1
SOCIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT

FAMILY PORTRAIT

CULTURAL CENTER, L'HAY-LES-ROSES
MAY - JUNE 1967
The residents of a public housing estate in this working-class Paris suburb receive a flyer in the mail inviting them to submit a family portrait or other family document for inclusion in a series of 3 public exhibitions organized by the artist, who personally calls on each family to collect their material and offers to take Polaroid snapshots of interested families who do not already possess a family portrait.

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2
VIDEO

THE TELEPHONE BOOTH
THE WALL OF ARLES

ARLES AND L’HAŸ LES ROSES
1967

These are Fred Forest’s very first works on video. They were produced using Sony Portapak ½ inch black-and-white camera donated to him by the manufacturer. Forest went on to use this equipment in his work for over 10 years.

A precursor of Sociological Art’s investigations into everyday environments, “The Telephone Booth” was shot in real time from the third-floor window of the artist’s apartment in L’Haÿ les Roses. The object of the video was the drab suburban neighborhood’s only public telephone booth and the local residents who used it during the course of the experiment, whom the artist filmed in relationship to the nearby tree that dwarfed the telephone booth like a giant antenna.

“The Wall of Arles” is case study in the curiosity of pedestrians in busy city street, attracted by some mysterious events that seem to going on behind a wooden barricade.

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3
INTERACTIVE VIDEO INSTALLATION

INTERROGATION 69

SAINTE-CROIX CHAPEL, TOURS
MAY 1969

This “electronic mass” celebrated in a historic gothic chapel in Tours is the first-ever video installation created in France. A system incorporating 5 video cameras, a closed circuit television hookup, a computer, and 15 fluorescent screens offered visitors an opportunity to meditate on their own movements and gestures, electronically transfigured in real time. The work garnered national attention in the post-May 68 context.

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4
MEDIA EXPERIMENT

SPACE-MEDIA

Interactive space PUBLISHED in “Le Monde” newspaper and live performance on French national television, Channel 2
JANUARY 1972

The passive environments maintained by unilateral media are turned into interactive spaces through the introduction of “parasitical” elements by the artist. The experiment began with a work called “150cm2 of Newspaper”—a small blank square appearing in “Le Monde” that readers were invited to fill with their own artwork and send to the artist for inclusion in a subsequent public exhibition. This was followed 10 days later by the artist’s appearance on the midday news on national television to ask viewers to observe a moment of silence designed to help them make sense of their lives. Both experiments were later repeated in newspapers and on radio in television in locations ranging from Belgium to Brazil.

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5
VIDEO

GESTURES

recordINGS ON ½ inch black-and-white videotapes
CREATED BETWEEN 1972 AND 1974

in collaboration with VILÉM FLÜSSER

This work benefited from the active collaboration of Vilém Flüsser, the philosopher and seminal theoretician of new media. The hand gestures, body postures, facial expressions, and physical behavior of a number of people representing various professions observed in characteristic situations of social interaction are recorded on videotape: Professor Flüsser smoking his pipe, a hairdresser, lovers in public, people waiting in line…

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6
VIDEO EVENT / INSTALLATION

ENCOUNTER WITH FRED FOREST

MUSÉE CANTONAL DES BEAUX-ARTS, LAUSANNE
12-26 NOVEMBER 1972

Invited by René Berger, Forest uses the Lausanne museum as the nerve center of a multimedia event that includes the results of an experiment in public participation through the local newspaper, live video of the festivities on closed-circuit television, a marching band, and a raffle.




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7
NETWORKED MULTIMEDIA EXPERIMENT / INSTALLATION

LE CAPITOLE

INSTITUT DE L’ENVIRONNEMENT, PARIS
DECEMBER 1972

This work is an early example of the artist’s lifelong interest in alternative media network hybrids and long-distance agency. Working in teams with information provided via closed-circuit television and by telephone correspondents, 5 groups of people are each asked to come up with a fictional narrative involving individuals who happen to find themselves together in a compartment of “Le Capitole,” the Paris-Toulouse express train that is about to leave the station in Paris. To complete their work they must link their narratives to stories reported in the morning newspapers and contend with the artist’s provocative voice-over interventions on closed-circuit television, and ultimately act out their narratives.

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8
VIDEO EXPERIMENT / INSTALLATION

ARCHEOLOGY OF THE PRESENT
Electronic Investigation of La Rue Guénégaud

GALERIE GERMAIN, PARIS
MAY 1973

This works forces the public to confront conventional distinctions between past and present; inside and outside; spectator, participant and object. A video camera installed outside the gallery provides continuous live video footage of the adjacent street, which is displayed on closed-circuit monitors inside the gallery under the puzzling caption “In those days, la rue Guénégaud was….” Simultaneous live video footage of the inside of the gallery is displayed on a monitor in the gallery’s outside display window. Items salvaged from trashcans in the street are displayed like archeological artifacts. Expert commentary is provided by Vilém Flüsser, Pierre Restany, and René Berger.

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9
SOCIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT / VIDEO PROJECT

HOME VIDEOS OF THE GOLDEN YEARS

LA FONT DES HORTS RETIREMENT HOME, HYÈRES
JUNE 1973

SELECTED FOR DOCUMENTA 6, KASSEL, 1997

The project constitutes an example of Joseph Beuys’s concept of the “social sculpture.” The elderly working-class residents of a retirement home are empowered to cast a critical and imaginative eye on life inside a closed institution widely considered to be both regimented and stagnant through the use of video.

