"Art's Birthday" is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou.
In
1963, he suggested that 1,000,000 years ago, there was no art. But one
day, on the 17th of January to be precise, Art was born. According to
Filliou, it happened when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of
water. Modest beginnings, but look at us now.
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.
Artists have celebrated Art's
Birthday with lavish parties and gatherings, correspondence and mailart,
and through Telematic networks using SloScan TV, Videophones, music
composed for telephone lines, modem-to-modem MIDI connections, early
bulletin board and chat systems, and (starting in the mid 1990's) the
Internet.
