Fred FOREST has always been at the forefront of the contemporary creative world with an artistic technique which develops constantly. After working as a painter and illustrator for the newspapers Combat and Les Echos, he dedicated his artistic career to researching the possibilities of new technological media. As a pioneer of video art in 1968, he was the first artist in France to create interactive environments. His innovative work continued with the creation of different forms of "press experiences" with symbolic and critical influence. His "blank space" in the newspaper Le Monde in 1972 was unforgettable in addition to his memorable media event about the artistic square metre. In 1973 he produced some spectacular work for the Sao-Paulo Biennial which brought him the much deserved Communication Prize and his - less deserved - arrest by the military regime. He has always worked as a leader in his field and uses: the telephone, video, radio, television, cable, PCs, electronic diode luminous news, robotics, on-line networks and so on. In the world of networks he will once again pull off a pioneering operation with the experimental network at Vélizy.

He was the co-founder of the Collectif d'Art Sociologique in 1974, and in 1984 presented his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne on the subject of the Aesthetics of Communication. With Mario Costa, holder of the chair of Aesthetics at the University of Salerno and Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the Marshall McLuhan Programme at the University of Toronto, he has created an International Research Group which counts the likes of Roy Ascott, David Rokeby, Norman White and others as participants.

He has taught video at the Ecole Nationale d'Art in Cergy, and was appointed to the chair of Information Science and Communication at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. Since taking up his duties in this city he has run an internationally-renowned seminar at the "Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain".

He represented France at the Venice Biennial and the Documenta in Kassel. He has made many experimental programmes on radio and television including on the national networks in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, Brazil and France. In 1991, the Bulgarian opposition supported him as a candidate to be the president of the national TV network with his project for interactive and utopian television. Works such as "The Electronic Bible" and "The Watchtowers of Peace" which he set at the border of the former Yugoslavia in addition to "From Locarno to Casablanca, love reviewed and corrected by Internet" are spectacular events and symbolic "works" of our present age. Their media impact is substantial and this shows that art today is not merely something to be consigned to museums or the lucky few who can afford to buy it from the auction rooms.

The work of this artist is a constant reflection upon communication itself, its codes, misuses, and its ideological, symbolic and aesthetic bases. In a climate of unprecedented historical upheaval, Fred Forest states, "today we need to invent other forms of art and not just repeat the obsolete models of the past". The role of the artist is to reveal and make us aware of how widespread communication and the use of networks interacts with all our systems of perception, representation, our imagination and places us in a situation where we can experiment with this new environment which goes by the name of: CYBERSPACE.

Furthermore, he insists on the artist's role as an "awakener", today as in the past, to try and find meaning, ask fundamental questions and introduce a certain spiritual aspect without which "promised life will be merely a theatre of shadows in a laboratory peopled with electronic devices."

Back to the top