SYNTHESIS NOTE ON THE ACTIVITIES OF FRED FOREST

Fred FOREST is always situated to the outposts of the contemporary creation with an artistic practice in continual evolution. After having been painter and drawer of press to the newspapers "Combat" and "Les Échos", he devotes himself to research raising of the new technological media. Pioneer of the video art in the years 1968, he is the first artist to create in France, at this time, "interactive environment". He innovates again in pioneer while conceiving different shapes of "experience of press" of symbolic and critical reach. One remembers his "white space" in Le Monde newspaper in 1972 and his noteworthy media operation of the artistic square meter... In 1973 he achieves several spectacular actions in the setting of the São Paulo Biennial where he received the Price of the communication and... his arrest by the military regime. In his artistic practice, always in pioneer, he uses: the telephone, the video, the radio, the television, the cable, the computer, the luminous newspapers to electronic diodes, the robotics, the networks telematics... Concerning the networks he will be again there, the first, with the experimental network of Vélizy.

Co-creator of the Collective of Sociological Art in 1974, he sustains in 1984 at the Sorbonne a thesis of State Doctorate on the Aesthetics of the communication. With Mario Costa, titular of the Pulpit of Aesthetics at the University of Salerne and Derrick of Kerckhove, director of the Marshall Mc Luhan Program of the University of Toronto, he creates an International Research Group, to which participate Roy Ascott, David Rokeby, Norman White...

He taught the video at The National School of Art at Cergy, and has been named titular of the "Pulpit of the Sciences of Information and Communication" at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, where since he directs to the Museum Modern Art and Contemporary Art a seminary of international reputation. He represented France to the Biennial of Venice and to Documenta of Kassel. He achieved numerous experimental broadcasts to the radio and the TV, notably on the Belgian, Swiss, Italian, Israelian, Brazilian, and French national channels. In 1991 the strengths of opposition in Bulgaria sustains its candidacy for President of the national TV on a project of interactive television and... utopian. "The electronic Bible", the "Watchtowers of the Peace" that he implants to the border of the former Yugoslavia, his multimedia action, "From Locarno to Casablanca, love reviewed and corrected by Internet", are as much spectacular actions, that constitute symbolic devices, "works" of our time, that will have a considerable media impact, demonstrating that today the art is not only an affair of museum, market and elitist public!

The work that this artist achieves constitutes a reflection on the communication itself, its codes, its diversion, its ideological, symbolic and aesthetic foundations. In a historic situation of rupture, without precedent, Fred Forest affirms: "Today, it's necessary to invent other shapes of art, and not to repeat models of the past, obsolete". The role of the artist being, on one hand, to put in sensitive "evidence" how the practice generalized of the communication and networks interacts on the whole of our systems of perception, of representation, our imaginary and, on other hand, to place us in situation to experiment this new environment, designated by the name of: CYBERSPACE.

Otherwise, he always insists on the function of "awaker" of the artist, that is there, today as yesterday, to make sense, to ask the fundamental questions and to introduce a certain "spiritual" dimension, "without which" the promised life would be only theater of shades, in a laboratory populated... with electronic gadgets".

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