The Helsinki and Sydney crews exchanged weather data via the Internet. Values derived from the wind in Helsinki were broadcast through the Scrambler. Solar powered sound modules at mbar responded to the Australian sunshine. These Solar Eclipse instruments, driven via the Internet, created a soundtrack that was streamed out to the Art's Birthday audience.

helsinki heltemp 25.2
helsinki helwdir 270.0
helsinki helwspe 3.1
helsinki heltemp - 7.6

Solar Eclipse audio stream: http://www.mbar.fi/artsbday.m3u
http://www2.uiah.fi/~jlyytika/mbar/

The Helsinki Celebrations were initiated by AURA:la with the support of mbar, Media Lab / Unniversity of Art and Design Helsinki, and the Centre for Music & Technology, Sibelius Academy.

AURA:la is a Helsinki based group currently experimenting in networked sonic interactions. The members are Sophea Lerner, Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski, Joni Lyytikäinen, Jürgen Scheible, Koray Tahiroglu. http://aura.siba.fi

Helsinki Crew: Koray Tahiroglu, Joni Lyytikäinen, Jürgen Scheible, Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski, with the support of mbar.

January 17, 4 pm local time: celebration at Radiokulturhaus.
January 18, 11:05 - 11:45 pm local time: Global Hangover radio show.

Art's Birthday was celebrated with a number of fine live performances as audio and video streams, and this year a series of installations were realized especially for this memorable event.

From Saturday afternoon onwards the installations were presented at the Radiokulturhaus where the Art's Birthday celebrations began. Among others, alien productions (giving reference to Robert Filliou) re-installed the very first piece of art; however, the sponge was not soaked with water, but phosphorescent, hence radioactive paint. A light-bulb triggered by data received from the network activated the glow of the paint and its radioactive emissions. This radioactivity was registered by a Geiger counter whose sounds were sent to the server. Markus Hammer's Dancefloor offered visitors an opportunity to dance in celebration of art, sending the dance moves to the Scrambled_Bites data server to trigger remote events; MACHFELD put together the video installation Inkubation dealing with birth and incubation periods. The moment of birth could be manipulated by the visitors with a set of commands which triggered remote installations. Furthermore, the ROBOEXOTICA team provided some great cocktail robots which mingled with the amazed and amused crowd.

In the evening, the party moved on to the ORF Kulturcafé for a number of live performances beginning with a birthday serenade from alien productions featuring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The late-night celebrations were also rounded-off with a custom-made serenade, this time coming from groiszkopperschrammel on two accordions, a KORG MS20, and other sound samples. Bernhard Loibner put together a piece using the copyrighted lyrics of "Happy Birthday", Monochrom offered a melange of stories and slogans and encouraged the audience to join in a sing-along. Elisabeth Schimana performed a breathtaking sound piece featuring Norbert Math and also using incoming sound streams. Gnu & dieb13 took the roles of the birthday jockeys.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, we also streamed audio and webcam images (e.g. from the live performances), while the visitors could hear the sound streams from the other network locations over loudspeakers, and images from the respective Art's Birthday parties were projected on a large screen.

On Sunday evening, when everything was already quite chilled, Elisabeth Schimana and Martin Pichlmair from MACHFELD got linked with Peter Courtemanche and friends at the Western Front in Vancouver to end this year's celebrations with an on air Global Hangover version of the events.

vienna dance up
vienna dance right
vienna trigger 275

vienna inkubation_switch 5
vienna inkubation_speed 20
vienna inkubation_direction -1

A group of students at the experimental radio department of the Bauhaus University participated in this year's Art's Birthday activities. Starting with their ongoing strike activities and thinking about how to transform them into a way of protesting during the birthday events, they came up with the idea to organize a public event at their student union house, Marienstrasse 18.

During this time-slot (11 am to 3 pm) their idea was to catch as many as possible of the webcams and streams from the ongoing birthday activities and feed them into their local installation along the stairwell of the building. This installation, pixel vs. brick, consists of 9 former GDR TV-sets running on software called "pakt", coded by Dan Fischer. The installation is about 9 meters high and reaches from the floor to the ceiling of the building.

In the afternoon there was a radio birthday party performance webcast on PING FM.

http://www.meduse.org/avatar/
http://lenomdelachose.org/

http://studioxx.org/

Studio XX thought Art's Birthday was a great reason to bring together some of Montreal's best multidisciplinary artists and have a party. Our super MC, Pascale Malaterre kept her head and didn't let the occasion pass without remembering influential women creators, pioneers and inventors who may have slipped from our collective conscience. Women's names and past accomplishments were proposed by some of the 200 people who attended, as well as via the Internet and recorded in cyberspace as an important part of our celebrations.

