Ici et maintenant

CENTRE CULTUREL DE MERCATO SAN SEVERINO, ITALIE
27-29 OCTOBRE 1983
MANIFESTATION ORGANISÉE PAR MARIO COSTA

Concept

A staging of the concept of implosion, the representation of which is approached here in its functional and structural aspects. According to Mario Costa: "Fred Forest, in his installation, totally evacuates narrative content to work exclusively on the primary forms of Time and Space. "
A device for highlighting ubiquity through an action of telepresence and presence at a distance. This performance could just as well have been called "Fred Forest and his double" or "Discussion at the summit with his avatar...". One of the two televisions transmits the channel of programme 3 on regional television, while the second, connected to a closed-circuit T.V. system, transmits the performance itself in real time. Time and space are the intrinsic (immaterial) materials of this performance.

Device

In the performance room, two televisions were placed side by side on a table, facing the audience. At the scheduled time, in agreement with RAI 3, T.V. broadcasts the tape that Forest has handed over to it a few hours earlier on its public terrestrial programme... On this tape, recorded the previous day in Paris (so in another space and another time...) the artist, in a fixed American shot, counts! He says the numbers aloud, in order, one after the other, without interrupting himself for fifteen minutes.
A video camera films Fred Forest from the front, while he counts himself in the performance room, facing the audience, in sync with his television icon. On a shelf facing the audience are four tape recorders which, switched on one after the other, allow us to hear Forest's voice as he counts, with time shifts that produce a sort of incantation reminiscent of American repetitive music.
This performance is perfectly illustrative of the theorisations that will be developed on the subject of the Aesthetics of Communication, both by Mario Costa and Forest himself from 1984 onwards.
At the time, Forest's performance already revealed this particular aspect of a new invisible, intangible, impalpable... but omnipresent space generated by electrical and electronic media. He puts us in a sensitive position to better perceive and understand the place of the individual in this new context.

1986 Esthétique de la communication ARTCOM ENSBA

In 1983, on the occasion of a cultural video event organised by Mario Costal in Italy, he and Fred Forest launched the Aesthetics of Communication Movement at Mercato San Severino. Three years later, in 1986, two of the movement's leading artist-theorists, Natan Karczmar and Fred Forest, decided to combine their efforts and organise a colloquium at the ENSBA in Paris to reinforce the work Mario Costa had begun with Fred Forest at Mercato San Severino, when the Manifesto of the Aesthetics of Communication was signed. Under the name ARTCOM, they managed to convince the Director of ENSBA to host the event on his premises. With this backing, they launched this now historic conference without a specific budget. The participants (theoreticians and artists) agreed to attend at their own expense, in view of an initiative which responded, point by point, to their views on a forward-looking art using technologies. An art that no longer fitted in with the concepts of a commercial art market, now outdated for them and the only one still of interest to galleries and institutions at the time.
The conference will be opened by Claude Mollard, who at the time was head of the DAP at the French Ministry of Culture. Other speakers will include Flor Bex, director of the ICC in Antwerp, Vilém Flusser, Mario Borillo, Claude Faure of the Cité des Sciences et de l'industrie, Bernard Teyssèdre, Dr of the UFR Saint Charles, Jean Duvignaud and artists such as Mitropoulos, Alain Snyers, Marc Denjean, Eric Samakh, etc...

• " Ici et Maintenant ", Mario Costa, Opus International, Paris 1984