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10
INTEGRATED SERIES OF PUBLIC EXPERIMENTS / EVENTS WITH VARIOUS MEDIA

ART AND COMMUNICATION

12th SAO PAULO BIENNIAL
OCTOBER 1973

AWARDED THE BIENNIAL’S GRAND PRIZE IN COMMUNICATION

The goal of this series of provocative actions undertaken under the cover of art was to create symbolic/utopian spaces of popular free expression in the mass media and the street in defiance of the ruling military junta. Elements included a nationwide call-in operation using specially installed telephone lines, blank spaces for reader response published in several newspapers, the use of radio and television to orchestrate unusual experiments in public participation (e.g. a taxi rally through the streets of the city), a videographic “mini museum of consumerism,” and a street demonstration in which participants carried blank signs: “The City Invaded by Blank Space.” This last endeavor led to the artist’s arrest by the political police.

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11
VIDEO EVENT / INSTALLATION

SOCIOLOGICAL PROMENADE IN BROOKLYN

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, Sao Paulo
NOVEMBER 1973

Through advertisements placed in the national press, the artist recruits participants in a “sociological promenade” through the working class district of Brooklyn on the outskirts of the city, during the course of which he comments on aspects of the urban environment and interviews merchants and residents about the social conditions in which they live.

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12
VIDEO EXPERIMENT / INSTALLATION

MINI MUSEUM OF CONSUMERISM

PORTAL GALLERY, SAO PAULO
10-23 DECEMBER 1973

A Variation of the earlier work created in Paris at the Galerie Germain.

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13
INTERACTIVE VIDEO INSTALLATION

ELECTRONIC SELF-PERCEPTION

C.A.Y.C. (CENTER FOR ART AND COMMUNICATION), BUENOS AIRES
JANUARY 1973

Members of the public take Polaroid snapshots of themselves as they appear live on a closed-circuit television. The resulting self-portraits are then mounted on a card that is stamped with the exact date and time of the portrait.


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14
VIDEO PERFORMANCE / EVENT

VIDEO PORTRAIT OF A COLLECTOR IN REAL TIME

ESPACE PIERRE CARDIN, PARIS
JUNE 1974

This project parodies the esthetic conventions (the formal portrait) and mercantile rituals (the auction) of the art world and explores the critical potential of real-time media. In the highly ceremonial setting of a public auction conducted under the gavel of Jean-Claude Binoche, the artist begins work on his advertised “Video Portrait of a Collector” precisely when bidding on the unfinished work itself gets underway. From a spot on the platform normally reserved for the lot being auctioned off, he mans his portable video camera, panning quickly about the room to record each new bid. In other words, the “portrait” in question is originally nothing more than the video recording of the bidding war among its putative “collectors.” The taping ends in a close-up of the person who has finally managed to outbid his rivals; however, according to the terms of the sales contract, the portrait is not officially finished, nor is it delivered to the buyer, until the collector has offered further evidence of his “good taste” by having himself filmed on the same tape, in close-up, eating several complete meals.

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15
VIDEO EVENT / INSTALLATION

RESTANY DINES AT LA COUPOLE

BRASSERIE LA COUPOLE, PARIS
22 OCTOBRE 1974

The project takes place in two phases. In the first, critic Pierre Restany eats a simple lunch in the kitchen of the artist’s modest suburban Paris apartment. The video of this meal is later played at the famous Parisian brasserie La Coupole, on a television monitor “seated” at a table as if it were a normal guest, while the real Restany, wearing the same clothes as his video alter ego, dines at the adjacent table, studiously replicating his movements in the videotaped meal.

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16
EXPERIMENTAL T.V. PROGRAM

TELESHOCK-TELEXCHANGE

French National Television, Channel 2
22 MARCH AND 12 APRIL 1972

During a first appearance on television, the artist asks viewers to send in an object, or the picture of an object, along with a true or fictitious account of the object’s history. Two weeks later, the objects/stories are featured on a special call-in program starring the artist and special guest sociologist Jean Duvignaud, who provided analysis of the material. Viewers call in to make arrangements for the exchange of objects, which takes place live. A gathering of all participants at the foot of the Eiffel Tower takes later takes place.

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17
VIDEO INSTALLATION

NEW MEDIA No. 1

KONSTHALLE MALMÖ, SWEEDEN
22 MARCH - 19 MAY 1975

This work anticipates many of the spatial and temporal themes that the artist and Mario Costa were to develop in the 1980s in the context of the Esthetics of Communication including the unpredictability of real time processes, long-distance presence, and contingent relationships between parallel spheres of reality. The installation involves two closed-circuit television monitors. The first displays non-stop live footage of a tree in the public square outside the museum. Visitors inside the museum are given a hand-held video camera and are told to recreate the exact point of view of the outside camera that is the source of the tree footage. The output of the hand-held camera is displayed on the screen of the second monitor on the surface of which the outline key elements of the outside landscape (buildings, lamp posts, billboards, etc.) have been traced.

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18
ANIMATED EXHIBITION

MADAME SOLEIL EXPOSED IN THE FLESH

MUSÉE GALLERIA, PARIS
JUNE/SEPTEMBER 1975

The artist creates an installation in the midst of which the renowned psychic Madame Soleil makes daily live appearances, surrounded by blown-up images of her press clippings and video footage of her at home with her children and grandchildren. The result is not the demystification of a pop culture icon turned into a ready-made, but a deconstruction of the mythical objectivity of the museological institution itself.

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19
PUBLIC EVENT FEATURING VIDEO INSTALLATIONS AND PERFORMANCES

THE BIENNIAL OF THE YEAR 2000

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SAO PAULO, BRAZIL
5-28 OCTOBER 1975

Persona non gratis at the official biennial on account of his subversive antics during the 1973 edition, the artist organizes his own alternative biennial in an exhibition space adjoining the official one. This satirical counter-biennial—the Biennial of the Year 2000—is construed as a retrospective and sociological look back at the 1975 edition that “took place” with the full support of the military regime. It features video footage of the official event. The between the two events is blurred as people circulate freely from one to the others. The Biennial of the Year 2000 prompts the defection of several artists participating in the official event, which it eclipses in terms of publicity.

