EBB AND FLOW: THE INTERNET CAVE
Fred Forest

Art Center Le Lait
Moulins Albigeois – 41 rue Porta – 81000 Albi.

In the 1970s, as a pioneer of video art, and media and network art, Fred Forest, who was born in
1933, ushered in the concept of sociological art. Then in the 1980s he initiated the concept of the
aesthetics of communication. All the various systems and methods of intervention represent his
research terrain. The ethical and aesthetic dimensions join together to put the human factor at the
heart of his approach, especially through the involvement of different kinds of public in his works.
His praxis is one of actions interfering in communication systems. The memory issue is ubiquitous.
His project for Les Moulins questions Plato’s cave in the Internet age. The shadows which the
people in the cave take for reality in Plato’s allegory are transposed in contemporary forms, by a
staged presentation of the public strolling about accompanied by their shadows, with texts and
video projections operating alternately. Other shadows and participations arrive through the
network of Internet connections in the world. In effect, a connection kit, in the form of a minimal
recording studio and a user’s manual is proposed to the 120 French Institutes throughout the
world, in conjunction with the French Institute in Paris, as well as other venues, such as the Fred
Forest exhibitions currently on view in New York and Sao Paulo. A twofold network is thus
activated, by the physical presence of the visitors in the exhibition at Les Moulins and by the
virtual presence of connected publics.
Fred Forest is at work on a gigantic worldwide network, whose virtual and real participants give
shape to the show, connection by connection. The artist has devised his project like a screenplay
whose participating casts make the film by constantly renewing it. This collective work is a
metaphor of a democratic dynamic. A journey like an initiatory plunge into the belly of a society
hallmarked by information.

Curator: Jackie-Ruth Meyer