About Don Foresta

Posted 5 December 2015

Don Foresta is a research artist and theoretician in art using new technologies as creative tools. He is a specialist in art and science whose principal work in the field, “Mondes Multiples” was published in French in 1991. The premise of the book is that we are living a new renaissance and its paradigm is the interactive network. He was a Visiting Research Associate at the London School of Economics and formerly professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts – Paris/Cergy. He now lectures extensively throughout Europe and North America.

He has been working for over 30 years developing the network as an artistic tool and is presently coordinating a permanent high band-width network, MARCEL, for artistic, educational and cultural experimentation. He began the network while invited artist/professor at the National Studio of Contemporary Art, Le Fresnoy, Lille, France and completed it under a UK Arts & Humanities Research Council fellowship at the Wimbledon School of Art in London. MARCEL now has 350 confirmed members in 22 countries, 10 of whom are now building a high performance multicasting platform for art and education, mmmap, MARCEL Multi-Media Art Platform.

His first on-line exchange in 1981 was between the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT where he was a fellow and the American Center in Paris where he was director of the Media Art program. He was a commissioner to the 42nd Venice Biennial in 1986 where he built one of the first computer networks between artists, an effort he has expanded as the technology has evolved.

Foresta is a graduate of the University of Buffalo, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and holds a doctorate degree from the Sorbonne in Information Science. He has both US and French nationalities and was named “Chevalier” of the Order of Arts and Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.