Fred Forest

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. He is also one of the founders of the French Fête de l’Internet, or Internet Fest.

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. 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." 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.

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). 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. 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 M 2 " (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 m 2 was indeed a bona fide work of art. For actions such as the São Paulo experiments and the "Artistic M 2 " operation, Forest can be considered a precursor of such current counter-cultural practices as tactical media, culture jamming, and hacktivism.

With its multimedia capabilities, the opportunities it provides to bypass traditional art venues and to take interactive projects directly to a broader public, its rapid and profound impact on contemporary society and culture, and the mythical aura of cyberspace and the virtual, the Internet was naturally appealing to an artist of Forest's interests and practices. His first work utilizing the Internet, "From Casablanca to Locarno," a multimedia public participation redubbing of certain famous scenes from the Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman classic, was created in 1995. In 1996, Forest's web-based digital work "Network-Parcel" was sold at a public auction carried live on the Internet—the first event of its kind. Forest went on to create a number of important online works including "Time Out" (1998, for the inaugural Fête de l’Internet), "The Time Processing Machine" (1998), "The Techno-Wedding" (1999), "The Center of the World" (1999), "Territorial Outings" (2001), "Networked Color" (2000), "Meat: The Territory of the Body and the Networked Body" (2002), "Memory Pictures" (2005), "The Digital Street Corner" (2005), and "Biennale 3000" (2006). Many of these works are concerned with developing new anthropological models for a world in which both individual and community have had to deal with the dual effects of dematerialization and deterritorialization, processes accelerated by the new digital technologies of networked communication. Some of the works literally constitute rites of passage. This is certainly true of "The Techno-Wedding," a collaborative project of Forest and fellow digital media artist Sophie Lavaud. The work was in fact the real-life wedding of Forest and Lavaud, which was webcast live alongside a virtual reality variant of the ceremony. Another example is to be found in "The Center of the World," which offered the public an opportunity to make a physical or telepresent pilgrimage to a shrine-like installation containing a digital relic of the old territorially centered world. Beginning in 2008, Forest launched a new series of performances in the environment of Second Life. The first in the series, "The Experimental Research Center of the Territory" (2008) is in continuity with a lifelong exploration of the notion of territory beginning with "The Artistic M 2 " (1977) and continuing through "The Territory of the M 2 " (1980, a simulated independent state on the grounds of Forest's property in the town of Anserville, near Paris) and "The Networked Territory" (1996, a hypertext work that Forest considers the Territory's transposition into cyberspace). Each Second Life work is adapted somewhat to the physical location in which it is presented (Nice, São Paulo, New York, Beirut, etc.). In addition to staging debates and discussions at a think tank for avatars and offering public access to a mystical disintegrator of trash, some of the Second Life performances center on the philosophical musings and personal confessions of Forest's digital alter ego, Ego Cyberstar.

Forest's most recent work continues to demonstrate his critical approach to contemporary art and society as well as his commitment to exploring the anthropological, sensory, and philosophical ramifications of life in media space. Examples include "The Traders’ Ball" (2010), which examined the implications of the 2008 financial crisis through an online performance in Second Life coupled with an installation at the Lab Gallery in New York; "Ebb and Flow: The Internet Cave" (2011), a multimedia environment in Albi, France, which allowed visitors to encounter their own digital shadows in a cave-like setting reminiscent of Plato’s famous allegory from The Republic; and an unauthorized protest performance at the site of the Centre Pompidou’s Video Vintage exhibition in 2012 (Forest had himself bound from head to toe in old Portapak videotape and then invited members of the public to cut him free while he offered his critique of the institutional memory of early video art). In 2012 performance at the MoMA The conversation. In 2013, Forest was treated to his first-ever major retrospective in France: Fred Forest, homme-média no. 1 (Fred Forest, No. 1 Media Man), held at the Centre des Arts in Enghien-les-Bains, outside Paris. "Soirée Nomade " Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. In 2014 performance at the Moma " Sociological walk with Google glass ". In 2015 exhibition at Jeu de Paume Paris " Sharingmédia ". ZKM and Adk Berlin " Flusser and The arts ". In July 2015 with Derrick de Kerckhove, Maurice Benayoun, Tom Klinkowstein and other art people, thinkers and philosophers, he participated to Natan Karczmar's seminar ArtComTec.

Fred Forest is recorded with the occupation university teacher. Recorded with the occupation video artist. Recorded as photographer, university teacher, painter, video artist and designer. Associated with mail art.