Virilio, Stelarc and 'Terminal' technoculture

Comparing the ways in which the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio and t he Australian cybernetic performance artist Stelarc criticize or defend tec hnological cultural practices, this article argues that Virilio's ambiguous responses to avant-garde art highlight his key ideas far move clearly than his single-minded critique of 'terminal' mass-cultural practices-without a ny relationship to art - in Polar Inertia and Open Sky. Virilio's The Art of the Motor attacks the strategies of 20th-century techn ological avant-gardes (such as Futurism and the work of Stelarc) for their apparent eugenicist and fascist sympathies, but Virilio's more recent inter views in Cybermonde and Voyage d'hiver defend the ways in which the pre-tec hnological avant-gardes (such as Impressionism) resist the realist perspect ive of photography, and argue that the technological arts should offer simi lar resistance to the impact of cyberculture. Whereas Virilio concludes tha t such technological 'resistance' is probably impossible, Stelarc's recent research identifies exceptions to Virilio's rules.