ARCHEOLOGY OF DIGITAL ART - PART I
FRED FOREST
By Hélène Gheysens
What do Bill Gates, Pierre Restany and Brian Eno have in common? They all took part in Fred Forest's seminar on the "Aesthetics of Communication" between 1994 and 1997. Technology, art criticism and music are all decisive cultural elements in Fred Forest's eyes, as they constitute the very fabric of society. An art theorist and practitioner, Forest has made the exploration of these cultural elements the focus of his work since he began in 1962. At a time when pop art was triumphant and minimal art had yet to make its mark, the artist's participatory, hybrid and conceptual approach was designed to question the conditions of individual freedom in society.
Fred Forest claims absolute, radical, unconditional freedom, and above all, freedom from the art market. He has no gallery and refuses to sell his work. His recognition therefore comes through other channels. One of these is institutional: the Venice and Sāo Paolo Biennales, major exhibitions such as Documenta in Kassel, internationally renowned museums such as the Centre Pompidou in 2017 and 2024, despite numerous criticisms of its operation. Another is critical: publication by Michael F. Leruth at MIT Press (Interface as Utopia), numerous articles, collaboration with philosophers such as Vilém Flusser. His greatest wish is broad public recognition: he's happy for his works to be visible and for everyone to be able to participate, whether in 1972 with Space Media or in 2025 with Banque du Pied. In this, he echoes the dream expressed by Hervé Fischer, with whom he co-founded the Sociological Art movement in the wake of Fluxus and conceptual art: a new art practice "outside institutions, in the street, in the countryside, in the fields, in the media, to question the image each of us has of the society in which we live, and possibly of ourselves as individuals in that society". Fred Forest initiated this new practice by using the media as a means of articulating interpersonal relationships: mail art, closed-circuit television, projections on canvas and the use of the Portapak in the sixties, infiltration of newspapers, radio and television in the seventies, telephone and telematic demonstrations in the eighties, development of a digital practice in the nineties, then exploration of the different modes of putting work online in the two-thousandths, Fred Forest appropriates all techniques in the service of his project, which is at once ethical, philosophical and political. Like Joseph Beuys's social sculptures, each of his works is a proposal for social change. He inverts sender and receiver in the communication process, questions economic processes and the creation of value, and creates alternative communities.
His experiments led him to anticipate certain future developments in society: Space Media bears the seeds of a social network, La cabine téléphonique and Restany dine at the dome of reality TV, Le M2 artistique websites and blogs, Ego Cyberstar Youtube channels and vlogs, Parcelle-réseau NFT... Let's stay tuned to his most recent proposals, as Fred Forest could once again enlighten us on the society to come.
