Fred Forest - Web Art

Web Art

With its multimedia capabilities, the opportunities it provides to bypass traditional art venues and to take interactive projects directly to a broader public, its rapid and profound impact on contemporary society and culture, and the mythical aura of cyberspace and the virtual, the Internet was naturally appealing to an artist of Forest’s interests and practices. His first work utilizing the Internet, “From Casablanca to Locarno,” a multimedia public participation redubbing of certain famous scenes from the Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman classic, was created in 1995. In 1996, Forest’s web-based digital work “Network-Parcel” was sold at a public auction carried live on the Internet—the first event of its kind.

Forest went on to create a number of important online works including “Time Out” (1998, for the inaugural Fête de l’Internet), “The Time Processing Machine” (1998), “The Techno-Wedding” (1999), “The Center of the World” (1999), “Territorial Outings” (2001), “Networked Color” (2000), “Meat: The Territory of the Body and the Networked Body” (2002), “Memory Pictures” (2005), “The Digital Street Corner” (2005), and “Biennale 3000” (2006). Many of these works are concerned with developing new anthropological models for a world in which both individual and community have had to deal with the dual effects of dematerialization and deterritorialization, processes accelerated by the new digital technologies of networked communication. Some of the works literally constitute rites of passage. This is certainly true of “The Techno-Wedding,” a collaborative project of Forest and fellow digital media artist Sophie Lavaud. The work was in fact the real-life wedding of Forest and Lavaud, which was webcast live alongside a virtual reality variant of the ceremony. Another example is to be found in “The Center of the World,” which offered the public an opportunity to make a physical or telepresent pilgrimage to a shrine-like installation containing a digital relic of the old territorially centered world.

Beginning in 2008, Forest launched a new series of performances in the environment of Second Life. The first in the series, “The Experimental Research Center of the Territory” (2008) is in continuity with a lifelong exploration of the notion of territory beginning with “The Artistic M2” (1977) and continuing through “The Territory of the M2” (1980, a simulated independent state on the grounds of Forest’s property in the town of Anserville, near Paris) and “The Networked Territory” (1996, a hypertext work that Forest considers the Territory’s transposition into cyberspace). Each Second Life work is adapted somewhat to the physical location in which it is presented (Nice, Sao Paulo, New York, Beirut, etc.). In addition to staging debates and discussions at a think tank for avatars and offering public access to a mystical disintegrator of trash, some of the Second Life performances center on the philosophical musings and personal confessions of Forest’s digital alter ego, Ego Cyberstar.