Fred Forest

Fred Forest was a French artist who spent more than six decades turning the mass media into his material. Born on 6 July 1933 in Mascara, in what was then French Algeria, he became one of the first artists in France to work with video, a co-founder of the Sociological Art Collective in 1974 and of the Aesthetics of Communication movement in 1983, and later a pioneer of net art. He died on 4 November 2026, aged 93, and true to form he announced his own death in a final letter sent out by his son Adrien.

Forest's path into art was anything but conventional. His formal schooling ended after primary school, and for around fifteen years, from 1954 to 1971, he worked as a postal and telecommunications inspector, first in Algeria and then in France. He painted, and in the early 1960s drew satirical illustrations for the Paris newspapers Combat and Les Echos. In 1967 he received a Sony Portapak video recorder through a promotional campaign by Sony France, and that same year he made his first experimental tapes, The Telephone Booth and The Wall of Arles. His first exhibition of video art, the interactive installation Interrogation 69, opened in Tours in May 1969.

Shaped by May 1968, by Situationist critiques of the society of spectacle and by the writings of Marshall McLuhan, Forest stopped making traditional art objects in 1969. On 12 January 1972 he published a small blank square in the daily Le Monde, titled 150 cm2 of Newspaper, and invited readers to fill it in and send it back to him. The philosopher Vilem Flusser wrote about the project and became a lasting collaborator. At the 1973 Sao Paulo Biennial, Forest won the communication prize for actions that included a street march with blank placards, and he was detained by the political police of Brazil's military regime until the French Embassy intervened.

In 1974 he founded the Sociological Art Collective with Herve Fischer and Jean-Paul Thenot, and the group represented France at the 1976 Venice Biennale at the invitation of the critic Pierre Restany, who became a lifelong friend. Forest also took part in Documenta in Kassel in 1977 and 1987. His Artistic Square Metre operation of 1977 put tiny plots of land up for sale through newspaper adverts, prompting a police fraud inquiry, and ended with a trampled square metre of cloth selling at auction for 6,500 francs.

In 1983, with Mario Costa of the University of Salerno, he launched the International Research Group for the Aesthetics of Communication, and in 1985 he wrote its manifesto. That same year he defended a state doctorate at the Sorbonne, turning the defence itself into a video performance. He went on to teach at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Art in Cergy-Pontoise, at Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, where he became professor emeritus. Works such as Telephonic Faucet (1992) and The Watchtowers of Peace (1993), which broadcast peace messages towards the former Yugoslavia, explored presence and action at a distance.

Forest was a fierce critic of the art establishment. From 1994 to 1997 he took the Centre Georges Pompidou to court over its refusal to disclose the prices it paid for recent acquisitions. He turned early to the internet: in 1996 his digital work Network-Parcel was sold at the Hotel Drouot in an auction carried live online, a first of its kind, and in March 1999 he married the digital artist Sophie Lavaud in The Techno-Wedding, a real ceremony webcast alongside a virtual reality version. He helped found France's Fete de l'Internet, created the online Web Net Museum, and from 2008 staged performances in Second Life through his alter ego Ego Cyberstar.

In July 2005 his archives, including his video works, were taken into France's national heritage through a legal deposit agreement with the Institut national de l'audiovisuel. Later highlights included The Traders' Ball (2010), an unauthorised protest performance at the Centre Pompidou in 2012 in which he was bound in old videotape, performances at MoMA in New York, and his first major French retrospective, Fred Forest, homme-media no. 1, at the Centre des Arts in Enghien-les-Bains in 2013. In 2021 he offered his first NFT, NFT-Archeology, for 69.3 million dollars plus one dollar, and later gave the work to the Centre Pompidou, which entered it into its collection in 2023. The Pompidou staged retrospectives of his work in 2017 and 2024.

His death on 4 November 2026 was announced by Forest himself in a posthumous message passed to AFP by his son Adrien, in which he described himself as adored by many, despised by some and ignored by most. The cause of death was not made public. Centre Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon said the relationship between Forest and the museum was like his personality: whole, strong and always tinged with humour.