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20
VIDEO INSTALLATION

THE VIDEO FAMILY

STUDIO ELKE PANTEN, COLOGNE, GERMANY
MAY 1976

The installation is set up in an empty apartment located in a residential neighborhood of Cologne. The five members of the family in question are five video monitors located in various rooms throughout the flat. The perfect “cathodic” bliss of their blank minds is exemplified by the blurry images visible on their screens. In the center of the living room a real television is tuned in non-stop to the programming of the ARD network. The visitors are made up of curious members of the general public, who read about the project in ads published in the real estate/for rent sections of local newspapers, and people who received official invitations to the opening.

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21
TELE-PERFORMANCE

SNAP SHOT OF THE TELEVISION VIEWER

TELEVISION BROADCAST ON THE R.T.B. NETWORK (BELGIUM)
13 NOVEMBER 1976

After a series of contrived interruptions due to fictitious technical difficulties, the artist makes a guest appearance at the end of a television program and informs the members of the audience that recent advances in technology will allow him to take a picture of them at home across the airwaves. After he gives them a series of instructions about how to pose the television camera frames the lens of the artist’s camera in close-up and “click”… the snap shot is made. The station received over 300 letters from members of the viewing public asking how to get a copy of their picture!

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22
MEDIA EXPERIMENT / EVENT

THE ARTISTIC SQUARE METER

MEDIA COVERAGE (print, radio, T.V.), ESPACE CARDIN-HÔTEL LE CRILLON, PARIS
MARCH–OCTOBER 1977

An ingenious parody of the speculative practices common to both the real estate and art markets, this major example of tactical “information art” relies on the subversive effect of “parasitical” pieces of information introduced into the echo chamber of the mass media for the purpose of playing off—and hence exposing—the internal contradictions of centers of power/rackets that rely on the hording and control of information in a particular field. The artist creates an authentic real estate company for the purpose of promoting square meter lots—all part of a remote tract of land in the countryside near the Franco-Swiss border—that are officially designated as “artistic” square meters in papers filed at the local title office. He then places “for sale” ads in several prominent national and international publications and announces that the first of the “artistic” square meters is to be auctioned off at Le Crillon. The artist is interrogated at police headquarters at the request of the Interior Ministry, which later intervenes to block the public sale on the grounds of false advertising and suspected real estate fraud. The artistic square meter of land is replaced at the last minute with a “non-artistic” square meter of fabric. The auction proceeds and the mundane cloth fetches a high price, no doubt driven up by the publicity the whole affair has generated—a denouement that prompts the art critic Pierre Restany to formally declare that the non-artistic square meter was indeed a true work of art!

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23
NEWSPAPER ART

“LIBÉ” BECOMES A WORK OF ART

PUBLICATION IN THE DAILY NEWSPAPER “LIBÉRATION”
26 OCTOBER 1979

Appearing on the last page of this daily newspaper, a framed “artist’s certificate” declares the day’s edition a work of art, castigates the art establishment for its bureaucratic spirit and lack of imagination, and states the artist’s subversive intent to make a copy of the work his invited submission to a exhibition entitled “Ten Years of Contemporary Art in France.”

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24
POLITICAL SIMULATION / COMMUNICATION GAME

THE TERRITORY OF THE SQUARE METER

LE TERRITOIRE, ANSERVILLE (OISE), FRANCE
1980

A spin-off of the highly successful “Artistic Square Meter” real estate parody, this project involves the artist’s secondary residence in the Paris region, which is declared an independent state within the French Republic. The house itself, a building on the grounds of a former aristocratic estate, is turned into the seat of government and is outfitted with installations parodying the settings one finds in real palaces and ministries. Individuals become citizens of the Territory by purchasing a subscription to a square-meter parcel of the grounds and are thereby privy to special communication from the artist-president: certificates of citizenship, special communiqués, invitations to participate in live events, etc.




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25
MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION / EVENT
STOCK EXCHANGE OF THE SENSATIONAL

CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU, PARIS
JUNE 1982

For a period of five weeks, the artist turns an exhibition space in the Centre Pompidou into the nerve center of a nationwide exchange of fictitious news items that are composed by members of the public. It is equipped like the headquarters of a news wire service with a phone bank (handling up to 8,000 calls a day), a computerized database, video production facilities, and a full range of office equipment. Working 24 hours a day, its staff of 15 are responsible for gathering, editing, displaying, archiving, and rating the news items—tabloid-type stories with an emphasis on sex, death, transgression, the unusual, and the absurd (not unlike much of modern art)—that are sent in from outside “correspondents” and produced on the spot by visitors. A national toll-free number set up so that interested members of the public can find out the highest rated story of the day. The operation lays bare the blurring of the boundaries between information, art, commerce, and the collective subconscious that is so characteristic of postmodern culture.

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26
MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION / EVENT

BABEL PRESS CONFERENCE

GALERIE CREATIS, PARIS
18–31 JANUARY 1983

With the help of an independent FM radio station, the artist hijacks one of the nation’s most listened to political talk shows—Europe 1’s weekly “Club de la presse”—via a simultaneous radio broadcast on which journalists from the alternative political news magazine TEL and special guests (e.g., politician Bernard Stasi, writer Philippe Sollers, and advertising mogul Jacques Séguéla) listen to and caustically dissect the Europe 1 program. The set of the artist’s parasitical broadcast shares gallery space a satirical installation, also created by the artist, featuring a conference table surrounded by 10 television monitors all simultaneously playing videotaped speeches by different heads of state.

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27
MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION

AUTOPSY OF A POLITICAL SPEECH

FRAUEN MUSEUM IM KRAUSFELD, BONN, GERMANY
8-30 JUNE 1983

In a reconstructed middle class living, a television monitor and a computer terminal stand face-to-face. On the monitor a speech by French President François Mitterrand plays non-stop, without sound. On the computer screen, the words of the President’s speech stream by, rearranged in random order by a special program.