Laying down the groove of the evening was the MXXR collective: the talented gals behind some of the hottest music being generated in these parts. Anna Friz was the guest curator for the happening and performances were sprinkled throughout the event. Sound artist Kathy Kennedy, assisted by radio and audio artist Chantal Dumas, performed an improvised Kake Kantata for cutlery, contact mics, and MAX. USSA (Jake Moore and Steve Bates) gave their twisted extended digital version of "Happy Birthday to You!" And Tagny Duff (at XX) and Margaret Dragu (at the Western Front) streamed real time video to exchange gestures by performance artists that had been influential to both of their work.

But ... what's a party without food? Ten of Montreal's cultural movers and shakers made birthday cakes for art: one vibrated, one filtered the sounds of the room through microphones sunk deep into Jell-O, one incorporated the Hulk, another guns and roses, while others were organic, vegan, chocolate, lemon. YumÉ all were delicious. To add some fun to the serious cake-eating going on, our intrepid hostess Victoria Stanton wore a dress with 60 pieces of silver-plated cutlery on it to spoon-feed all who were willing. Cake was washed down with beer, wine and vodka and a happy Art's Birthday was had by all.

- Christine Redfern

La fête internationale de l'Art 2004 au Studio XX

Au Studio XX, la Fête internationale de l'Art a été le prétexte idéal pour réunir quelques-unes des meilleures artistes interdisciplinaires de Montréal afin de faire la fête. Spécialement pour l'occasion, Pascale Malaterre a assuré le rôle de grande maîtresse de cérémonie, faisant rejaillir dans nos mémoires vives des noms de créatrices, pionnières et inventeures encore oubliées dans la conscience collective. Ces noms d'artistes et leurs accomplissements avaient été rapportés via l'Internet et par certaines des 200 personnes rassemblées ce jour-là. La célébration-commémoration de ces femmes a atterri, ultimement, dans le cyberespace.

Pour assurer l'ambiance de la soirée, fidèles au poste derrière leur console étaient des membres du collectif MXXR: des femmes du son, de la musique et du bruit des plus tripatives en ville. Parmi elles, Anna Friz était aussi la commissaire invitée du happening, l'orchestratrice des performances. L'artiste sonore bien connue Kathy Kennedy, assistée par la femme de radio et d'audio Chantal Dumas, a improvisé pour nous sa Kake Kantata pour ustensiles, micros contacts et programmation MAX. USSA (Jake Moore & Steve Bates) a magiquement livré sa version de l'hymne traditionnel Happy Birthday to You au moyen de mécanismes analogues et numériques. Enfin, dans l'esprit du Fluxus et de l'éternel réseau de Robert Filliou, Tagny Duff (à XX) et Margaret Dragu (au Western Front) ont communiqué en direct par vidéo en ligne lors d'une performance composée de citations de performances de femmes artistes qui ont influencé leur travail au cours des dernières décennies.

Mais qu'est-ce qu'une fête sans victuailles? Une dizaine de gâteaux avaient été concoctés pour l'événement par des artisanes de la culture d'ici : un vibrait, un filtrait l'ambiance sonore à travers des microphones plongés dans du Jell-O tricolore, un incorporait l'Hulk de l'Art, un autre des fusils et des roses, alors que d'autres étaient biologique, végétalien, chocolaté ou citronné. Pour ajouter à la chose, l'artiste de la performance Victoria Stanton a joué les hôtesses magnifiques avec sa robe composée de 60 pièces de couverts argentés, nourrissant les invités un à un à la cuillère, dans un rituel surprenament touchant. Le tout a été arrosé de punch, vin et bière, et une bonne fête de l'Art célébrée par une tonne de convives radieux.

- Christine Redfern (traduit par Caroline Martel)

MXXR: Lynne Trépanier, DJ Cyan, Jackie Gallant, Bernie Bankrupt and Anna Friz

Cake Makers: Andrée DuChaine, Sylvie Gilbert, Aneessa Hashmi, Lynn Hugues, Anne Golden, Juliana Espana Keller, Gretchen King, Ana Rewakowicz, Kat Soukup and Barbara Ulrich

Sound Print by Craig Mainprize: an installation with microphones that transform a live video image.

Electronic Scale by Lousia Tsui: different ranges, answer questions, then computer calculates their calories and food.

16 mm by Facuithe Goulet: installation vidéo à partir de film 16mm, ou les videos sont déclenchés par certains sons.

PartÉ Snacks by Darsha Hewitt: popcorn machine activated by data stream. Video of popcorn on old TV.

