Telematic cultures, as defined by Vivian Sobschack, are the ones in which »television, video cassettes, video tape recorder/players, video games and personal computers all form an encompassing electronic system whose various forms 'interface' to constitute an alternative and absolute world that uniquely incorporates the spectator/user in a spatially decentered, weakly temporalized and quasi-disembodied state«. The individual is within the framework of such a culture defined as the terminal for multiple networks, an interface between different mediathic realms, while the public sphere is conceived as fully mediated by the Cyberspace, the Web, Net, Grid or Matrix, which are, in fact, just contemporary names for what already in the fifties Marshal McLuhan has named as agora cathodique. Critical perspectives on telematic cultures, on social and technological formations that lie beneath them, are to face this reinforcement of the disembodied sphere of the visual, as the strongest effect of the contemporary mass media which constantly render virtual whatever comes to their range of influence. On that ground, they are, further on, by reviewing creative artistic practices of today, to look for the means of reinventing the methods of what Foucault used to call 'the care of the self', one's fully embodied self, the body which is not just the surface for inscription of different codes, but also a source of individuation and the ground for an ethical stance. And, finally, they are also to serve as a vector of transmission between the contemporary art practices and classical discourses on body and technology.

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