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28
MEDIA PERFORMANCE

HERE AND NOW

CULTURAL CENTER OF MERCATO SAN SEVERINO, ITALY
27-29 OCTOBER 1983

EVENT ORGANIZED BY MARIO COSTA

Normal constructs of space and time are imploded and the virtual environment of electronic communication is made palpable through an absurd display of telepresence. Side-by-side television monitors display similar images of the artist counting non-stop for 15 minutes. The first is a television set tuned to the local RAI station, which is broadcasting a tape previously recorded in Paris (i.e., another space and time). The second is a closed circuit television monitor displaying live images of the artist—present in the performance space (i.e., here and now)—counting in pace with his video avatar. In the background, four tape recorders are playing four different non-synchronized audiotapes of the artist counting, creating an incantation-like din.

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29
MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION / EXPERIMENT

THE COMMUNICATIVE SPACE

ELECTRA, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART OF THE CITY OF PARIS
10 DECEMBER 1983 – 5 FEBRUARY 1984

In this early example of “instant messaging” art, the artist provides the infrastructure for an independent telecommunications network inspired by the “wildcat” networks that temporarily flourished in 1982 by exploiting cracks in the national network that allowed people to make free telephone calls to one another by dialing certain unassigned numbers normally kept secret. Newspaper ads invite members of the public to make calls to the telecommunications installation, where they can talk to, and leave messages for, total strangers visiting the museum. Unlike like messages exchanged on the real-life wildcat networks, those exchanged through “The Communicative Space” are not clandestine: all calls are instantly broadcast over the museum’s public address system; a special interface is creating to broadcast a portion of the calls during the course of a program on a nationwide radio channel.

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30
MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION / PERFORMANCE

ELECTRONIC BLUE: IN HONOR OF YVES KLEIN

THE TECHNOLOGICAL IMAGINATION, DEL SANIO MUSEUM, BENVENTO, ITALY
MARCH – APRIL 1984

EXHIBITION CURATED BY MARIO COSTA
ELECTRONIC CONVERSION OF YVES KLEIN BLUE BY ÉRIC MAILLET

This works draws an implicit comparison between the empty space at the core of Klein’s work and the abstract, hybridized space of telecommunications … eventually known as cyberspace. The artist orchestrates the regional television broadcast of an electronically synthesized form of Yves Klein’s signature hue of blue. The electronic blue of this broadcast and commentary and reminiscences by New Realism founder Pierre Restany, speaking live via a telephone conference call, are both incorporated into Forest’s performance, which takes place in a gallery bathed in blue light.

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31
MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION / EVENT

LEARN HOW TO WATCH TELEVISION BY LISTENING TO YOUR RADIO

FIAC (International Contemporary Art Fair), Paris
19 OCTOBER 1984

The artist further perfects the esthetic application the concept of the wildcat meta-media network in this work that prefigures the « hacktivist » and “interface art” of today by putting together a confederation of 10 independent FM radio stations in the Paris area that will broadcast 4 hours of nonstop programming replacing the normal audio of the television programming broadcast at same time (i.e., the viewers are told to turn down the sound on their televisions and listen to their radios instead). The artist’s radio program features critical commentary by journalists and intellectuals, ridiculous instructions issued to viewers to change channels and perform other actions that together make up the “choreography” of a distributed collective performance, and call-in segments for viewer feedback.

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32
MEDIA-ENHANCED ACADEMIC AND ARTISTIC PERFORMANCE

DOCTORATE IN HUMANITIES, THESIS DEFENSE

Louis Liard Auditorium, University of Paris-Sorbonne
18 JANUARY 1985

For the defense of his doctoral thesis on “Sociological Art, the Esthetics of Communication, and Artistic Communication” the artist turns the formal thesis defense ritual into a work of art—a video-enhanced performance that uses the members of the jury (Abraham Moles, Bernard Teyssèdre, Jean Duvignaud, Dominique Nogues, and Frank Popper) as its main objects. The work illustrates several of the points made in the thesis itself including the meta-communicational function of artistic media hybrids and the esthetic properties of the new forms of space and time created by electronic media.

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33
MEDIA PERFORMANCE

CELEBRATION OF THE PRESENT

ART-MEDIA, VERDI THEATRE, SALERNO, ITALY
4 MAY 1985
This performance is one of the most important illustrations of the principles of the Esthetics of Communication, which theorizes a new type of art that reveals relational configurations in space and time—its media—instead of producing material objects to be contemplated. The performance begins when the artist dials the number of a telephone in the local studios of the RAI television network—seen in close-up on live television, on a monitor installed in front of the audience at the Verdi Theatre in Salerno. The telephone on television begins to ring and the artist, seated in the audience, grows impatient and finally gets up and leaves the theatre. Unbeknownst to the others in the theatre, he gets on a waiting motorcycle and speeds off to the nearby studio, where he answers the phone, which hasn’t stopped ringing during his absence.

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34
MEDIA PERFORMANCE

PLANETARY TELEPHONIC SCULPTURE

GALERIE ISY BRACHOT, FIAC, PARIS
10 OCTOBER 1985

Surrounded by paintings by the Belgian Surrealists Magritte and Delvaux, the artist stands before two side-by-side red and blue telephones. He picks up the receiver of the blue telephone and dials the number of a correspondent in Brussels, whom he asks to transmit a message, made up entirely of gibberish, to a second correspondent in Cologne. The same message is successively transmitted by phone to ten more correspondents stationed in different cities around the world, the last of whom calls the artist on the red phone 42 minutes and 30 seconds later.

