Beyond "East" and "West" through "The Eternal Network": networked artists’ communities as counter-publics of Cold War Europe

This chapter considers how "networked communities" (Findeisen and Zimmermann 2015) of post avant-garde artists in the Cold War period reconceptualised frontiers of mind and territory names "East" and "West" particularly in Europe. Preceded and overlapped by events such as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the Televised Moon Landing of 1969, and as illustrated by Robert Filliou's 1968 conception of The Eternal Network, the 1960s-1970s was an expansive period for the artistic counter-culture (Roszak 1995) in both Europe and the United States of America in particular. Artists arguably resisted state-driven Cold War propaganda, on both sides, through intervening in communication systems such as postal, radio, telephonic and television transmission to develop their own horizontally distributive "distance art and activism" (Chandler and Neumark 2006, p. 4). This networked approach of "artists turning communication media into their art media" (ibid., p. 3) is also where "art, activism and media fundamentally reconfigure each other" (ibid.) as the post avant-garde aspires to become a counter-cultural experience of global, peer-to-peer communication.