Doctor Pulse by Shaun Elie: video sequences are played in response to a heart sensor.

WeB MinD by Martin Brodeur: a streaming consciousness with the use of .html.

Your Choice by Steven Bruni and Christina Moore: web page survey.

Simulounge by Stephaie White and Nathan Lyle: a revisited computer game that explores human interactivity over computers and real life.

Synesthesie by Stephanie Brodeur: transformer l'image en son et le son en image.

The Wisest Thing Ever Said by Shawn Smith: speakers can record the wisest things ever said or select from global web data base of previously recorded wisest things ever said.

Megamix by Ross Birdwise and Lindsay Mensen: an enjoyable music mixing interface.

Alternate Realities by Sharon Kuiper: an interactive exploration of a relationship.

What is Art? by Margit Hideg

fluxkit popcorn 42
fluxkit oracle_scale 177
fluxkit gsr_matic 20
fluxkit popcorn 148

http://fluxkit.net/artsbirthday.html
http://artengine.ca/

Music Provided by DJ Lance Baptiste and Shawn Smith, Element Kuuda, Grapesmugglers and if then do.

Live from Columbus Ohio, the demographically average capital of the American midwest, Matt Lewis and Daniel Jolliffe connected during darkness to the Art's Birthday Scrambler network.

The location of this event was the inside of a building on the Oval, a green space smack dab in the middle of the second largest university in the United States. For the inside of the building, we placed multiple video projectors to produce images visible from the outside at night. The Oval's evening foot traffic discovered a building that had become a data (re)mapping birthday cake. The in-the-window projections, controlled by MAX and Jitter, represented visually the activity of our international collaborators, the positions of GPS satellites over the campus, and the activity of local participants on the Oval through motion tracking.

http://www.finearts.uvic.ca/~jolliffe
http://www.accad.ohio-state.edu/~mlewis

BYOS (bring your own sound) ... a sonic buffet ... costume wearing recommended ... sledge hammer hits will be collected and transferred via the network to a mechanism which eventually crushes a cake in Vancouver ... net work activity mixes colorful martinis which are chilled as they are routed through a video ice sculpture into glass ... noise makers, buffet table plate spinners, kinetic others? ... all activated by Scrambled_Bites network activity ... non-perishable food items collected for Winnipeg Harvest Food Bank.

ken sledgehammer1 7
ken sledgehammer2 0
ken motion1 4
ken amplitude1 4
ken amplitude2 13
ken foodbank 22

Live Entertainment by: Vav Jungle http:// www.vavjungle.com, Multiple Partners Army and dj hunnicutt. Video Installation by Hope Peterson. Cake Crusher (in Vancouver) and Cocktail-O-Matic (in Winnipeg) by Ken Gregory. Cake for crusher in Vancouver by Sara D. Patton.

January 17th, 4 pm to 12 midnight local time: Celebration and performances.

The evening of the 17th began with Margaret Dragu and Tagny Duff (in Montréal). Connected by webcam, they choose thirteen performance actions by artists they had seen and re-enacted them through their own metamorphosis of memory, time and gesture. Following this Margaret Dragu adopted the persona of Art, went for a tour in the Artist Run Limousine, and returned to serve Cava to the masses. The journey's path, in the form of Audiomobile X-Y coordinates, was streamed to the Scrambler. Arts Annual Exam: or More Hospitals Use Unsterilized Instruments was a shadow play of uniformed nurses and probing performed by Cease Wyss, Paul Lang, Lynn Hill and Thirza Cuthand.

Devices in the Grande Luxe were activated by a "ticker tape translator". Based on the idea of a Geiger Counter that reacts to radioactive particles, the translator reacted to general traffic in the Scrambler data stream. It filtered the stream and divided it into separate threads that were each designed to trigger motors at different rates. A number of devices at the Western Front were constructed using small motors that ran on 9 volt batteries. These are the type of motors used in animated window displays in store fronts. Diana Burgoyne made a drink mixing machine with five glass containers. Each container would pour at different times and rates. The mix of these liquids ran through a bed of ice and into glasses, favouring a mixture of tequila and lime. Diana also attached a motor to the temperature control on an electric frying pan that was used the next morning for brunch. Diana's students, Cam MacDonald and Angela Adair, worked with skeletons. Cam hung a deer skeleton lengthwise from the ceiling and connected motors to three of its limbs. Angela interwove two chickens and placed them inside a diarama. The data stream would turn on a light inside the diarama and this light would in turn trigger the motors.

