He faulted contemporary art for having largely ignored these means of communication, which had transformed everyday life and added an entirely new dimension to reality: the virtual space of information and communication, which Forest likened to new territory "dredged from the void." In order to promote artistic research into the sensory, cognitive, psychological, symbolic, aesthetic, spiritual, and social properties of electronic telecommunications media, Forest and Professor Mario Costa of the University of Salerno formed the International Research Group for the Aesthetics of Communication in 1983. They were joined by the media theorist Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and a wide array of artists including many of the pioneers of telecommunications and telematic art. Among those affiliated with the group at some point were Robert Adrian X, Roy Ascott, Stéphan Barron, Jean-Pierre Giavonelli, Eric Gidney, Natan Karczmar, Tom Klinkowstein, Mit Mitopoulos, Antoni Muntadas, David Rokeby, Christian Sevette, Norman White, and Horacio Zabala. Forest himself was the author of the group's manifesto, "For an Aesthetics of Communication," published in 1985. This important text laid out his vision of the metacommunicational artwork, whose goal is not to convey any particular message or imagery, but to create experimental micro-environments of communication in which certain salient, normally hidden features of the media themselves may be discovered. This usually involves the artist's conception of special media configurations of his own, composed of different elements of existing media deviated from their normal uses. The work is created by the users of system; it emerges from their consciousness-raising interaction with the system and each other. The artist's role is that of an "architect of information." Forest's own metacommunicational artworks fall into three broad categories. The first involves media performances that are somewhat like technological versions of the koans that Zen masters ask their students in order to elicit sudden flashes of insight into existence and surrounding reality. In Forest's case, such works often focus on altered perceptual realities of time and space in the media environment. Notable examples include "Immediate Intervention" (1983), "Here and Now" (1983), "Electronic Blue, In Homage to Yves Klein" (1984), "Celebration of the Present" (1985), and "The Broken Vase" (1985). Another type of work involves whimsical exercises in telepresence and long-distance agency.