Art’s Birthday 2004

YOU ARE INVITED TO ART’S BIRTHDAY!

“One million years ago on January 17, art was born…. Close the schools and the factories! Let them eat cake and make art! And the next year let it be two days of holiday, then three days, then four, five, six and so on, until everyday is art’s birthday, at which point we can all get on with life”, Robert Filliou declared in 1963. To this day, a loose network of international artists and friends continues the tradition of making art and eating cake. Exchanging art first through telecommunications networks such as telephone, fax, slo-scan video, and later as streamed data. This ‘holiday’ persists in part because of its playful, Fluxus roots, where art is made not to be bought, sold or traded as a commodity, but given freely as a gift.

For art’s 41st birthday on Saturday January 17, 2004, Studio XX will be joining with more than ten art centers from Japan to Austria to celebrate art’s midlife crisis in style. The Western Front in Vancouver functions as a hub for birthday festivities, where participating artists use sensors, software, and robotics to join in the creation of an activated social space that responds to data flow through the Scrambler server. Studio XX and other centres will host their own events, while also connecting to the Front and to each other to exchange art and make art together in the form of sending data (audio, video, sensors) to trigger events remotely and receiving data to trigger events at XX. Have your cake and data too.

Come eat free cake made by Sylvie Gilbert, fed to you by Victoria Stanton, while listening to the sounds of the room filtered through microphones sunk deep into Jell-O by Kat Soukup. The key here is play, and as such this is an opportunity for experimentation, for trying out that new MAX patch, for playing around with gadgets, for building ambitious dessert architecture. Various birthday activities will be taking place to create audio, visual, and performance art that generates or responds to data, and in which the public is implicated and may take part.

Super MC Pascale Malaterre will pay homage to the women creators, pioneers and inventors, who have perhaps slipped from the collective conscience. She is asking for your help in remembering women active in life, science, politics or art. (Ex: Ada Lovelace: computer visionary) If you know someone whose accomplishments should be recorded in cyberspace, please send their name, along with a brief description of what they did/do to pascale@cam.org, at 271-3000 or come to Studio XX on the 17th and tell their name to the world yourself. In addition: all attending have the chance to win a fabulous door prize: your own 5 minutes of Internet fame!!

This Montréal happening will start at Studio XX on Saturday January 17th at 16:00. It will end only once all the cakes are eaten and the networked festivities have circled the world in honour of Art’s birthday!

Curator: Anna Friz

Super MC: Pascale Malaterre

Hostess: Victoria Stanton

Performers: Tagny Duff, Margaret Dragu, Kathy Kennedy, Katarina Soukup, USSA (Steve Bates and Jake Moore)

Cake Makers: Andrée DuChaine, Sylvie Gilbert/Cate Rimmer, Aneessa Hashmi, Lynn Hugues, Anne Golden, Juliana Espana Keller, Gretchen King, Ana Rewakowicz, Kat Soukup, Barbara Ulrich

DJ: MXXR