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35
MEDIA PERFORMANCE / INSTALLATION / EVENT

TELEPHONIC RALLY

ARTCOM, MOLTEKEREI GALLERY, COLOGNE, GERMANY
22 JUNE 1986

IN COLLABORATION WITH RADIO-FRANCE, FRANCE INTER, AND EMMANUEL DENNE

Unlike their automobile-bound counterparts, the contestants in this off-road rally race through virtual space … along telephone lines and over radio waves. They compete with one another to reach the artist by phone at the “finish line” in Cologne after first having reached several other correspondents in various cities—the different “stages” of the race—at numbers announced on the radio or by the correspondents themselves. The rally is carried live on a special program on France Inter radio that parodies the suspense, pageantry, and colorful commentary of a real sportscast.







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36
INSTALLATION

THE AGE OF ELECTRONIC WRITING

“LETTRISTE” EXHIBITION, GRAND PALAIS, PARIS
10-23 SEPTEMBER 1986

In the midst of an exhibition devoted to painterly painting, the artist displays an LED bulletin board—the first European to use this device in an artwork—across which flows a stream of fragmentary musings on the nature of writing and periodic appearances of a digital clock, as if to remind the spectators of the time they are wasting staring at pictures hanging on walls.

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37
MULTI-MEDIA INSTALLATION

THE GOLDEN NUMBER AND A 14,000-HERTZ ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD

DOCUMENTA 8, KASSEL, GERMANY
AUGUST 1987

The artist explores the esthetics of “invisible system artworks,” virtual space, and the relationship between art and information in a “latent” installation that only begins to take on meaning elsewhere and after the fact, when its existence is revealed in an article appearing in a major national newspaper published in Cologne. The work in question is an 14,000 Hz electromagnetic field produced by a series of tiny ultrasound transmitters secretly placed along the perimeter of a rectangle based on the golden number plotted on the floor of the building where the Documenta exhibition is being held. The article announcing the work—written by an art critic by prearrangement with the artist—is preceded by a small classified ad appearing in the lost-and-found section of the local newspaper the day before stating that a number of small transmitters had likely been lost on the grounds of the Documenta (8 of which were later returned to the artist by mail).

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38
MEDIA / PUBLIC EVENT

IN SEARCH OF JULIA MARGARET CAMERON

“VAR MATIN” NEWSPAPER AND MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, TOULON
JANUARY / JUNE 1988

Based on 40 varied “missing person” announcements published in a local daily newspaper over the course of a six-month period—reinforced by tracts handed out in public places, posters, graffiti, and coverage on radio and television—the artist creates a sense of suspense around a fictitious character who has reportedly disappeared. The public is invited to send the mysterious person letters, pictures, and telephone messages; and all material is immediately put on display in the city museum. At the end of this participatory action, which demonstrates the media’s capacity to turn fiction into reality, the character, played by an actress, makes her triumphant return in an open-air motorcade.
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39
MULTIMEDIA EVENT

ZÉNAÏDE AND CHARLOTTE MEET THE PRESS

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, TOULON, FRANCE
21 DECEMBER 1988 – 30 APRIL 1989

ASSISTED BY JEAN-NOËL LASZLO

Commissioned for the museum’s centennial, this work brings to life of the most famous paintings in its collection: Jean-Louis David’s 1822 double portrait of sisters Zénaïde and Charlotte Bonaparte. The project begins with the publication of a reproduction of the painting—altered through the insertion of two blank comic-strip-like dialog bubbles—in the local newspaper. Readers are asked to imagine the conversation the two young women are having and to send their contributions in to the museum where they will be displayed alongside the original. The members of the public are also given the opportunity to leave the sisters messages via voice mail and the Minitel telematic network, or to talk to them in person on the occasion of one of their periodic arm-in-arm outings in the streets of the city.

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40
VIDEO INSTALLATION / ELECTRONIC MESSAGE BOARDS

JOGGING IN THE PARK

GALERIE JACQUELINE FELMANN, PARIS
FEBRUARY - MARCH 1989

A video monitor playing non-stop a tape featuring a solitary jogger is surround by six simultaneously operating LED message boards recreating the different layers of thought of the protagonist, which stream by at different speeds: reminiscences, desires, anxieties, philosophical musings, lists of things to do, insignificant reverie, recurring instances of immersion in the act of running, etc.

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41
SCIENTIFIC VOYAGE WITH VARIOUS EVENTS AND INSTALLATIONS

TELEMATIC RITUALS FOR WHITE NIGHTS

ARCTIC CIRCLE, FORMER U.S.S.R.
4 – 26 AUGUST 1989

The premise of this phony scientific voyage that takes the artist from Moscow to Leningrad and on to the polar north aboard an icebreaker is the confirmation of the artist’s hypothesis that the Arctic circle is in fact a square meter (see no 22 and 24). During the course of his journey, the artist will make various measurements and send dispatches to Soviet Academy of Sciences and to other scientific and cultural institutions on five continents. At the last minute, an inexplicable equipment failure will prevent him from collecting data offering “conclusive” proof of his hypothesis, thus leaving the question in suspense. As a consolation, the artist will sail down Severnaïa Dvina River to a monastery in Elikii Ouistiouk, where he will he transform himself from scientist into shaman and celebrate a ritual fusing time and space on the last “white night” of the season.

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42
MEDIA PERFORMANCE

REGIME CHANGE BALLAD

GALERIE DONGUY, PARIS / VASSILIEV THEATRE, MOSCOW
20 NOVEMBER – 2 DECEMBER 1989

FEATURING AN ORIGINAL MUSICAL COMPOSITION PERFORMED VIA TELEPHONE BY ALEXANDER ALEXANDROV, BASS CLARINETTE

In development well before the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, this work took on a magical aura when it was performed in December as a celebration of the historical miracle then unfolding. The performance took place in a multimedia environment featuring LED message boards displaying a stream of important dates (offered without commentary) from Soviet history.

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43
VIDEO INSTALLATION / TELEVISION BROADCAST

HOMMAGE TO MONDRIAN

TECHNEITRONICA, VILLA BRUNO, NAPLES
7 DECEMBER 1989

An electronic reproduction of a painting of Mondrian is created on 14 video monitors playing tapes that feature a portion of the abstract composition. A piece at the center of the puzzle—a blank television monitor—is missing. It will be filled in by a one-minute-long broadcast on a local television station.

