FRED FOREST

FRED FOREST, OR, ALL GOOD THINGS COME TO HE WHO WAITS, OR, HE WHO ENDURES WITH PATIENCE IN THE ART WORLD IS A CONQUEROR…

Widely regarded as an artistic pioneer in numerous fields, Fred Forest has always stayed two steps ahead of his contemporaries in his unprecedented and creative use of new communications technologies. Often among the first to make artistic use of them, he is also often among the first to give them up for new areas of exploration once their popularity finally catches on in the art world and they begin to become clichéd. In this way, Forest has made a name for himself as an incontrovertible precursor through a succession of noteworthy experiments with a wide array of media: from graphic illustration to painting, from painting to video, from video to slow-scan, from slow-scan to mass media, from mass media to communication via telephone , fax, cable, LED bulletin boards, telematics (minitel), computers, and most recently the Internet and other hypermedia networks. Today, true to his reputation as an incorrigible trailblazer, Forest has moved on to something new with his concept of invisible system artworks, which encompasses electromagnetic waves, cognitive structures, mental images, and even laboratory research in parapsychology …

Of course, always being ahead of his times, and the models officially endorsed by the art establishment, also has its down side. It has caused Forest to be given the cold shoulder by cultural institutions and the market alike, both of which conform, like it or not, to the mercantile culture that today reigns supreme and have thereby become integral parts of a system all too easily subject to commercially motivated manipulation.

Presently, the age-old mechanisms by which the history of art slowly moves forward by consistently recycling, albeit belatedly, that which was formerly misunderstood, or simply ignored, have all of a sudden caught up with Fred Forest. On the strength of his position as an innovator, and in light of the theoretical paradigms he has developed both as an academic and as the co-founder of two major movements, sociological art and the aesthetics of communication, Forest is now solicited to play a starring role in galaxy of contemporary art. And he enjoys that most rare of privileges: complete independence with respect to the entrenched dominant system, and with it, total freedom to speak his mind. He has lost none of his critical spirit, and hasn’t the slightest intention either to trade it in for fame and fortune, or to water it down. Quite on the contrary, …

In July 2004, his complete works officially became part of the national cultural heritage of France through the addition of his personal archives to the collection of INA, the French National Audiovisual Institute. In March and April 2005, he was given the honor of a public exhibition and the opportunity to create a multimedia installation on the premises of the French Ministry of Culture, for which he was personally congratulated in a speech delivered by none other than the Minister of Culture himself!

Forest now stands poised to receive the ultimate consecration of his notoriety in the form of an invitation to take part in the prestigious “Art Basel/Miami Beach Fair” in December 2005, with the creation of an all-new invisible system artwork to be showcased at the Fair. Following this historic event, the first ever retrospective of his work will be held in Sao Paulo in April 2006, at Paco Das Artes, the preeminent institution for contemporary art in Brazil. This exhibition is underwritten by the Fondation Cartier and AFAA (French Association for the Advancement of the Arts).

Fred Forest’s current interactive online project, sponsored by INA, is Images-Mémoire (Memory-Pictures):
http://www.fredforest.org/Ina
---------------------------------------------
Fred Forest

Multimedia artist, holder of a State Doctorate from the Sorbonne, Professor emeritus at the University of Nice at Sophia-Antipolis

- Born in Mascara, Algeria; lives and works in Paris, Anserville and Nice, France
- Pioneer in the fields of Video Art and Net Art
- Co-founder of Sociological Art and Esthetics of Communication movements
- Received of the Grand Prize at the Sao Paulo Biennial
- Invited to Documenta 7 in Kassel
- Represented France at the 1976 Venice Biennial
- Personal exhibition at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1982
- Received Grand Prize of the City of Locarno at the Locarno Festival of Electronic Art, 1996
- Married to artist Sophie Lavaud in 1999 in a ceremony celebrated on the Internet including a virtual reality environment
- His work is incorporated into the national cultural heritage through the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel in 2004
- Invited to participate in Art Basel/Miami Beach Fair in December 2005 through the creation of an invisible system artwork.

