a loose network of artists and friends around the world. Each year the Eternal Network evolves to include new partners – working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications-art.

This year it’s the 1,000,050th birthday of art, and I’m getting back into party mode here in Chicago.

First off, running a stream together with absolute value of noise of our newly recomposed generative piece Somewhere a voice is calling. We have rethought the piece as a composition and stream, now made with new material, though the concept remains the same: an exploration of the first broadcasts of the human voice into the transmission ecology over radio by Reginald Fessenden and others beginning in 1906.

Stream runs January 16-18, 2013, and you can listen in here.

Meanwhile, live and fueled by too much sugar, I’ll be hanging out today at the Experimental Sound Studio, which hosts the radio collaboration NRRF Radio in the Audible Gallery from 2pm to 8pm, January 17 (GMT -6).  5925 N. Ravenswood, Chicago.

Transmitting to the neighbourhood and the world via FM and stream LISTEN LIVE HERE.

We’ll be listening and exchanging with any and all birthday streams circulating internationally, and do our best to infiltrate available bands with tenacious earworms and parasitic refrains, powered of course by lurid birthday cake. Glue Banta, Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Stephen Germana, Jeff Kolar, Peter Speer, and guests bring the noise.

Drop in, tune in, eat cake. Happy Art’s Birthday! The End is just pretend!