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44
INSTALLATION

THE ELECTRONIC BIBLE AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR

NATIONAL CENTRE FOR ART AND TECHNOLOGY, REIMS
10 MARCH – 19 MAY 1991
LA BASE, LEVALLOIS-PERRET
26 JUNE – 3 AUGUST 1991

The installation is located in a pit and viewed from above. Down below, 15 LED message boards of varying sizes, planted in six tons of sand specially flown in from Kuwait, display a steady stream of quotations from the Bible juxtaposed with news dispatches from the war zone. A vertiginous mise-en-abîme effect is produced by the myriad reflections of the moving red LED lights in the full-length mirrors that line the walls of the installation. Surrounded by these modern-day electronic tablets of the law there stands a totem: a single video monitor, surrounded by a battery of cameras like an obsequious head of state at a photo op, playing television news clips from the war non-stop at accelerated speed.

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45
MEDIA EVENT / POLITCAL PERFORMANCE

FRED FOREST FOR PRESIDENT OF BULGARIAN NATIONAL TELEVISION:
Make TV More Nervous and Utopian!

PUBLIC CAMPAIGN IN URBAN SPACE AND MASS MEDIA, SOFIA, BULGARIA
2-9 OCTOBER 1992

With the help of Bulgarian journalist Rossen Milev and the support opposition forces hoping to destabilize the neo-communist regime in power and push their country further along the path to democratization, the artist mounts a farcical campaign for the presidency of Bulgarian national television based on a platform calling for wide-ranging reforms designed to bring about a more “utopian” and “nervous” form of television in the formerly staunchly Stalinist land. When the artist-candidate arrives in Sofia to begin a barnstorming tour of the country, where he always appears wearing his trademark rose-colored sunglasses, he causes quite a stir. People begin to take his candidacy seriously; even his rival, the incumbent Ognan Saparev, feels obliged to accept his challenge to take part in a debate on live nationwide television. After a Dada-like electoral motorcade through the streets of Sofia (a symbolic march on the houses of parliament), the artist is pressured to leave the country immediately—i.e., he is informed in no uncertain terms that his presence is no longer welcome and that his personal safety can no longer be guaranteed. The work is a stunning example of how artists can increase their political leverage through tactical uses of the mass media.

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46
MEDIA EVENT / TELECOMMUNICATIONS INSTALLATION

THE TELEPHONIC FAUCET

ARS LAB, MOLE ANTONELLIANA, TURIN, ITALY
18-26 APRIL 1992

Through newspaper ads and fliers, the public is invited to dial a special telephone number that will trigger the electronic valve of a faucet on the site of the installation in Turin and thereby spew a small quantity of water in a bucket below until, 1,500 calls later, the bucket begins to overflow and water spills onto the marble floors of the historic Antonelliana!

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47
TELECOMMUNICATIONS INSTALLATION

PLANETARY FAUCETS

COMMUNICATING MACHINES, CITY OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY, PARIS
12 JULY - 25 OCTOBER 1992

Like “The Telephonic Faucet” (no 46), this work demonstrates how telecommunications technologies have altered our relationship to, and perception of, physical space through the use of a telephone connection to fill a bucket with water. In this case, the calls are made from the site of the installation rather than from numerous remote locations, but each call is makes a trans-global detour with stops in New York and Tokyo before being redirected to the installation site in Paris where the valve is triggered.

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48
MEDIA PERFORMANCE / INSTALLATION / EVENT

THE WATCHTOWERS OF PEACE

MOUNTAINS ALONG THE AUSTRO-SLOVENIAN BORDER
INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY GALLERY, GRAZ, AUSTRIA
GALERIE LE MONDE DE L’ART, PARIS
MAY - JULY 1993

Disappointed with the mainstream media coverage of the warfare and “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia and the apathy of the international community that watches the tragedy unfold on television without doing anything to stop it, the artist decides to set up an alternative communication network—a combination of sophisticated technology and more primitive means—centering on three watchtowers, or “sound sculptures,” erected in the mountains along the Austrian border with Slovenia, with a fourth located in a Parisian art gallery. By dialing special phone numbers publicized in several different countries, people could record their own personal peace messages for the former Yugoslavia. The messages were transferred to the watchtowers, from which they were broadcast into the war-torn region via loudspeaker. Several radio stations in different cities including Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo, played selections of messages over the air.

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49
MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE
Theatre · Cinema · Radio · Television · Telephone · Internet

FROM CASABLANCA TO LOCARNO

FESTIVAL OF ELECTRONIC ART, MUNICIPAL THEATRE, LOCARNO, SWITZERLAND
2 SEPTEMBER 1995

http://www.tinet.ch/videoart/va16/multimedia.html

In this interactive meta-media project created for the centennial of the cinema, the artist offers the public an opportunity to “rewrite” the mythical film Casablanca by substituting the original dialog with its own modern takes on love and life, broadcast on the radio. Scenes from the film are broadcast without the original dialog and soundtrack on the Swiss Italian channel RTSI. Instructions and lively commentary stream across the bottom of the screen. Couples of viewers are invited to call the Rete 3 radio station, where they are put on hold before given 30 seconds of airtime to say their lines for the featured scenes (participants are selected in the order that their calls are received). The epicenter of the happening is the Locarno Theatre, where the artist himself takes part in the collective performance— supplying dialog for important scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, writing text messages, and initiating visual special effect in a carnival-like atmosphere.
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50
INSTALLATION / WEB SITE

