Fred Forest - Aesthetics of Communication

Aesthetics of Communication

Although the social and political concerns first developed within the framework of Sociological Art have remained strong in his work to this day, in the 1980s, Forest became increasingly interested in the “immanent realities” of electronic and networked communication—for instance, issues of space, time, the body, knowledge, and identity. He faulted contemporary art for having largely ignored these means of communication, which had transformed everyday life and added an entirely new dimension to reality: the virtual space of information and communication, which Forest likened to new territory “dredged from the void.” In order to promote artistic research into the sensory, cognitive, psychological, symbolic, aesthetic, spiritual, and social properties of electronic telecommunications media, Forest and Professor Mario Costa of the University of Salerno formed the International Research Group for the Aesthetics of Communication in 1983. They were joined by the media theorist Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and a wide array of artists including many of the pioneers of telecommunications and telematic art. Among those affiliated with the group at some point were Robert Adrian X, Roy Ascott, Stéphan Barron, Jean-Pierre Giavonelli, Eric Gidney, Natan Karczmar, Tom Klinkowstein, Mit Mitopoulos, Antoni Muntadas, David Rokeby, Christian Sevette, Norman White, and Horacio Zabala.

Forest himself was the author of the group’s manifesto, “For an Aesthetics of Communication,” published in 1985. This important text laid out his vision of the metacommunicational artwork, whose goal is not to convey any particular message or imagery, but to create experimental micro-environments of communication in which certain salient, normally hidden features of the media themselves may be discovered. This usually involves the artist’s conception of special media configurations of his own, composed of different elements of existing media deviated from their normal uses. The work is created by the users of system; it emerges out of their consciousness-raising interaction with the system and each other. The artist’s role is that of an “architect of information.”

Forest’s own metacommunicational artworks fall into three broad categories. The first involves media performances that are somewhat like technological versions of the koans that Zen masters ask their students in order to elicit sudden flashes of insight into existence and surrounding reality. In Forest’s case, such works often focus on altered perceptual realities of time and space in the media environment. Notable examples include “Immediate Intervention” (1983), “Here and Now” (1983), “Electronic Blue, In Homage to Yves Klein” (1984), “Celebration of the Present” (1985), and “The Broken Vase” (1985). Another type of work involves whimsical exercises in telepresence and long-distance agency. Examples include “Telephonic Rally” (1986) and “Telephonic Faucet (1992), in which people contributed to filling a bucket in a Turin exhibition hall by turning on a faucet electronically triggered by their local and long-distance phone calls. Finally, there is a series of ambitious works that present alternative interfaces to the existing media and solicit public participation on a large scale. Examples include “The Stock Exchange of the Imaginary” (1982), “The Press Conference of Babel” (1983), “Learn to Watch T.V. by Listening to Your Radio” (1984), “In Search of Julia Margaret Cameron” (1986), and “Zenaide and Charlotte Take the Media by Storm” (1988). “The Press Conference of Babel” involved a multimedia installation that was also the set and makeshift studio of a pirate radio broadcast of expert analysis and public opinion over the broadcast of a leading French news interview program.

As the preceding example suggests, Forest’s works of this period were by no means devoid of political implications. Other examples include his installation of LED message boards juxtaposing Bible verses and Gulf War news dispatches (“The Electronic Bible and the Gulf War," 1991), his public campaign for the presidency of Bulgarian National Television (“For a Utopian and Nervous Television,” 1991), and his broadcasting of peace messages into the former Yugoslavia via radio and loudspeakers mounted on towers near the border (“The Watchtowers of Peace,” 1993).