Art birthday celebrations a cause for some family fun today at Wychwood Barns

Did you know it the 1,000,047th anniversary of Art today?

That's what late French performance artist Robert Filliou (1922-1987) would have us believe. In 1963, he declared that it was born a million years earlier when someone dropped a sponge in a bucket of water. He turned the day into a perfect excuse for a "happening," where words, music and whatever else some far-out hipster artists could devise (the picture shows him lighting a birthday cake in 1973). The idea of celebrating Art's Birthday came to Canada in the mid-1980s.

Today's big event in Toronto is a door's-open kind of big party at Wychwood Barns, the abandoned transit garage-turned-artists' colony on Christie St.

Most of the kid-firendly activities centre around arts and crafts. There are several sound-related projects organized by New Adventures in Sound Art, including an game played on ice, where the skaters navigate an imaginary hockey game by sound rather than sight.

All details here.

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Not part of today's birthday celebrations but ideal examples of the creative impulse at work in music, Toronto keyboard-electronics experimentalists John Kameel Farah and Attila Fias perform late -- 10:30 p.m. --  at the Tranzac on two pianos. Admission is pay-what-you-can.

Fias comes to this project from the jazz side. Farah, started off as a classical pianist, and now works almost exclusively in new music, both solo and in collaboration.

Here is a sample of Farah at work: