Carrot Chewing (2005)

---

Live performance piece performed by Steve Bradley in Baltimore, USA and Martin Breindl in Vienna, A in the course of "Art's Birthday Celebration 05 - Permanent Creation"
 
2005 was the first year that the EBU's ARS ACUSTICA GROUP - producers and editors of radio art at public radio stations in Europe, Canada, and Australia - were joining Art's Birthday party, an internationally networked annual event that pays homage to the French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou. The artists have been asked to bring birthday presents that can be shared and listened to via the network by all participants.

Some of the presents from the artists invited to participate by Ars Acustica were presented live, for example in Madrid, Moscow, Prague, Stockholm, and Vienna; others had been prerecorded (SüdWestRundfunk, Baden-Baden, RBB Berlin, or Ward Weis in Antwerp). The birthday presents were transmitted via EBU satellite, ISDN lines, and the Internet and submitted not only by artists commissioned by members of the Ars Acustica but also by independent artists, art institutions, non-commercial radio stations and/or webradio, e.g. CITR FM in Vancouver, Radio Kinesonus in Tokyo, ResonanceFM in London, art@radio in Baltimore, Western Front Vancouver and others. Many of the participating radio stations broadcasted their versions/mixes of the Special Evening live, others non-real-time processed or summarized versions of the input.

Not only had Kunstradio be coordinating the live network but also celebrating Art's birthday in a 4 hours' live event on site, on line and on air under the heading "Permanent Creation".

On site at the ORF Funkhaus, Studio 3, alien productions (Martin Breindl, Norbert Math, and Andrea Sodomka) and the Institute for Transacoustic Research (Matthias Meinharter, Jörg Piringer and Ernst Reitermaier) were jamming with artists via the network and acting out short performances based on the action instructions provided by other artists and the audience.

One of the instructions submitted on line was:

carrott chewing
Chew a carrott very close to the microphone (like there was the carrott chew performance of the Fluxus people in New York)

Steve Bradley in Baltimore and Martin Breindl in Vienna decided to perform the perfomance piece together, using the network's delay to create a 10 minutes' psychedelic chew-back-loop...