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Recycled, re-engineered and transformed pornography has often been appropriated by many of the industrial music movement’s female personalities who are invested in an anti-censorship discourse. This contrasts with the dominant form of feminism in the 1970s, which railed against the depiction of all aspects of sexuality. Artists Cosey Fanni Tutti, Lisa Carver, Diamanda Galás, Mïrka Lugosi, Antal Nemeth, Diana Rogerson and Jill Westwood challenged the codes of male domination by reconfiguring gender and overturning the violence perpetrated by men within the industrial movement. Following the artistic and cultural context of the 1970s and 1980s, such issues gave rise to the radical performances that are discussed throughout this article.

This paper examines the leading role played by the American mechanical performance group Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) within the field of machine art during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and as organized under the headings of (a) destruction/survival; (b) the cyborg as a symbol of human/machine interpenetration; and (c) biomechanical sexuality. As a manifestation of the era’s “industrial„ culture, moreover, the work of SRL artists Mark Pauline and Eric Werner was often conceived in collaboration with industrial musicians like Monte Cazazza and Graeme Revell, and all of whom shared a common interest in the same influences. One such influence was the novel Crash by English author J. G. Ballard, and which in turn revealed the ultimate direction in which all of these artists sensed society to be heading: towards a world in which sex itself has fallen under the mechanical demiurge.