Recent Publications :
- Pour un art actuel : l'art à l'heure d'Internet (For an Art of the Present : Art in the Age of the Internet), Paris : L’Harmattan, 1998
- Fonctionnement et dysfonctionnements de l'art contemporain (Function and Dysfunction in Contemporary Art), Paris : L’Harmattan, 2000
- Repenser l'art et son enseignement (Rethinking Art and the Way It Is Taught), Paris : L’Harmattan, 2002
- De l'art vidéo au Net Art (From Video Art to Net Art), Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004
- L’oeuvre système invisible (Invisible System Artworks), Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005


www.webnetmuseum.org
www.fredforest.org
www.fredforest.org/Ina

Contact-press Michael Leruth
757.221.1390 (tel)
001 757 221 1390 (tel)
757.221.3637 (fax)
mfleru@wm.edu

press@webnetmuseum.org

EXHIBITION FRED FOREST MINISTERE DE LA CULTURE ET DE LA COMMUNICATION PARIS 21 MARCH / 15 APRIL 2005

Press-release

Ina invites you to delve into the memory of the web with
" Memory-Pictures " the newest work by Fred Forest 

online at  target=_new>http://www.fredforest.org/Ina 



Fred Forest’s newest work will also be presented in the form of an installation located in the lobby of the Ministry of Culture and Communication, 182 rue Saint-Honoré, 75001 Paris, France, from March 21 to April 15, 2005.

Beginning on March 21, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel and Fred Forest invite you to join in the creation of a collaborative work of art " Memory-Pictures " online at www.fredforest.org/Ina, conceived for the Festival of the Internet.

" Memory-Pictures " offers Internet users the opportunity to embark on a journey to the core of the memory of the Internet in the company of avatar guides.  Starting with a key word fed into a search engine, users will cause images to emerge from the depths of the network.  A specially designed computer program will automatically organize these images into a pre-formatted montage consisting of sixty thumbnail pictures, which will bear a digital stamp validating the montage’s status as an authentic work of art.  The montages can be printed out and sent to Ina, where they will be signed by the artist, and then returned to the senders via surface mail.  A dynamic archive will be set up to allow the public to view all of the works produced.

This playful project sets up a framework for free exchange, which, by virtue of its altruistic motives, underscores the original fraternal spirit of the Net.

A most atypical artist, Fred Forest has become over the years an emblematic figure in the world of contemporary art.  A co-founder of the French Festival of the Internet, he was awarded the Grand Prize for Communication at the Sao Paulo Biennial.  He has represented France at both the Venice Biennial and the Documenta exhibition in Kassel…

In April 2004, the entire corpus of his work officially became part of the national cultural heritage through its incorporation into the Fonds de Création Audiovisuelle Contemporaine, a public archive maintained by Ina.  Created in 2002 out of the archives of Imagina, the first European forum dedicated to " new images ", the Fonds de Création Audiovisuelle Contemporaine is dedicated to the creation and preservation of a permanent record of works that have made creative use of audiovisual media or have developed new approaches to esthetics and storytelling with the help of innovations in the field of information technology.  It is especially concerned with forms of creative expression whose spirit of originality and independence has not yet been subjected to the constraints of industrial production.


Contact-press Michael Leruth
757.221.1390 (tel)
001 757 221 1390 (tel)
757.221.3637 (fax)

"VERBAL, VISUAL, VIRTUAL" FRED FOREST, SOPHIE CALLE, MARIE NIMIER http://www.rll.ufl.edu/icffs

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA'S
INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM

FRED FOREST
SOPHIE CALLE
MARIE NIMIER

Speakers ETIENNE BALIBAR
PIERRE ALFERI
SPECIAL SESSION
FRED FOREST PRESENTE PAR MICHAEL F LERUTH ET PIERRE LEVY

target=_new>http://www.rll.ufl.edu/icffs


KEYNOTE SEAPKERS
Etienne Balibar
Pierre Alferi
Special session : Fred Forest, présenté par Michael F Leruth et Pierre Lévy

International Colloquium
March 31 - April 2, 2005

"Verbal, Visual, Virtual: New Canons for the Twenty-first Century"

Hosted by the France-Florida Research Institute and the
University of Florida's Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, French Section

From The Interpretation of Dreams at the beginning of the century, with its emphasis on the visual language of the unconscious, to Sophie Calle’s phototextual autobiographies at its close, experiments with form, genre, aesthetics, and representations in visual, verbal, and virtual modes cross boundaries and push the limits of textualities and the canon. Lacan’s psychic language, Barthes’s Mythologies, Kristeva’s Révolution du langage poétique, Ricardou’s textique, Baudrillard’s simulacra, ciné-romans, new technologies, the era of theory, postmodern performatives, electronic media, and globalization – all have challenged twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers/viewers with new mappings of culture. Speakers at the 22nd meeting of the 20th-21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium are asked to explore the revolutionary dynamics of languages–verbal, visual, virtual-- that have transformed our way of seeing and being in the world and altered the very notion of texte.


target=_new>http://www.rll.ufl.edu/icffs



For more information, please contact:Dr. Carol J. Murphy, Director,
France-Florida Research Institute, Professor of French
University of Florida, 170 Dauer Hall, P.O. Box 117405, Gainesville, FL 32611-7405
Telephone: (352) 392-2016 ext 256, Fax: (352) 392-5679, E-mail: Carol J. Murphy