January 16th, 2016
Art’s Birthday 2016
“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!