Fred Forest Dies at 93, Leaving a Final Media Gesture

French artist Fred Forest died on November 4 at 93, but his last public act arrived after his death: a letter he prepared and asked his son Adrien to release. The gesture matters because Forest spent six decades turning channels of communication—from portable video and newspapers to Minitel, the web, virtual worlds, and NFTs—into the material of art.

 
 

Fred Forest’s Last Message Was Also a Medium

The Centre Pompidou’s memorial notice, dated November 4, confirms Forest’s death at 93 and identifies the prepared text as Letter Announcing My Death by Myself. It says Adrien Forest published the statement on his father’s behalf. Le Journal des Arts reported on November 6 that Forest died on November 4; Le Monde reported that the letter appeared on November 5.

Forest used the message to look back at an artistic life that he described as both serious and playful, then imagined having time to consider what he would do “tomorrow.” The official announcement did not disclose a cause of death.

Read against his earlier work, the letter functions as more than a witty farewell. Its form depended on a relay, a delay, and an audience receiving Forest’s presence after his physical absence, echoing a recurring structure in his art: he set up a communication system, gave another person or the public a role, and treated the resulting exchange as the work.

 

Fred Forest speaking about NFT-Archeology in 2021. Image by Fred Forest via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; cropped.

 
 

The Medium Changed, but the Structure Did Not

Forest’s place in early video art is secure. His official archive calls him the first artist to use video in France and even Europe, while the Centre Pompidou’s notice uses the narrower formulation that he was among the first artists in France to take up video.

Period	System	Documented work
1967	Portable video	The Telephone Booth and The Wall of Arles
1972	Press and TV	Space Media invited public responses
1982	Minitel	Stock Exchange of the Imaginary
1995–1996	Internet	Casablanca project and Parcelle-Réseau
2008	Second Life	Experimental territory and social laboratory
2021–2023	NFT and museum	NFT-Archeology, later donated

The 1967 tapes already linked technology to ordinary social behavior: one watched people approach a neighborhood telephone booth, while the other turned the curiosity of passersby at a construction barrier into an unscripted visual event. In 1972, Space Media bought a blank area in Le Monde and asked readers to fill and return it. Forest’s archive dates the newspaper intervention to January 12 and says hundreds of replies became exhibition material. The channel was commercial, but the content was made by its users.

His 1982 Minitel project at the Centre Pompidou is similarly well documented. Yet the official archive page calls it both the first public use of Minitel and one of the first artistic uses of the system. Forest used experimental Minitel at the Pompidou to make submitted material remotely consultable; absolute priority remains the archive’s retrospective claim.

The Centre Pompidou’s collection record calls Parcelle-Réseau the first website sold at auction: access passed through a confidential code in 1996. That is not the same as calling it an NFT, a technology that did not yet exist. Forest revisited the earlier work as NFT-Archeology in 2021, making the later object part of the history of digital art rather than proof that a blockchain token existed in 1996.

Although one page in Forest’s archive gives conflicting dates, contemporary reporting and his official biography place the Drouot sale on October 16, 1996. Its Parcelle-Réseau page labels video of the sale October 10, then gives October 16 in the body; another official project page also says October 16. The Centre Pompidou record establishes the year and the nature of the sale, but not its exact day.

Forest donated NFT-Archeology in 2023. It is now displayed at the West Bund Art Museum in Shanghai in Computer Worlds, scheduled through February 14, 2027. The work therefore entered the period after Forest’s death already under museum custody and before an international audience.

Minitel terminals, the network technology Forest used for his 1982 project. Photo: kevin, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

 
 

What Survives Is Spread Across Several Systems

The most consequential part of Forest’s legacy is not a list of obsolete devices. It is the preservation problem created when an artwork includes tapes, software, passwords, websites, audience contributions, and the behavior of a once-live network.

An official 2010 preservation conference records the scale of the first safeguard. INA conservator Gilbert Dutertre described Forest’s holdings as roughly 600 video carriers in formats ranging from half-inch tape to Digital Betacam, plus audio, paper documentation, and websites. The published proceedings say sample footage had been digitized without restoration because INA was preserving a trace. Dutertre also acknowledged the limits of a semi-industrial process. Forest’s own archive separately says 300 video works became consultable through INA from 2004; “works” and physical “carriers” are not interchangeable counts.

A second layer is web archiving. The Bibliothèque nationale de France collects French websites under legal deposit and supplements that work with historical captures from 1996 through 2005. But the BnF explicitly says its web collection is not exhaustive. A captured page may preserve text and images while losing a database, password gate, plug-in, stream, or interaction on which the work depended. Legal deposit is therefore evidence of preservation activity, not proof that every Forest website remains functionally reconstructable.

A third layer sits at the Centre Pompidou. Its collection record defines the 2023 donation as a three-part ensemble: the 2021 NFT and digital file, a letter to the buyer that Forest unsealed upon donation, and the 1966 painting L’Homme réseau. The museum assigns those components to new media, graphic arts, and visual arts respectively. That division is revealing: preserving one Forest work already requires several curatorial and conservation systems.

The official records consequently map a distributed legacy, not a finished archive. INA holds and digitizes audiovisual carriers; the BnF preserves portions of the French web under a non-exhaustive program; the Pompidou owns a specific mixed physical-digital ensemble; and Forest’s own website remains the principal public index to hundreds of actions. The archive website currently names no posthumous custodian or maintenance plan for its live index, embedded media, and network dependencies.

Audiovisual tape storage at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, illustrating the physical preservation challenge discussed in relation to Forest’s archive. Photo: DRs Kulturarvsprojekt, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

 
 

Forest’s Firsts, Holdings, and Remaining Gaps

• The Centre Pompidou confirms that Forest died at 93 and that Adrien released his prepared final letter.
• The institutional record supports “among the first” video artists in France; the stronger France-and-Europe priority claim comes from Forest’s own archive.
• The Pompidou identifies Parcelle-Réseau as the first website sold at auction, while NFT-Archeology is a distinct 2021 work donated in 2023.
• INA documented about 600 audiovisual carriers, while the Pompidou’s donation contains three differently managed components.
• Forest’s public archive gives two dates for the 1996 Drouot sale; the Centre Pompidou memorial, collection record, and archive website do not name a future custodian for the live archive.

Forest made communication systems visible by interrupting them, rerouting them, or asking audiences to complete them. His posthumous letter repeated that method one final time. The question left by his death is not whether the message arrived—it did—but how much of the machinery behind six decades of such exchanges will remain available to future viewers.