Fred Forest (born July 6, 1933) is a French new media artist. He makes use of video, photography, the printed press, mail, radio, television, telephone, telematics, and the internet in a wide range of installations, performances, and public interventions that explore both the ramifications and potential of media space. He was a cofounder of both the Sociological Art Collective (1974) and the Aesthetics of Communication movement (1983).
Forest has taken part in the Biennale of Venice (1976) and the Documenta of Kassel (1977, 1987) and his work has won awards at the São Paulo Art Biennial (1973) and the Festival of Electronic Arts of Locarno (1995). In 2004, Forest's archives, including his video works, were added to the collection of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel of France. A retrospective of his work was held at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia in 2007.
The holder of a state doctorate in the humanities from the Sorbonne (his 1985 thesis committee included Abraham Moles, Frank Popper, and Jean Duvignaud), Forest has also taught on the faculty of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art, Cergy-Pontoise; the University of Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne; and the University of Nice, Sophia-Antipolis. He is the author of numerous books on art, communication, and technology including Pour un art actuel: l'art à l'heure d’Internet (1998, For an Art of Today: Art in the Internet Age), Fonctionnements et dysfonctionnements de l’art contemporain (2000, The Inner Workings and Dysfunctionality of Contemporary Art), and L’œuvre-système invisible (2006, The Invisible System Work).
Aside from his artworks, which are often imbedded in the mass media and use publicity as a raw material, Forest is well known in France as a fierce critic of the contemporary art establishment—a critical stance that led him to take the Musée National d'Art Moderne (Centre Georges Pompidou) to court (1994–97) over its refusal to disclose the purchase prices of recent acquisitions.A complete account is offered in Forest's book Fonctionnement et dysfonctionnements de l'art contemporain. He is also one of the founders of the French Fête de l’Internet, or Internet Fest.For background information on the festival, see Michael F. Leruth, "The French Fête de l’Internet," The French Review 73.5(April 2000): 921-942.
Beginnings Forest was born on July 6, 1933 in Mascara, French Algeria. A self-taught artist whose formal education ended after primary school (he was later authorized to present a doctoral thesis under special provisions), Forest worked for fifteen years as a postal service employee, first in Algeria and then in France, before deciding to devote himself exclusively to artistic pursuits. In the early 1960s, he worked as an illustrator for the French newspapers Combat and Les Echos and experimented with the projection of moving and still images on tableaux-écrans, or screen-paintings. Having received a Sony CV-2400 Portapak video recorder in 1967 as part of a promotional campaign by Sony France, he ranks as one of the first artists in Europe and the world to experiment with video.As far as Europe is concerned, Sony France had three prototypes of this equipment, adapted to European technical norms, at its disposal at about the same time, in 1967. One of these prototypes was given to Fred Forest as part of a promotional campaign by Sony’s public relations department, which was planning on the equipment’s commercial distribution in France by the end of 1967. Fred Forest learned of the existence of this equipment from Pierre Schaeffer, who had just returned from a trip to the USA with some examples. See Tom Sherman's account of Forest's role in the beginnings of video art at http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2007/01/the_premature_b.html Forest's first experimental video tapes, "The Telephone Booth" and "The Wall of Arles," date from 1967. His first formal exhibition of video art, "Interrogation 69," an interactive video installation, took place in May 1969 in the city of Tours.
Influenced by the political and cultural ferment of May 68, Situationist critiques of the society of spectacle, Marshall McLuhan's writings, Umberto Eco's concept of the "open work," and the avant-garde's proclaimed goal of breaking down the barrier between art and everyday life, Forest stopped producing traditional art objects in 1969 and focused instead on a utopian form of "social praxis" operating "under the cover of art."Forest, Art sociologique vidéo: 33. Because of its portability, low-fi aesthetic, immediacy, and potential for interactive feedback, video was the tool of choice for such experimental social praxis; however, Forest also became interested in the mass media at an early stage in his career. His first major series of works with the mass media was the "Space-Media" project of 1972, which included a small "parasitic" blank square ("150 cm2 of Newspaper") published in the January 12, 1972 edition of the daily Le Monde, which the readers were encouraged to mail back to Forest, filled in with commentary, creative writing, or artwork of their own. "Space-Media" was the subject of a major article by the philosopher and new media theorist Vilém Flusser, with whom Forest collaborated throughout his career.
