2024 is Art's 1,000,061st Annivesary!
The new schedule will be online early in January 2024.

Art's Birthday . Net - an annual exchange-art event celebrated on January 17th by a loose collection of artists and artist organizations around the world.


(Ward Weis invites you to make your own Art's Birthday hat.)


"Art's Birthday" is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou.

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.

This website includes links to many of the participants from recent years, and an incomplete chronology of past events.

 

  • Facebook members can join the Facebook group for Art's Birthday by going here and clicking "Join Group".
  • Google members can join the google group and e-mail list by going here.
  • Unfettered spirits can join the e-mail list and make contact the old-fashioned way by contacting: artsbirthday (at) gmail (dot) com

This web-site is supported by ABC:V (Art's Birthday Collective: Vancouver). Many thanks are due to Kunstradio ORF in Vienna for providing on-going support for Art's Birthday events and for maintaining an archive of events through the years.