A Listener’s Lab
Interview Two



Date: January 17, 2010

HB: Hank Bull
DZ: Debra Zhou

Hank Bull was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1949 and now lives in Vancouver. A multimedia artist as well as an arts administrator he has been an important member of the legendary Western Front Society since 1973. He is the also the founder and executive director of Centre A (Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art) since 1999. He became involved in radio and television in 1975 and, in collaboration with Patrick Ready [as HP], produced a weekly show of original radio art which ran for eight years. He has been active as an organizer of international artistsá projects using electronic networks and continues various pursuits as a áTOTALmediaá artist. His works have been collected by National Gallery of Canada, Netherlands Media Art Institute and many private collectors.
– CCC artist profile

I interviewed Hank as part of the program for Art’s Birthday 2010 at Centre A. The interview was streamed live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/art-s-birthday


DZ: First on all, can you tell us how Art’s Birthday started?

HB: The first Art’s Birthday in Vancouver I remember was 1974, but Art’s Birthday had already been around for quite sometime by then. In fact it had already been around for 11 years. It started in France and we brought it to Vancouver and it started slowly to be repeated in different cities. Now it’s happening all over the world.

DZ:I read through stories that Robert Filliou proposed the concept of Art’s Birthday in 1967, is that correct?
HB: I think that the actual date of origin is somewhat lost in the mist of time. I was trying to look it up somewhere in this book Whispered Art History. I know that the 1,000,010th birthday of art was celebrated in 1973, so that would suggest the first time would have been in 1963. In anyways, the story according to Filliou was a French poet and artist, a philosopher of art. He has all sorts of wonderful concepts and one of them is Art’s Birthday that he proposed that, when you think about it, that 1 million years ago, there was no such thing as art. At some point, there was no art. There was just life on the planet. At one point, art appeared. According to Filliou, it happened on the 17th of January, and it took place when somebody, I don’t know who, dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water, and that was it. That’s what caused art to be born. Therefore he said “now we have art and we should celebrate that by having a birthday party”. He wrote a poem called the Whispered Art History:

It all started on the the 17th of January, one million years ago.
A man dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.
Who that man was is not important.
He’s dead, but art is alive.
I mean, let’s keep names out of this.
As I was saying, on the 10 o’clock on the 17th of January of a million years ago.
A man sat along by the side of a running stream.
He thought to himself, where the stream run to and why.
Meaning, why do they run, where they run, that sort of thing.
Personally, once I’ve observed a baker at work, and a blacksmith and a shoemaker at work.
And I noticed the use of water was essential to their work.
Or perhaps what I’ve noticed was not so important.
Anyways the 17th goes on till the 18th, and then the 19th, the 20th, the 21st to 22nd, 23rd to 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, and the 31st of January.
Thus time goes by.

So that was his original thing. He proposed to this town, I think it was a small town in Germany, and said let’s have a birthday party for the art and the town bought the idea. And they closed the schools. Everybody had a paid holiday from work. They had bands and music in the street. Everybody had a festival. It happened again the next year and so on.
So he had another idea that we should have this festival, and after a few years or more, let’s have two days, and a few years more, let’s have 3 days, and 4 days, and so on until eventually a millions years from now we will have 365 day of holidays and we don’t need art anymore. So we can go back to life again. That’s the basic piece.

DZ: How did this idea travel across the world? For now I can see people spreading the idea over the internet or (through) travelling around so much, but how did they do it the past? I guess the question is also linked to the (origin of the) eternal network.

HB: Exactly. Filliou had this idea of eternal network. That’s another of his conceptual poem or artwork if you like. And the eternal network says we are all on a network that we are all connected. Someone’s sleeping and someone’s awake. Someone’s rich and someone’s poor. Someone’s happy and someone’s sad. Always. And that they were connected on the network. You maybe a baker, an artist or a housewife. And this image of people on a vast network was very appealing at that time. There was a happening here in North America, especially Vancouver, the idea of mail art that artists corresponding and connecting with each other. So now the postal system can be a decentralized art work, and anyone can be at the centre of the artwork. Suddenly there was the photocopy machine and you could reproduce something cheaply and mail it to people. The stamp cost 5 cents. So the mail system became a place for experiment. Filliou found out about that and eventually he came here to Vancouver to discover that there were artists starting their own galleries, collectives and magazines, their own ways of doing things and they were connecting to people in different cities on a network. They in return discovered his idea of the network and it became very inspiring. So the art’s birthday became the event that celebrates this sense of network.

DZ: I know that West Coast Canada engaged very early on with the technology, like the telecommunication art. In fact the first telecommunication art project in the world Interplay was initiated by Bill Bartlet in Victoria, Can you talk about that project and is it related to the eternal network?

