Dear all
My name is Roddy Hunter and I am a part-time doctoral researcher at CRUMB
working on ‘Curating The Eternal Network After Globalisation’. I am posting
today to draw your attention to a series of networked events occurring in
connection with Art’s 1,000,050th Birthday on 17 January 2013. I have put
online a small experimental work *‘Le Hunter Idéal’ (After Robert Filliou)*’
which is a video performance to which you can add your comments. It is
accessible
at http://artsbirthday.roddyhunter.info from now until Friday, 18 Jan,
11:00 GMT. Other events connected with Art’s Birthday can be found at
http://www.artsbirthday.net/.
Robert Filliou declared that Art was 1,000,000 years old on 17 January
1963, the date of his own 37th birthday. Filliou has been said to suggest
that on 17 January 998037 BC, Art was born ‘when someone dropped a dry
sponge into a bucket of water.’ A global network of artists and friends
have since celebrated Filliou’s vision of undifferentiated ‘art’ and
‘creativity’ annually on this day. Art’s Birthday epitomises the capacity
of the *The Eternal Network* for shared creativity and play, for the
celebration of ‘art [being] what life makes life more interesting than
art.’ This global event has also been a context for developments in
networked art practice over the last fifty years. Local meetings of artists
and friends across *The Eternal Network* have been connected through forms
of conceptual, postal, fax, telecommunication and online art practice. It
is then an important opportunity to maintain continuity with practices of
the past while developing new creative strategies to our own times globally.
My broader research project, ‘Curating The Eternal Network After
Globalisation’, aims to identify and develop models and principles of
curating *The Eternal Network *in ways that circumvent contemporary
globalisation in its neoliberal, doctrinal sense (Chomsky 1999).* **The
Eternal Network*, co-created by artists George Brecht and Robert Filliou in
1968, is an unusual instance of creativity in which arguably *the network
itself is the artwork*. Filliou in particular explored how the
network-as-artwork-as-network could enable collaboration, exchange and
dialogue across space and time. More than solely a means of distribution or
medium of production, *The Eternal Network *became for him a conceptual
context for ‘permanent creation’ (Filliou 1996). Experiments such as *‘Le
Hunter Idéal’ *explore how artists manifest networks through technologies
and systems of communications (Grundmann 1984; Saper 2001). Given the
utopian ideological principles of *The Eternal Network*, it will also
explore how to circumvent the dependence of curating new media art upon the
internet ‘as the most material and visible sign of globalisation’ (Manovich
2001).
Is this what artists like Robert Filliou anticipated almost fifty years
ago? Art’s Birthday is possibly the longest-running body of networked
practice that monitors changes in how artists communicate, and deserves
particular attention in research terms. It is also the longest running
model of how to curate *The Eternal Network*. As part of my doctoral
research I hope to host a future discussion on this topic with invited
correspondents, but in the meantime, I’d be grateful to hear from anyone
has thoughts about curating the network, here, off-list, or on my website.
Best wishes and Happy Art’s Birthday,
Roddy Hunter
--
Roddy Hunter
artist｜curator｜educator｜writer
[log in to unmask]
http://yorksj.academia.edu/RoddyHunter/About
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