THE NETWORKED TERRITORY

IMAGINA 96, GALERIE PIERRE NOUVION, MONACO
JANUARY 1996

http://www.monaco.mc/exhib/territories

The inauguration of an online version of the artist’s “Territory of the Square Meter” (i.e., its digital deterritorialzation) forms the pretext for two public participation initiatives occurring at the Nouvion gallery. In the first, a digital picture is made of each visitor upon entering the gallery and is instantly relocated to a specific square meter parcel of the now worldwide cyber-territory. In the second, the “Universal Foot Project,” visitors to both the gallery and the website are invited to have an outline of one of their feet traced, scanned, and uploaded to an online database—an effort to lay claim to networked space by literally/virtually setting foot upon it just like the astronauts who first set foot on the surface of the moon. The web site—also a “site of memory” for the artist—featured a series of linked texts and images. The ironic texts offered a semi-fictionalized history of the “Territory.” The accompanying imagery included photos of the interior and grounds of the Territorial “seat of government” (the artist’s country home in Anserville, France), private snapshots, and archival material from the artist’s many projects. Visitors had the option of taking a guided tour by clicking on “Forward@ and “Back” buttons or could err about the labyrinthine site by clicking on the links in random order, thereby creating their own version of the artist’s (e)state/life/career.

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51
ONLINE EVENT / NET ART

NETWORK PARCEL

DROUT AUCTION HOUSE, PARIS
16 OCTOBER 1996

PUBLIC AUCTION CONDUCTED BY JEAN-CLAUDE BINOCHE

Like “Video Portrait of a Collector in Real Time” (no 14) and “The Artistic Square Meter” (no 22) this work involves an artistic commodity of a conceptual nature that (ironically) takes on added esthetic value through its use as prop in a performance designed to raise questions about how art is invested with symbolic capital, traded, distributed, and consumed in the age of information and electronic media. In this case, the commodity in question is a password granting the purchaser exclusive access to a web site hosting an original digital work titled “Network Parcel,” and the performance is the public auction—the first of its kind to be carried live on the Internet—at which it is sold.







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52
ONLINE EVENT

TIME OUT

INTERNET FEST 1998
MARCH 1998

http://www.fredforest.com/

This project, created for the inaugural French “Internet Fest” (Fête de l’Internet), combines a symbolic (liminal) suspension of time and a virtual around-the-world journey in one hour in a festive rite of passage into the age of the digital global village. It involved placing webcams in cities located in each of the world’s 24 time zones. Beginning with a live shot of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the camera in each location began transmitting at precisely 12:00 p.m. on March 20. The very instant the clock was about to strike 1:00 p.m., the image on the screen switched over to the input of the camera in the next time zone to the west thus allowing visitors to the project web site to “relive” the same hour of the day throughout the 24-hour duration of the event. The web site also offered people a number of thought-provoking and fun ways to make use of their time away from time including an online poll about the role time plays in their frenzied lives, a means to send scanned outlines of their feet to a server in Guadeloupe for a brief vacation, and a chance to buy extra time in increments of 30 seconds, 1 minute, or 1 hour.

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53
WEB SITE / INSTALLATION

MACHINE FOR MANIPULATING TIME

LANDOWSKI CULTURAL CENTER, BOULOGNE-BILLANCOURT
DECEMBER 1998 – JANUARY 1999

http://www.fredforest.org/temps

People were given the opportunity to speed up or slow down the passage of time by clicking on the accelerator and brake buttons of a chronometer-like display on the project web site. The artist wanted to show how technology’s effect on time was a question of a competing social forces. Accordingly, each person had to contend with all of the others working the machine’s controls at any given moment. The speed of time displayed on the chronometer was therefore the net result of all ongoing efforts to either speed it up or slow it down.

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54
WEB SITE / INTERACTIVE INSTALLATION

TOUCH ME

MILIA 99, CANNES
FEBRUARY 1999

http://www.fredforest.org/touch-me

This work explored another dimension of time in a technological environment, entropy, while also call attention to the issues of copyright protection and preservation as they apply to digital works. It featured a virtual creature that was said to be sensitive to the human touch. The “cells” of its body were made up pixels recycled from works of art in the sponsoring organization’s database. A contemporary version of the “vanities” painted by 18th century artists, it had a preprogrammed life span, began to disintegrate from the moment of its “birth,” and eventually “died” (i.e., it disappeared altogether). However, by touching the screen of the “Touch-Me” exhibit clicking a button on the web site, visitors could trigger a sensor that temporarily arrested the progress of disintegration and even restored lost cells—a truly lifesaving caress.

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55
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE / VIRTUAL REALITY ENVIRONMENT / WEB SITE

THE TECHNO-MARRIAGE

CITY HALL, ISSY-LES-MOULINEAUX
18 MARCH 1999

FRED FOREST AND SOPHIE LAVAUD, CO-AUTHORS
BRUNO HERBELIN, PR0GRAMMER

http://www.fredforest.org/technomariage/default.htm

The “Techno-Marriage” is work rich in esthetic, social, and philosophical significance insofar as it was real wedding as well as a collaborative and interactive artwork and an experiment in online ritual: i.e., Forest and Lavaud were legally married in artistic performance combining a civil ceremony conducted at city hall and a digital replica of the ceremony, acted out in real time by their digital avatars (in response to input from movement sensors worn by their flesh-and-blood counterparts) in a surrealistic virtual reality setting. Both versions of the ceremony were webcast simultaneously on the project website, which was set up to accommodate the long-distance participation of certain members of the wedding party as well as interested members of the general public, who could email their messages of congratulations and order flowers or wedding gifts online.