HB: Oh yeah it all fits together (laugh). Bill and his partner Peggy were interested in using new technology to develop networks, not just the mail system but there were other tools you could use to communicate. They were disappointed with television because it’s really a one-way communication that’s not interactive. I met them when they were just stating. They referred to a German playwright called Bertolt Brecht he wrote an article on radio. He said radio is not really a medium of communication. It’s a medium of distribution, and, in fact, a medium of control, isolating the listeners rather than building a community. These technologies can only be called communication technology if it’s a two-way conversation. So they really set about making the television into a interactive medium. They worked with a couple of technologies that were new at the time. One was a device that was invented by a Canadian ham radio operator in Prince Edward Island. You know ham radio guys are talking to each other around the world and playing chess games and so on. He found a way to send pictures where a video cam could grab a still and encode that into sound, very rough black and white sound The sound would be transmitted by shortwave radio and would be reconstituted on the other person’s television. It would come down the screen very slowly. After 15 seconds you would get a picture. This was super exciting. We got this machine and hooked it up with a telephone, so we could do all kinds of events to connect. Bill and Peggy started doing that and caught on. The other thing that was new was mail art. It wasn’t called mail art. Computer companies were using it to send information back and forth. It was again a Canadian company IP Sharp that gave us access to their bandwidth. Basically they were renting telephone lines and allowed artists to experiment. That became an international network as well. It happened for several years before the internet came along. A lot of the activities happened quite early on in Vancouver. I was also involved in artist radio and television too.

DZ: That leads to my next question. Can you tell us about your history with the Kunstradio? You did a lot of projects with them early on.

HB: when I came to Vancouver I was 23 years old. I didn’t have any money. I collaborated with a very close friend Patrick Ready. We were playing with audio cassettes tapes. That was another new invention. Here’s this tiny little thing and it was really exciting that you could use cassettes. It was really cheap. So we started making radio plays, and we sent letters to each other and record on cassette. We started to experiment with weird sounds and of course imitating old time radios and mimicking various forms of communication. Around that time they started the co-op radio where’s right across the street from us now. We were invited to do a show on this new community radio station which became the HP radio show. We were part of a generation that was discovering sound as an artist medium for experiment all over the world. Our sense of sound, certainly for me, wasn’t really coming out of music or literature. It was coming out of the visual art or sculptural practice. I always thought that sound, especially what we did with HP radio as a sculpture, a social sculpture in the Josef Beuys’ sense. You could cover this vast area and engage people with the telephone and interactive radio. It becomes this huge sculpture. The sound fit into it as well. At a certain point we would do this event that we have two telephones. One of them would be sending sound back and forth. The other would be sending pictures. In the early 80s fax machines came so we started sending faxes. Art’s birthday took off again in early 80’s especially around the fax machine. I remember art’s birthday in 83, 84, 85. A lot of them were fax parties. So your fax machine would go nuts on art’s birthday.

DZ: Western front is one of the earliest places to organize Art’s birthday celebration? What about other galleries and museums?

HB: The Front was the centre of it. And there were others in Vancouver. To go back to your other question about Kunstradio, Vienna came to the network very early. Robert Adrian was involved in the computer network, early email and slow scan event. He produced some very interesting events from his end. His wife Heidi Grundmann had a very legitimate radio show on the National Radio Station about art. She would go to the Documenta and Biennales to interview the artists and so on. Then she realized that there were artists using that medium itself. She became very interested in artist using radio and sound. The show evolved very early on and became a sound art show even still today, a very important show. So we might be being broadcasted right now on Kunstradio which runs every Sunday night on the National Austrian Radio. If you go to their website (http://www.kunstradio.at) you will find a huge archive on Art’s Birthday. They’ve really become an important node. So this global network that we have today is largely because of the efforts of Kunstradio, and Western Front is very closely connected. Right now at Western Front there are other events happening for the Art’s Birthday.

DZ: One of the early telecommunication art theories is that instead of artists making objects, they are creating a space. From the first telecommunication project till now, almost 40 years, there has been big improvement in technology. For example, we are streaming live! That would never have happened 10 years ago. How does that affect telecommunication art? And also what is new right now?

HB: It all moved on very quickly. Sure Fluxus artists imagined a global network, a global brain a long time ago. You can see mail art as an early model for the Internet. But it’s true that we are in a completely new situation. Now everybody’s got a cell phone. You can just about stream from a cell phone. That interactive technology has become real so that the idea of Bertolt Brecht is real. Now it’s just huge. There’s a whole kind of vernacular creativity goes beyond the art world. The whole idea of the eternal network is happening in the global sense. You almost feel like some amazing balance that would tip at certain point that, suddenly, out of this accelerated hothouse, rapidly evolving communications and creativities, there would be some new thing. We will come out of it. Maybe it won’t take a million years to go back to life, maybe it will be sooner than we thought.

