Fluxus Heidelberg Center
Like usual Ken Friedman sent out his invitation to his circle of friends to participate in his special New Year performance. Below we printed the complete invitation. Of course Fluxus Heidelberg participated in this and we did it this way:
We e-mailed on January 3rd 2004 from Stuttgart the URL to Ken:
Hi Ken,
Have a look at:
http://www.fluxusheidelberg.org/fp15a.html
To remember our participation in your performance Litsa Spathi created this special Fluxus Poem for you. Just click on the first image to go through it.....
With best wishes,
Ruud Janssen & Litsa Spathi
And here is his reaction on January 5th 2004:
Dear Ruud and Litsa,
Thank you.
This was a lovely surprise.
I was sitting here reading it out loud and laughing, and my wife heard me and came to see it.
She likes it too.
Warmest wishes,
Ken
In One Year and Out the Other
On New Year's Eve, make a telephone call from one time zone to another so that you are conducting a conversation between people located in two years.
-- Ken Friedman
December 31, 1975
This score is your invitation to participate in a performance for the
New Year that friends and I have performed every year since 1975.
The first performance took place on New Year's Eve
1975-1976. It started before midnight in Springfield, Ohio calling
forward to Dick Higgins, Christo, and Nam June Paik in New York.
After midnight local time, it ended with calls back to Tom Garver and
Natasha Nicholson in California. I have performed this work every year
since then, frequently calling Tom Garver, Peter Frank, Judy
Hoffberg, Newton and Helen Harrison, Abraham Friedman and the late Dick
Higgins.
The arrival of new media gave rise to new modes of performance. On
New Year's of 1992-1993 I used telefax for the first
time in
performing this work, sent telefax messages with the
score to Christo
and Jeanne-Claude Christo, Peter Frank, Abraham and
Shirley Friedman,
Dick Higgins, Hong Hee Kim-Cheon, Choong-Sup and
Yeong Lim, Karen and
David Moss.
In recent years, email has extended the performance
to network of
friends and colleagues. The ability to share and
forward email
messages means that increasingly large numbers of
people perform the
event each year using email.
Friends tell me that mobile telephone technology now
enables new
enactments in which people at different New Year
gatherings
simultaneously call to friends in many locations,
receiving return
calls from different time zones shortly after.
In the Swedish country village where I live with my
wife Ditte and
our dog Jacob, the annual New Year gathering is
generally quiet. We
always cook a light supper of lobster and asparagus.
In my
hermeneutical interpretation of the meal, the meat
of lobster
represents the New Year emerging from the shell of
the old, while the
asparagus signifies the green growth of spring.
This year, the menu will expand with an appetizer of cantaloupe and
thin slices of twice-baked ham glazed in egg mustard
and bread
crumbs. We will follow this with avocado sprinkled
with apple cider
vinegar.
Catharina Stenqvist and Eva Oesterberg will join us
for dinner as
they often do. Jacob's grandson, Sixten, will come
with them. (Jacob
and Sixten will not be sharing our lobster. Their
menu will consist
of an appetizer of two cheeses, Skaane Prestost and
Gruyere, followed
by a lightly grilled steak. It is New Year, after
all, and my
postmodern rendition of the St. Francis role
requires a dinner for
all creatures in the house.)
After dinner, we will stroll around the 800-year-old
village church
and accompany Eva, Cattis, and Sixten homeward as
village families
explode the annual fireworks display.
That will be my New Year's celebration. I hope your celebration will
be warm, cheerful, and satisfying. One thing is
certain, or
reasonably certain, and that is the fact that a New
Year is on the
way.
Here are my wishes for a wonderful 2004!
Ken Friedman
The original e-mail of the Invitation received in Heidelberg in December 2003 :
Dear Friend,
