Don Foresta is an artist, researcher and educator in art and science and art and technology with a long history of art and the network.  He created the MARCEL network for artistic collaboration in 2000, http://www.mmmarcel.org/, and is currently its international coordinator.  He and several partners in France, the UK, and elsewhere are currently building mmmap, the MARCEL Multi-Media Art Platform, a multipoint creative online tool for artistic collaboration and research on the network as an artistic space, https://www.map-marcel.fr/doku.php.  Given the profound societal transformation we are now living, a period of experimentation is essential in order to find our way through it using the tools at hand to their fullest potential and inventing new ones.  This is one of the fundamental roles of art.  The long-term effort is to create a part of the high bandwidth network as a public good for culture; art, science, research and education as a place for that experimentation.

Foresta is also part of a “Groupe de réflexion” on man and nature at the Collège de France, an art and science group probing the changes taking place today from many disciplinary directions.  A book, “Sapiens; Métamorphose ou Extinction” was published in February 2022.  That effort is one among many promoting collaboration between art and science and cross-disciplinary approaches to a better understanding our place in a changing world.