DZ: there’s also this interesting thing that we discovered through researching Internet streaming. I was calling up some internet companies to ask about how to set up wide bandwidth internet here at Centre A, one of the companies said that the service is extremely expensive, for example a commercial T1 line, and that’s because they don’t want to make it into a common commodity. Why do you think is that (besides the technological aspect)?

HB: I think it goes back to the theory artists making space. I think it’s a very nice image: artists making space, artists making life. There’s a sense of freedom about that idea. There’s a sense of freedom for me that now we are here having the world tea party. What is the world tea party? It is a space. There’s no big shows, no spectacle. There’s just this space where we could be together and have a cup of tea. Which is great right? Then we become the art. I think it’s very democratic. And of course there are thousands of people out there trying to figure out how to make money out of it. I am sure there are all sorts of people thinking “what do me do wrong? We allowed the Internet get out and it’s free and we are not making any money off it and it’s a problem. And they continue to try to. They commodify it and it’s surveillance. There’s this dystopia scenario that can very easily be rolled out. But seems to me that each time these forces of management, control and exploitation try to reinforce their position, the subversive voices comes in and very quickly dissolve the situation. Not just activists and legal system but also j-walkers wh invent something that goes around the system of control. I think that’s the creative space of play that we are in right now. Marshall McLuhan said long time ago that you have the surveillance of people looking down, but you also have the people looking up. With these technologies, they go both ways. So it’s very hard for the force of control to keep their stuff secret now.

DZ: Thank you for all the great and honest answers. I have one more question. What’s your view of artwork exhibited on the cyber space? Of course it’s very different than participating in an event. For example, people who are watching us at home and people who are sitting here physically. What’s your view on cyber-based art and exhibitions? I know it’s a big question.

HB I think it’s about what’s on your mind really. We used to do these radio shows called the LUXE Radio Plays. We get together with a bunch of people who are not professional actors. We made up stories, we scripted them and we performed them as live performance using old style sound effects. We had rolled-up carpets pouring rice down tubes and breaking glasses. It was actually quite a lot of fun to watch for the audience there. You would see some people holding sheets of paper reading to a microphone, and a bunch of other people with objects, but you might be imagining people going over the Alps on a hot air balloon or something coming in from outer space going to the bottom of the ocean. In your mind the scenario would be completely different from what you are seeing with your own eyes. So when you talk about art on the Internet, it’s kind of conceptual isn’t it? We imagine all kind of people in different cities celebrating art’s birthday. We can actually go into that space. I think a lot of interest for online art is among people who are online. People who are online are going to make online art and look at other people who are online and make online art. They live in this world which’s like an online cult of streaming audio freaks. So you might be typing a letter or doing a spreadsheet or something, but on the corner of your monitor, there’s stream coming from Antwerp. And you can look at it more closely if you want to, or sometimes you have three or four things ongoing at the same time. People live in that world but at the same time we are sitting here across from each other. There’s always this tension happening between what’s in the real world and what’s happening online. It’s interesting that a lot of commercial galleries are like“ oh interesting that we ill go online and sell all the work online”, and it hasn’t worked out. All the big commercial galleries closed their online sites because people need to meet to engage that. Its not a bout making a sale, it’s about what art does, and I think it’s really important to have this space in which we can actually meet in order for this online thing to work. You can’t have one without the other.

DZ: I think we had a similar discussion when we talked about performance art and who is the audience. Let’s go back to the Net-based art. There’s always this possibility that nobody out there is watching right? You can have 0 or 100 visitors on your website while doing this live event. Similar to a performance artist doing a performance in a forest with nobody watching. Does it still make it art if nobody is watching?

HB: Oh yeah totally. Actually I was just inspired by Kate Sansom on my Facebook. She has a piece called “to-do”. I didn’t really look up the work but I am going to borrow that idea. It’s great to have ideas, but you don’t actually have to make the ideas. Why not just make a list of the ideas? One idea I have is to shoot a series of photographs of pine trees in Vancouver which are normally located in very ugly gas stations and next to a street lamp or something like that, but you know what it’s a subject that’s been done to death. You don’t actually have to take the photographs. It’s just a nice idea. You can actually list hundreds of ideas and you don’t actually have to execute them. So is that art? Why not. I think art is about intention. What is it that you mean? What do you mean to do? So what you mean to do is being alone in the forest and drop a dry sponge into a bucket of water. And it’s art and it’s fine. It’s about what you are thinking. What’s in your mind and what’s coming out of your mind.


[The end]