ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how networked communities of post avant-garde artists in the Cold War period reconceptualised frontiers of mind and territory named “East” and “West”, particularly in Europe. Positioning the launch of Sputnik 1 as a paradigm shift in planetary consciousness and telecommunications, Roddy Hunter takes Robert Filliou’s 1968 conception of The Eternal Network as an emblematic post avant-garde response of working in distributed collaboration across the former East/West divide. The analyses of chosen examples will consider whether artists’ attempts to work through horizontal, distributive networks arguably constituted a “second public sphere” anticipating peer-to-peer networks of now ubiquitous globalisation.
In memory of Norbert Klassen (1941–2011)