Ken Gregory sent us a Cake Crusher by Greyhound. This consisted of a large motor on top of a steel frame. The motor caused a toilet seat to move down a steel rod, thus crushing the cake below. Ironically the motor was only strong enough to crush the top two-thirds of the cake. Then the system broke. The Cake Crusher was activated by people in Winnipeg swinging a sledgehammer. If the sledgehammer hit was strong enough it would also activate a fire bell. At a certain point in the evening there was a large group of people sitting around in front of the Cake Crusher watching it as if it were a TV set. Once in a while it would slowly move downwards and then the bell would clatter.

Michael Undem, another of Diana's students and a local video artist, built a giant Etchasketch machine (about 4 feet wide by 3 feet high). Members of the audience controlled the machine with switches. A pattern was created as an indelible marker moved slowly along X and Y axis. As the pen was driven, the on/off states of the motors were transmitted to the Scrambler.

Once the cocktails had been consumed, Diana Burgoyne donned a wire frame mask with an embedded photo cell grid. This grid acted as a 5 by 5 pixel camera transmitting images of candles to both the Scrambler and to an LED pixel TV. Hank Bull played piano variations on the theme of "Happy Birthday". The sounds of various devices being activated by the Scrambler were mixed together to create an endless soundtrack of relay clicks, motor turns, and other noises.

luxe etch_y_mov 9
luxe face_21 3
luxe etch_y_dir 9
luxe face_20 5
luxe etch_x_mov 8
luxe face_19 5
luxe etch_x_dir 8

omez limoX 3847
omez limoY 6498

http://projects.front.bc.ca/2003/scrambled/
http://front.bc.ca

January 17 is the anniversary of Radio Kinesonus and the Art's Birthday special. Over the last year, Radio Kinesonus has challenged various experiments of radio art and performance. Art's Birthday 2004 has taken a large step towards wider networking and more experimental technologies. Radio Kinesonus members were encouraged by this and also the basic idea that Robert Filliou initiated and then Hank Bull, Roberet Adrian and Heidi Grundman developed in the form of Translocal Conviviality. Live performances took place at the Goethe Gallery Tokyo where Radio Kinesonus is located. Tokyo and Brussels (Jacques Foschia - a unique radio artist using short waves) were connected by telephone and transmitters.

11 to 11:05 pm: Soundscape and voices from Tokyo by all members.
11:05 to11:20 pm: Sound performance by Hiroshi Hasegawa.
11:20 to 14:30 pm: Telephone reactions by Jacques Foschia (Brussels) to our shortwave pulses from Tokyo.
11:30 to 11:45 pm: Sound-mix by Kenji Maehara (DJ).
11:45 to midnight: Radio art performance using numerous transmitters by Tetsuo Kogawa.

http://anarchy.translocal.jp/kinesonus/
rtspp://autonomia.k2.tku.ac.jp/encoder/kinesonus.rm

An extended-absurdist celebratory dinner party was planned in this shop front gallery on a busy inner city street. Scrambled_Bites network activity relating to local weather activity was generated and sent to Helsinki where it was used to power "solar powered" devices. Network activity also controlled the recording, cutting up and replaying of dinner conversation to enable guests to converse with their own selves from the past. Guests were encouraged to bring and create further audio elements to add to this mix that slowly layered through time.

sydney sydneysun 380
sydney sydneysun 295

http://miscellanea.com/~birthday

The Sydney celebrations were initiated by Sophea Lerner and Andrew Burrell, with the support of Peep Space.
http://peep.com.au

It is alleged that the much contested 1935 copyright registration of the song "Happy Birthday", originated with the melody, "Good Morning to All" published in 1893 and is public domain by US Statute. The only difference between the two pieces is the first note which is split to accommodate the two syllables in the word "hap-py". Other than this, the two pieces are melodically identical, suggesting that the only element of the melody that does not fall into the public domain is the second note in "Happy Birthday".

To celebrate Art's Birthday, and as a dedication to public domain cultural works, Toy Satellite performed generative interpretations of "Good Morning To All" with a resampling of the original and associated texts. This included a narrative derived from countless birthday greetings and well wishes sourced from the Web and assembled into reasonably coherent phrases with the text cut-up engine, Caesarian.

In addition, a custom PERL script fed frequently updated Melbourne weather data to the Scrambled_Bites server in Canada. The key values provided were:

toy Melb_Temp (deg Celcius)
toy Melb_Humidity (%)
toy Melb_Wind_Dir (text - N, S, WNW, etc)
toy Melb_Wind_Speed (knots)

Scrambled_Bites saw Art's Birthday participants sharing and retrieving data, utilizing these values to trigger a host of remote events.

Participants: Andrew Garton, Rod Garton, Grant McHerron.

This project would not be possible without the support of SSEYO Ltd.
http://www.sseyo.com/