In January, Art will be 1,000,048 years old. Compass will be joining a range of worldwide celebrations with a weekend of spontaneous play

Saturday 15 & Sunday 16 January

Participating artists include Ganghut (Dundee, Scotland) and Our Ideas Are Everywhere (Belfast, Northern Ireland), Roddy Hunter (York); Sarah Spanton (Leeds); Benedict Phillips (Leeds) and Contents May Vary (Manchester).

The second event in the Compass Programme will be Art’s Birthday, an exchange-art event celebrated on (or around) 17 January by a loose collection of artists and artist organisations around the world.

Art will be 1,000,048 years old on 17 January 2011.

Art’s Birthday is an annual event first proposed in 1973 (17 January, Aachen), when French artist Robert Filliou announced that art was was born 1,000,010 years ago when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.

Filliou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. His 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. 

'Filliou said: "1,000,010 years ago art was life, 1,000,010 years from now it will again be". The announcement of Art's Birthday reveals Filliou's desire of what the day would mean: "A beautiful day we hope: school vacation for girls and boys, paid holiday for the workers, museums and galleries filled with flowers, banners and lanterns all  over town, bands playing, people dancing, fireworks" The message of the celebration is that creatively enacting leisure time (in the guise art that was compellingly not art) is a form of cultural, social liberation.' (Shava, Sharla The Filliou Tapes - From Political to Poetical Economy, in Political to Poetical Economy, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia, 1995, p.40.)

During the years artists have celebrated Art’s Birthday with lavish parties and gatherings, correspondence and mail art, 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.