In the mid-1960s, Forest (born 1933, Algeria) began a series of actions using of audiovisual and communication technologies to challenge conventional artistic media and activity.
[3] Images of many works are available at Webnetmuseum He projected slides onto his paintings (Tableau Ecran, 1963), initiated community events in impoverished neighborhoods (Family Portrait, 1967), and used video to engage social spaces ("Mur d’Arles and Cabine Telephonique", 1967).
In January 1972, Forest began his "Space Media" project by placing a blank rectangle in the newspaper Le Monde and inviting readers to fill it in and mail it to him.
On the occasion of the XII Bienal de São Paulo in October 1973, he effectuated a series of events, including a version of Space Media, a sociological walk, and a procession through the city center with participants holding white placards ("Blancs evanhit la ville"), all of which were provocations in the face of the established military dictatorship.
Always highly critical of those in power, committed to participatory art, and deeply engaged with new communication technologies, Forest would continue these pursuits after joining the collective in October 1974.
Around 1974, his projects shifted away from the medium of painting toward more marginal and popular visual idioms, such as stamps and street signs, and into performances in the social realm.
Around 1969, he began creating artworks, beginning with his “Interventions in the Street,” which consisted of a series of scaled sculptures of everyday objects, such as mousetraps, set up in public space.
Around 1970, he moved away from producing objects into largely textual and conceptual works, such as his “Constats d’existence,” typed pages of commentary on contemporary artists that were mailed to various figures in the art world.
In the summer of 1974, Journiac organized a series of meetings at his apartment on Île Saint-Louis in Paris to discuss the initiation of an artist movement engaged with critical and sociological realities.
], which although geographically close remain distant at the level of social communication.” After setting out four principles—critique, communication, intervention, and pedagogy—the group proposes sociological art as means to overcome the divide between “a quasi-scientific approach to the environment and a lived connection established among individuals [.
Whether focused on a town or a particular community, sociological art aimed to increase awareness about social conditions of existence through exchange with sites and humans.
It envisioned art in terms of interaction, animation, pedagogy, and the creation of structures of exchange, provocation, and disruption of conventional social behaviors with a view to denouncing all and any forms of conditioning.
[7] Forest launched his subsequent theory of Communication aesthetics and continued his work as a teacher and artist, becoming an important early theorist and practitioners of net and internet art.