Sociological art In 1974, Forest joined forces with Hervé Fischer and Jean-Paul Thénot to form the Collectif d’Art Sociologique (disbanded in 1979). The members of the Collective were invited to represent France at the 76th Biennale of Venice by Pierre Restany, who became a lifelong friend and supporter of Forest and his work.
Forest's video and video-based installation and performance works from this period include "Gestures in Work and Social Life" (1972–74), "Electronic Investigation of Rue Guénégaud" (1973), "Senior Citizen Video" (1973), "Video Portrait of a Collector in Real Time" (1974), "Restany Dines at La Coupole" (1974), "TV Shock, TV Exchange" (1975), "Madame Soleil Exhibited in the Flesh" (1975), and "The Video Family" (1976).For additional information on Forest's actions from 1969 to 2003, see Forest, De l'art vidéo au Net Art.
In 1973, Forest was awarded the grand prize in communication at the 12th Bienal do São Paulo for a series of provocative actions that included a mock street demonstration featuring marchers carrying blank placards, interactive experiments in the press, and a multimedia installation with an uncensored telephone call-in center. These actions elicited the attention and displeasure of Brazil's military regime and Forest was detained by the political police, released only after the French Embassy intervened on his behalf.A full account of Forest's actions in Brazil (in Portuguese and French) can be found in Vitoria Daniela Bousso (ed.) and Priscila Arantes (cur.), Circuitos paralelos: retrospectiva Fred Forest, exhibition catalog (São Paulo: Paço das Artes, 2006).
Forest's actions throughout the 1970s and beyond took aim at cultural as well as political power structures. This included the contemporary art establishment, whose perceived lack of imagination, corporatist logic, arcane traditions, star system, and speculative practices he lampooned in works like "The Artistic M2" (1977). For this project, Forest formed a certified real estate development company and placed ads in the national and international press announcing his plans to sell "artistic" square-meters of land—small plots of undeveloped land near the Franco-Swiss border. The ads prompted a police real estate fraud investigation and authorities intervened to halt the sale of the first square-meter plot at a public auction alongside a number of contemporary paintings and sculptures. At the last minute, Forest substituted the tiny plot of land with a square-meter piece of common cloth that had been trampled by the auction attendees as they crossed the threshold and this officially "non artistic" square meter of cloth fetched a usually high price of 6,500 Francs at the auction—thanks, no doubt, to the publicity Forest's action and the police investigation had attracted. At the auction's conclusion, Pierre Restany publicly declared that Forest's m2 was indeed a bona fide work of art.
For actions such as the São Paulo experiments and the "Artistic M2" operation, Forest can be considered a precursor of such current counter-cultural practices as tactical media, culture jamming, and hacktivism.
Aesthetics of communication Although the social and political concerns first developed within the framework of Sociological Art have remained strong in his work to this day, in the 1980s, Forest became increasingly interested in the "immanent realities" of electronic and networked communication—for instance, issues of space, time, the body, knowledge, and identity. He faulted contemporary art for having largely ignored these means of communication, which had transformed everyday life and added an entirely new dimension to reality: the virtual space of information and communication, which Forest likened to new territory "dredged from the void." In order to promote artistic research into the sensory, cognitive, psychological, symbolic, aesthetic, spiritual, and social properties of electronic telecommunications media, Forest and Professor Mario Costa of the University of Salerno formed the International Research Group for the Aesthetics of Communication in 1983.For more information on the Aesthetics of Communication, see the special issue of Leonardo; see also Claudia Gianetti's article "Aesthetics and Communicative Context" on the Media Art Net website, http://www.mediaartnet.org/themes/aesthetics_of_the_digital/aesthetics_and_communicative%20Context/. They were joined by the media theorist Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and a wide array of artists including many of the pioneers of telecommunications and telematic art. Among those affiliated with the group at some point were Robert Adrian X, Roy Ascott, Stéphan Barron, Jean-Pierre Giavonelli, Eric Gidney, Natan Karczmar, Tom Klinkowstein, Mit Mitopoulos, Antoni Muntadas, David Rokeby, Christian Sevette, Norman White, and Horacio Zabala.
Forest himself was the author of the group's manifesto, "For an Aesthetics of Communication," published in 1985. This important text laid out his vision of the metacommunicational artwork, whose goal is not to convey any particular message or imagery, but to create experimental micro-environments of communication in which certain salient, normally hidden features of the media themselves may be discovered. This usually involves the artist's conception of special media configurations of his own, composed of different elements of existing media deviated from their normal uses. The work is created by the users of system; it emerges from their consciousness-raising interaction with the system and each other. The artist's role is that of an "architect of information."