An experience on the media of unpublished type

Edgar MORIN (Paris, December 1975) Sociologist

What seems interesting to me at Fred Forest, it is that he delivers himself to experiences on media of type quite unpublished, his experiences have multiple facets. On one hand, they look like a kind of art of the immediate. It is art. But it is also a provocation, an intervention, a social act, sometimes to the limit nearly political. Finally of another side again, maybe an invitation to a sociological reflection. One could believe that it is a kind of joker that has fun to put white spaces in the newspapersÖ One even can, to the limit, consider him as a kind of experimental handyman. It is already very beautiful because the handymen have the real imagination. But Fred Forest, beyond the appearances, goes more farther than this. He goes to the source of everything that is important for us, human beings, individual and social at a time, - sources of dreams, of imagination, of creativeness that only ask to express - that is always more or less blocked, asphyxiated in us. Therefore, he tries to encourage this expression. What I find important in his activity, it is that he is to the root, and everything that is to the root, doesn't have a name, cannot be classified. The things that can be classified are the things of surface, the things that can be separate in slices. Is Fred Forest an artist? Yes, but not only. Is he a researcher? Essentially but not in the restricted sense that one often gives today to this word as in scientific researcherÖ

Is he a public man? Yes, but of a different kind of public action. I think that today's world in its anonymity, its bureaucratization, and all its tendencies that push it to a way of mechanics, this world needs of animators, of hecklers. That means people who shake it, who wake it up, who give it a soul.

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