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56
INTERNET INSTALLATION

THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

ESPACE PIERR CARDIN, PARIS
15-19 SEPTEMBER 1999

http://www.fredforest.org/centre/default.htm

This project was conceived as a fitting “final homage” to the old-fashioned existential and metaphysical paradigm a territorially centered world, which is dissolving before our very eyes in the virtual sea of information known as cyberspace and has been rendered “obsolete” by the triumphant ideology of the global. Visitors to the artist’s temple-like installation could gaze at a relic of the so-called “Center of the World” in the form of a three-dimension digital image appearing on the surface of an altar—an image that was not immutable but appropriately changed form continuously in relationship to Internet traffic. Cyber-pilgrims could visit the sacred site of memory online thanks to the three different webcams that provided continuous live coverage of the installation site throughout the duration of the operation, and they could compose an e-mail meditation that would be displayed on the large electronic message board that covered the curved rear wall of the installation.


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57
WEB SITE / INSTALLATION / PERFORMANCE

ONE APPLE CAN HIDE ANOTHER…

IUKB (Kurt Bosch Institute), SION, SWITZERLAND
OCTOBER 1999

http://www.fredforest.org/pomme/default.htm

Objective reality, representation, and virtual simulation are juxtaposed and intertwined in this meditation on the apple created for a conference on the intersection of art and science held at a university research institute specialized in agronomy and ecological issues. The installation is set up near large bay windows offering a superb view of the institute’s apple orchards—a view blocked, à la Magritte, by a screen on which live closed circuit television images of the same trees is to be seen. Facing the screen is another screen—a computer screen on which is displayed the artist’s web site devoted it the apple, which includes a virtual tree whose apples the viewer is invited to pick.

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58
WEB SITE / INSTALLATION

INTERNET GRAFFITIS: “SUR LE PONT D’AVIGNON”

INTERNET FEST 2000 / AVIGNON CELEBRATION OF THE YEAR 2000
19-21 MARCH 2000

http://www.fredforest.net/

The artist creates a web site that offers visitors a chance to rewrite the words to the famous French children’s song “Sur le pont d’Avignon.” Each entry is instantly displayed in graffiti-like characters in a window on the site and on giant screens at the installation with the music from the song playing in the background.

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59
DIGITAL MONOCHROMES / WEB SITES / PUBLIC EVENT

NETWORK COLOR

DROUT-MONTAIGNE AUCTION HOUSE, PARIS
28 OCTOBER 2000
http://fredforest.org/Catalogue

Following up on “Network Parcel” (no 51), the artist creates a web site containing 8 digital monochromes, which are sold at public auction carried live on the web.

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60
WEB SITE / ONLINE MUSEUM

WWW.WEBNETMUSEUM.ORG

INAUGURATION DURING INTERNET FEST 2001
MARC 2001

http://www.webnetmuseum.org/

The artist launches an online museum devoted digital art and culture. The museum is also an archive and an important communication platform for his own work, which is profiled in a major retrospective put together for the site’s inauguration.

Honorary Presidents: Vinton Cerf, Jean-Michel Billaut
Founder/Artist in Residence: Fred Forest
Curator: Louis-José Lestocart
North American Correspondent: Michael Leruth
Editorial Consultant: Jean-Luc Bastin
Advisory Board: Annick Burreaud, Pierre Cornette de Saint Cyr, Mario Costa, Pierre Lévy, Derrick de Kerckhove, Pierre Moëglin, Pierre Restany^


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61
WEB SITE / ONLINE EVENT

MEAT:
Territory of the Body / Networked Body

INTERNET FEST 2002
MARCH 2002

http://viande.fredforest.net/

Some people donate their body to science; the artist puts his up for sale on the Internet—not surprising given that he’s already sold both time and color online, not to mention artistic square meter parcels of land through newspaper ads! Indeed, in this online work, the artist’s body is for sale piece by piece—like cuts of meat in a butcher display case or lots in a real estate promoter’s subdivision. Each parcel of flesh purchased or rented was in reality a small section of a larger interactive image onto which the new titular occupant planted a small flag. In addition to being an ironic overstatement of the idea that the Internet is little more than a vast electronic marketplace, an apparent assertion of the declining importance of the body in an age of virtual reality, an implicit comparison between the territorial nature of the body and that of the Internet, and an aging artist’s fantasy of immortality, the work could perhaps also been seen as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to found a sort of mystical body of Internet users on the basis of something akin to a virtual human sacrifice.

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62
WEB SITE

GRENOBLE AT THE CENTER OF THE WEB

INTERNET FEST 2003, SCHOOL OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF GRENOBLE
17 MARCH 2003

http://www.fredforest.org/fete

For this edition of Internet Fest, the art teams up with art students and faculty colleagues in Grenoble to create an online museum of “digital folk art.”

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63
INTERACTIVE WEB SITE

INTERNET UNDER THE MAGNIFYING GLASS

INTERNET FEST 2004
MARCH 2004

WORK CREATED IN COLLABORATION WITH DAVID GRUMBS, GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND PROGRAMMET

http://www.fredforest.org/loupe

In successive stages, visitors to the web site examine the surface of the earth with a magnifying glass, spot an egg, see it crack open, discover a seed in side, and watch a sprout grow out of the seed that will bear leaves in the form of the word for “love” in different languages.


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61
WEB SITE / INSTALLATION

MEMORY-PICTURES

INTERNET FEST 2005, Great Hall, French Ministry of Culture, Paris
MARCH – MAY 2005

WORK COMMISSIONED BY THE NATIONAL AUDIOVISUAL INSTITUTE (INA) OF FRANCE

In this web-based work, which was also the basis for an installation at the Ministry of Culture in Paris, the artist sublimates the image search function of Google so as to allow Internet users to create their own works of art in the form of montages of images culled at random from the depths of the “memory bank of all memory” based on key words they choose and define. Produced jointly with the artist (the primary author of the web site), a digital avatar (the individual’s “guide” through the labyrinth of the web), and scores of anonymous and unwitting assistants (the people who originally posted the images that found their way into individual’s collage), these collages constituted “collaborative” works of art, which the artist invited his “collaborators” to send to him via surface mail to be “authenticated” as the bona fide co-creations of a recognized “master” the old-fashioned way—i.e., by signing his name to them … free of charge!