Bleu électronique : hommage à Yves Klein

L’IMAGINAIRE TECHNOLOGIQUE, MUSÉE DE BENEVENTO, ITALIE - MARS-AVRIL 1984
COMMISSAIRE : MARIO COSTA

Concept

Fred Forest transposes Yves Klein's blue pigment... which he converts into "electronic blue". A blue entirely generated synthetically in the video control room. This blue will then be dispersed to all winds by hertzian broadcast, in an indeterminate geographical space and in principle without limits... finding its support of visualization on thousands and thousands of receivers through the cities and the countryside of the region of Benevento.
The broadcasting operation by the regional TV channel Canal 28 in San Benevento took place simultaneously with Fred Forest's performance in the museum, where a calibrated control receiver received the electronic blue as soon as it was emitted and dispersed into radio space. During this broadcast of the electronic blue, Fred Forest simultaneously held a telephone conversation in the Museum of Benevento with Pierre Restany at a distance in Paris, thus symbolically reuniting these three distinct spaces.
For Fred Forest, this is no longer a tribute but a creation.
A creation in the sense that :

1. By broadcasting its blue over the airwaves, the artist achieves the invisibility so dear to Yves Klein - total invisibility for the time it takes to reach the TV receiver that receives it.
2. Thanks to the broadcasting system chosen, it simultaneously and instantaneously reaches an incalculable number of people at a distance and in different locations.
3. By abandoning pictorial pigment in favour of pixels, he can now claim, as Yves Klein did, that he invented not only digital blue but all the colours of the palette, as he did when his website on colour was sold in 2000 by Maître Cornette de Saint Cyr at Drouot Montaigne.

L’IMAGINAIRE TECHNOLOGIQUE, MUSÉE DE BENEVENTO, ITALIE MARS-AVRIL 1984
COMMISSAIRE : MARIO COSTA
CONVERSION ÉLECTRONIQUE DU BLEU : ÉRIC MAILLET

Concept

Fred Forest transposes Yves Klein's blue pigment... which he converts into "electronic blue". A blue entirely generated synthetically in the video control room. This blue will then be dispersed to all winds by hertzian broadcast, in an indeterminate geographical space and in principle without limits... finding its support of visualization on thousands and thousands of receivers through the cities and the countryside of the region of Benevento.
The regional TV broadcast took place simultaneously with Fred Forest's performance in the museum, where a calibrated control receiver received the electronic blue as soon as it was transmitted and dispersed.
A second communication device is superimposed on the first. This is an amplified telephone link that introduces a new space into Forest's performance, that of Paris, from where Pierre Restany, as biological memory (and not yet digital...), and above all as a privileged historical witness, introduces through his discourse an additional dimension of time. A dimension that is superimposed on the real time of Forest's performance, adding an additional element of complexity and richness. As his amplified voice resounds beneath the museum's vaults, blue spotlights flood the stone walls of the Museo del Sannio.
In this performance, the artist was really trying to make us aware of a new space that we would call twenty years later... cyberspace!
Klein's void is also that zone of invisibility in which Forest's Hertzian electrons are both so present and so visually absent, above the Italian countryside.

Device

• Prior use of video control equipment
• Canal 28 broadcast fifteen minutes of electronic blue continuously on its channel, with a scrolling banner every two minutes saying: Bleu électronique, hommage à Yves Klein.
• Other artists present at the performance : Gérald Minkoff, Murielle Olensen, Marc Denjean…

• Catalogue l’Imaginaire technologique, Mario Costa, Musée del Sanio, Benevento, mars 1984
• Hommage à Yves Klein, " + - 0 ", N° 43 Bruxelles, octobre 1985
• Cette œuvre a été reconstituée pour l’exposition " Machine à Communiquer ", Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, La Villette Paris, 1992