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Article Excerpt
This essay examines the career of French media art pioneer Fred Forest. It argues that Forest has staked out an original position in the field of web art by virtue of a number of online rituals that problematize the threshold, or limen, between the "real world" and cyberspace.
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Much has happened in the nearly forty years since Walter Benjamin first published his famous essay known in English as "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in which he argued that techniques of mass production and the new media of photography and the cinema had destroyed the "sacred aura" formerly associated with unique, hand-crafted masterpieces of art. While subsequent developments such as the proliferation of consumerism and the invention of television have mostly confirmed Benjamin's thesis, the "digital revolution" in information and telecommunications technology, which has reached spectacular (in the Debordian sense) new heights with the popularization of the Internet and the opening up of a "new frontier" in cyberspace, has created a whole new set of challenges for art and literature that go beyond anything Benjamin ever anticipated. In the wake of this revolution, the boundaries between different media and disciplines have disintegrated; the usual distinctions that are made between the role of the author and that of the spectator/reader no longer apply in the case of mutating works that are electronically "co-produced" (Pierre Moeglin) by a legion of "spectactors" (Rejean Dumouchel); and the basic unit of art, the work/text, has been stretched so thin that it virtually vanishes--or vanishes into virtuality. Indeed, one could well assert that it is now the work of art's aura of reality that is being destroyed (see Poissant).
Since going online, artists have tended to respond to the Internet in three different ways. The most common response has been to exploit the interactive potential and democratic ethos of what is chiefly seen as a new public forum for art. Major examples of this tendency include Douglas Davis's "The World's First Collaborative Sentence" (1994) and "Metabody: The World's First Collaborative Visions of Beauty" (1997)( ) and the creation of online art collectives such as the now-defunct ada'web ( ). The second response has been to exploit the technical parameters of the Internet itself for the purpose of creating a new self-referential, web-specific genre of art. This is the orientation of the growing number of artist-designed Web browsers, which may have practical applications or purely aesthetic ones like Mark Napier's collage producing Website "Shredder" (1998)( ) or Entropy8Zuper's URL-driven "Eden Garden" (2001)( ). For a smaller number of artists with a long-standing interest in telecommunications, electronic media, and cybernetics, a third response has been to treat the Internet as a new experimental tool at the juncture of art and science, to be used to gauge the effects that such technologies have on the way human beings live and think. Noteworthy examples of this tendency include Roy Ascott, one of the earliest proponents of telematic art; Eduardo Kac ( ), whose protean career has touched upon themes ranging from teleporting to biotelematics; and Stelarc ( ), whose provocative meditations on the relationship between the body and technology have included works such as "ParaSite" (1997, a "cyborged" body "invaded" by information from the Internet) and "Evolving URL Body" (1996, a virtual being that changes as a function of the specific pages accessed by each visitor to the artist's Website).
Another artist who deserves to be counted among the major figures of this third tendency is the French media and communication art pioneer Fred Forest, a chronology of whose career follows:
1933 Fred Forest is born in Algeria. 1954 Begins career with Postal Service. 1970 Works as an illustrator for French leftist journals (Combat, Les Echos). 1972 Launches "Space-Media" project. 1973 Is detained by Brazilian police for staging mock demonstration with blank placards in Sao Paulo. 1974 Co-founds Sociological Art Collective with Herve Fischer and Jean-Paul Thenot. 1977 Conducts "Artistic Square Meter" project. 1980 Creates "Territory of the [M.sup.2]" in Anserville, France. 1983 Stages "Intermediate Intervention" tele-performance. 1984 Co-founds Aesthetics of Communication movement with Mario Costa. 1985 Defends doctoral thesis at Sorbonne via teleconference. 1991 Performs as candidate for the presidency of Bulgarian National Television. 1992 Creates "Telephonic Faucet" installation. 1994 Files lawsuit to force Centre Pompidou to disclose purchase prices of new works (see Fonctionnement). 1995 Is named professor of information and communication science at University of Nice. 1996 Creates "Network Territory" (online version of "Territory of the [M.sup.2]"). 1998 Conducts "I Stop Time" operation for first French Internet Festival; creates online "Time Treatment Machine." 1998 Publishes Pour un art actuel: L'art a l'heure d'Internet. 1999 Stages "Techno-Marriage" performance; creates "Centre of the World installation. 2000 Conducts "Territorial Outings" project. 2001 Founds Web Net Museum. 2002 Conducts "Meat" project. 2002 Publishes Repenser l'art et son enseignement. 2002 Co-organizes Artmedia VIII conference in Paris.
One of the clearest statements of the "epistemological" mission of online art is to be found in Forest's 1998 book Pour un art actuel: L'art a l'heure d'Internet:
Artistic practice finds itself taking on an exploratory role that involves a special kind of research touching upon our self-awareness. [...] This evolution leads art to define itself as an enterprise of knowledge, albeit one of a different nature than that which is specific to the field of science. [...] The artistic approach still attaches primary importance to emotional, symbolic, existential, ethical, and aesthetic issues: the need for meaning. [...] For the sake of clarifying this distinction, we will say that art takes shortcuts designed to place the subject in configurations and situations that lead him to experience alternative forms of sensorial and mental adaptation (191).
In effect, many of Forest's online works take the form of simple experiments designed to get people to gauge the effect that technologies like the Internet have on certain basic parameters of human perception such as time, space, and the body. However, Forest's most original contributions to online art are to be found in a series of elaborate online rituals that reflect a distinctly utopian outlook. This does not mean that these performances are lyrical glorifications of the Internet. Instead, they are construed as public exercises in "anthropological projection" (Pour 86) that are supposed to lead to the conception of alternative modes of relation to time, space, and community in the "hyper-technological" environment. Such works call to mind the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner's theory of liminality in public performance. Derived from the Latin word for threshold, liminality refers to a shared sense of being on the threshold of a new reality that occurs in certain instances of ritual, festivity, and other forms of public performance predicated on the temporary suspension of existing cultural norms and the state of playful improvisation that ensues. There is something like a liminal element in many of Forest's works; however, this element is the strongest in Forest's projects for the annual French Internet Festival, or Fete de l'Internet, which is a bona fide nationwide public celebration that takes place both in the city and online.
Forest's approach to online art has been shaped by over three decades of work in the field of media and communication art (see 100 actions). After a brief career as an abstract painter and an illustrator for leftist publications in France, Forest "stopped doing art" ("Reflections" 65) (i.e., working with plastic media) in 1969 and began experimenting with video and performance. From that point on, his career was to pass through two...
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