Art has birthday. It already becomes 1 000 059th old!

Der Art's Birthday goes back to a concept of the French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou (1926-1987), who set January 17, 1963 as the one millionth birthday of art. Art was born when an unknown man dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. Artists celebrate this moment and art by organizing networked birthday parties. There will be performances and concerts, serenades and gifts, candle sparklers and lots of cakes.

In addition to artsbirthday.net, which is run by the media artist absolute value of noise, Ö1 Kunstradio is an important node in the Art's Birthday network. In 2004, on the initiative of Kunstradio, Ars Acustica, the radio art group within the European Broadcasting Union EBU, also joined the open network with its transmission lines and radio broadcasts. Since then, the group has also been a permanent part of Art's Birthday celebrations.

"Animals are good" by Maria Balabaș, "PLANKWAS" by Ward Weis and "The Sheer Frost Orchestra, for 17 women playing electric guitars" by Marina Rosenfeld were presented as gifts to Art during the Euroradio Ars Acustica Art’s Birthday exchange.

Animals are good
by Maria Balabas

From the Subcarpathian villages to the Danube Delta or the Moldavian hills, the SEMI SILENT program SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES explores the specificity of the sonic environment of the Romanian rural areas. The constant dialogue with the nature, the agricultural work, the attending to the animals around the house, and the popular gatherings are contributing to the portrait of a transforming space in which the sounds of the modernity, thought more and more present, are still paced by the seasons. Inviting the artists to question and archive these sounds, the residency program is aiming to enrich the vocabulary of its artists but also to challenge the superficial relation we have with the environment.

The 2021 edition of the residency was held at the George Enescu memorial house in Tescani, Bacău county, marking the 140th anniversary of the composer’s birth.

For the Art’s Birthday broadcast, the artist Maria Balabaș made a mix with 3 compositions created with the sounds of Tescani, and 2 commissions of sound work about gardens..

• Applecore, Cosmin Nicolae, 2021
• Animals Are Good, Anna Kravets, 2022
• Conservation Conversation, La Pesch, 2021
• Oedaadaao, Irina Botea Bucan & Jon Dean, 2021
• Măr din măr, Maria Balabaș, 2021


• Production: Radio România Cultural

Plankwas
by Ward Weis

• Art’s Birthday 2022 as a new beginning.
• A clean, fresh start.
• It’s time to put covid and the discord it has caused behind us.
• Let’s create an Art’s Laundry Day.
• Start all washing machines.
• Enjoy the sound of the water, the soap, the turning, spinning and rinsing...
• Spend some time checking it out.
• Slow radio and television.
• Let your machine become part of Art’s birthday party.
• Record yours while doing a 40° (warm) colour wash.


• Production: PLANKTONE

The Sheer Frost Orchestra, for 17 women playing electric guitars
by Marina Rosenfeld
Interpretation: Ensemble Contrechamps, Genf

The Sheer Frost Orchestra had its first iteration in 1993 when Marina Rosenfeld was a student at CalArts. It has received many performances since, including in New York, London, Innsbruck, Cleveland, and San Francisco, but was mainly active as a concept and composition during the '90s. An event of indeterminate length but deploying a formalized set of other conditions—namely, 17 female performers, 17 electric guitars laid end-to-end on the floor, 17 individual amps forming a wall behind the performers, and a hundred or more nail polish bottles dividing audience from stage (enough for each performer to have access to a variety of textured and sized glass bottles for sound-production)—it foregrounds the intersection of performance, site specificity, improvised music, and feminist strategies of organization and sociality. Participants are required to learn a set of one-fisted gestures on the instrument and a scoring system organized in 30- or 60-second increments. At no time are the instruments lifted to the body or touched, except through the mediation of the glass bottoms of the many nail polish bottles at hand. Participants adopt and explore these techniques in rehearsals that are just as important as any subsequent performance.

The work's identity is distributed across numerous local, temporary ensembles; scores customized to local conditions; and recorded traces in the form of cassette recordings, CD releases, and personal memorabilia (including scores, programs and relationships formed in the course of participation).

Production: RTS Culture Espace2

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