Fred Forest

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.

"[4] 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.

[6] 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.

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.

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.

[8] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 global financial meltdown of 2007-08 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).