Fred Forest

Fred Forest (6 July 1933, Mascara, Algeria) is a French new media artist making 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. He was a co-founder of both the Sociological Art Collective (1974) and the Aesthetics of Communication movement (1983).

Forest was professor at the École Nationale d’Art de Cergy (France), as well as in charge of the Chaire des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication at the university of Nice Sophia-Antipolis. He is also director of the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain of Nice. Fred Forest published a series of essays on art and comunication: Pour un art actuel/l’art à l’heure d’Internet, Paris, 1998; Fonctionnements et dysfonctionnements de l’art contemporain: un procès pour l’exemple, Paris, 2000; Repenser l'art et son enseignement and De l'art vidéo au Net Art, Paris, 2004; as well as L'Oeuvre-système invisible, Paris, 2005.

He took part in numerous exhibitions, among them the Biennale of Venice in 1976, the Documenta 6 Kassel in 1977 and the Biennale 2000 at the MAC of São Paulo in 1975. A series of individual exhibitions have been organised so far: in the Centre Georges Pompidou (1982), at the Slought Foundation of Philadelphia (2007). In 2014, the performance Sociological walk with Google glass was held at the MoMA. In 2015, an exhibition at Jeu de Paume Paris, Sharingmédia.

Literature

• Michael F. Leruth, Fred Forest's Utopia: Media Art and Activism, MIT Press, 2017, 264 pp.

Links

• Website
• Fred Forest Archives, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Jan-Jul 2024
• http://webnetmuseum.org/html/en/expo-retr-fredforest/edito_en.htm
• https://www.flusserstudies.net/person/fred-forest