About Art's Birthday:
Art is 1,000,043 years old!

Art's Birthday, an annual event first proposed in 1963 by the French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, has been celebrated by Kunstradio since the late 1990s on air - on line - on site with artists, musicians, writers, and friends as well as with artist organizations and radio stations around the globe via the internet, airwaves and other forms of telecommunication. From the beginning, Kunstradio often and closely collaborated with the Western Front Society in Vancouver in conceiving, organizing, and coordinating the Art’s Birthday celebrations, which also led to the re-birth ofthe so-called Wiencouver series.

"Art's Birthday Party is a celebration in memory of Robert Filliou who declared, on 17th of January 1963, that Art had been born exactly 1,000,000 years ago when someone dropped a dry sponge into a pail of water. Ten years later he celebrated Art's 1,000,010th birthday at the Neue Galerie, Aachen.

After Filliou's death in 1987, some artists began to celebrate Art's Birthday with mail art, fax and slow scan TV events in the spirit of his concept of "The Eternal Network" or "La Fête permanente". The birthday parties took place in different cities across the world and artists were asked to bring birthday presents for Art – works that could be shared over the network. Art's Birthday Party has never been a formal event, but was always organized on an ad hoc basis through the network. Every participating location (and they are different every year) organizes its own party – from a few friends in a private studio to a performance evening in a museum, gallery or radio station. The only condition is that each group be able to send and receive birthday presents for Art. Since 1994 this has usually meant using the Internet in one form or other. Filliou's invention of Art's Birthday is wonderfully absurd and humorous in the typical Fluxus tradition of serious fun. So the global birthday party for art has always tried to be fun while paying homage to Robert Filliou's dream of The Eternal Network.“

» Robert Adrian

In recent years, the birthday parties were often related to a specific topic in some way or the other linked to the ideas of Robert Filliou, such as „Scrambled Bites“ in 2004 which culminated in a „Global Hangover“ or last year’s "Reverie - Noise City".

Former Kunstradio Art’s Birthday projects:

AB 1999
AB 2000
AB 2002
AB 2003
AB 2004 - Scrambled Bites / Global Hangover
AB 2005 - Reverie - Noise City / Permanent Creation