From Mac Luhan to Vilèm Flusser passing by Pierre Restany or Edgar Morin, the biggest thinkers of the society of the information, professors of universities and critics of art leaned on the sense and the reach of the work of Fred Forest, here are some extracts:
Marshall MAC LUHAN (1911-1980) - Professor of English literature and communication theorist, he is one of the founders of contemporary media studies.
"Uncle Fred is here" (January 1973)
To present the experiences that Fred Forest achieved with the telephone since 1972, using the urban and interurban networks, as well as of the automatic answering machines, Marshall Mac Luhan wrote for Fred Forest the following text... See more here
Michael Leruth - Associate Professor at the College of William and Mary, Virginia, U.S.A.
Fred Forest: Utopian Art in Reverse (March 2019)
Fred Forest is one artist who still believes in the utopian function of art. It’s a belief that he has affirmed in no uncertain terms from one end of his career to the other... see more here
Vilèm FLUSSER (1920-1991) - Philosopher, Writer, Journalist
Fred Forest or the destruction of the established points of view - 1975
A hot afternoon in 1974, Forest visited me in Fontevrault, in Touraine, where I began to write a phenomenology of the human gestures. We were in the garden. I explained him my thesis according to which if one was able to decode the significance of the gestures, we would have found the being's significance in the human world. Forest always provided of his equipment video passed his nearly automatically to record my explanations on a videotape... See more here
Edgar MORIN Philosopher & Sociologist
An experience on the media of unpublished type (December 1975)
What seems interesting to me at Fred Forest, it is that he delivers himself to experiences on media of type quite unpublished, his experiences have multiple facets... See more here
Since the years 1970, where I met Fred Forest in presence of Marshall Mac Luhan that was interested in his artistic practice, I didn't stop crossing him; at São Paulo, Berlin, SalerneÖ or on his own "Territory" in Anserville! Forest understood, one of the first, that the media are not ends in themselves... See more here
Fred Forest, or the art of the implication ( January 1995)
Since at least some centuries in West the artistic phenomenon presents itself more or less as follows: a person (the artist) signs an object or a particular message (the work) that other people (the recipients, the public, the criticals) discern, taste, read, interpret, value. Whatever is the function of the work (religious, decorative, subversive.) and its capacity to transcend all function toward the core of the enigma and of emotion that lives us, it register in a classic communication diagram. See more here
The great naive of Internet - May 2000
At the term of a course already old of more than 30 years, and that I tried to follow since the beginning of its emergence, my reflection on the work of Fred Forest operated itself at multilevel. Every report was for me the opportunity to measure the conceptual span of the notion of art through its direct projection on the vital plot of the social relations. See more here
Frank POPPER Professor of Aesthetics and Sciences of the Art, University of Paris VIII.
Fred Forest and the art of the communication (January 1994 )
It is probably daring to answer straightaway to the question: "what is an artist ?". However, I would take the liberty to make a suggestion: to be an artist, you have to choose and pursue, with a certain perseverance, an aesthetic finality. It is this that makes that a man or a woman becomes and remains artist... see more here
Harald SZEEMANN - Theorician of art, promoter of exhibitions, co-director of the Kunsthalle of Zurich
The lost work of Fred Forest or the lawsuit as pretext to artistic creation (January 1992)
In art - and one knows it, among other things, by the practice and the nature of the artistic work engaged by Fred Forest - there are no certainties... See more here
Mario COSTA -Professor holder of the chair of Aesthetic at the University of Salerne (Italia)
Of sociological art to the aesthetic of the communication (March 1994)
The work of Fred Forest always results from a combinative of three fundamental factors: the advertising factor, the sociological factor, the aesthetic factor. These three components act differently according to the nature of the operations that he achieved and according to the different periods of his activity... See more here
Pierre MOEGLIN - Professor, University Paris Nord, Laboratory of the Sciences of the information and communication
What is of aesthetic in the communication and conversely (October 1994)
Jean DEVEZE Professor in Sciences of Information and Communication
The multiple spaces of Fred Forest (October 1994)
Non only Fred Forest lives in multiple spaces but he haunts them. He is not necessarily where one believes he is and when he is not already there, he lets something of him, behind him... See more here
Evelyne ROGUE - Philosophe, Chercheur associé-
Fred Forest ou an artist of the reflection (May 2003)
The "Pope of networks" as some like to call him, this unique artist, founder of sociological art with Hervé Fisher and Jean-Paul Thénot in 1973, Fred Forest... See more here
Annick Bureaud - Art critic, curator and organizer of events in the field of art and technosciences.
The Online Territory (January 1996)
The inanimate matter doesn't know a territory, no territory in the cosmos, nor on the earth considered as planet. The notion of territory belongs to the living and enrolls in borders themselves synonymous of power See more here
Sophie Lavaud - Artist and theorist in visual and new media arts
Web 2.0 ahead of its time : an ethical art practice, from the aesthetic model to the social model (May 2020)
There are two types of artists: the followers, who develop, explore, enrich and put the finishing touches to a brilliantly breakaway artistic gesture enacted by others, and the explorers, who are adventurers working... see more here