Sad news: Shannon Larratt will no longer be working for BME, or writing about body modification online at all, after a lengthy dispute with his ex-wife and BME co-founder:

After a personally difficult legal dispute over BME, I’ve had to face the potentially insurmountable reality of being massively in debt, and I have chosen to transfer the business to Rachel (the details of this deal are sealed, so please don’t ask). Within the month my role at BME will come to an end, and new staff (made up largely of people who’ve been working on BME for some time as well) will be taking over. I will no longer be writing online about body modification, although I will be maintaining my regular blog and other projects of course, as well as working on several body modification book projects which I am eager to complete.

Full Story: Mod Blog

Larratt’s own site

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I hate to admit it, but sometimes I do learn things from OldMedia. Take the the recent episode of the Australian 60 Minutes about body modification, “Freaking Out”. Sure, it had the same examples of body-moding we’ve all been seeing for years. But it also featured an interview with Steve Haworth, who I’m ashamed to admit, I’d previously been completely ignorant of. This part of the transcript introduces him:

“PETER OVERTON: If body modification is an art form, then Steve Haworth is a modern master. In a makeshift surgery at his home in Arizona he transforms thousands of individuals helping them find their inner freak. Remarkably, he has no formal medical qualifications, and is entirely self-taught.”

Full Story: Grinding.

Pictured above: my friend Rex Church, who is one of Haworth’s clients.

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Homosexual relationships are banned in Iran, but the country allows sex change operations and hundreds of men have elected for surgery to change their lives.

“He wants to kill me. He keeps telling me to come home so he can kill me. He had put rat poison in my tea.”

For Ali Askar, at age 24, the decision to become a woman came at a heavy cost. His father threatened to kill him if he went ahead with surgery.

Now renamed Negar, she says she would not have had the operation if she did not live in Iran.

“If I didn’t have to operate, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t touch God’s work.”

But as Ali, he felt he had no identity.

Full Story: BBC

(via Disinfo)

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Female ejaculation is considered rare in the west, and even, by some, abnormal. In Rwanda, however, it is the norm.

Social scientists Marian Koster and Lisa Price of Wageningen University in the Netherlands interviewed 11 women and two men in Rwanda about “gukuna imishino”, which is the practice of elongating the labia minora, the inner vaginal lips. “The Rwandan women and men we interviewed were clear in their opinion that all Rwandan women are able to ejaculate, the ejaculation being different from the mere squirting of urine,” Koster says. “Elongated labia are seen as crucial in this respect.”

From around puberty onwards, Rwandan girls start stretching the labia minora using plant extracts with antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties, with the aim of achieving a length of about 5 centimetres. The WHO considers this practice as a form of genital mutilation, but Koster and Price argue that it should be reclassified as genital modification. “We believe that there are cultural practices that are not harmful to women’s integrity and rights,” says Koster.

Their interviewees reported, and Koster and Price speculate, that labial elongation increases the sexual pleasure of both sexes. “Since the labia minora swell during sexual excitement, there is a larger surface area for penile friction during coitus,” they write

From: New Scientist.

(via Grinding).

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Full Image: ModBlog.

(via Notes From Somewhere Bizarre).

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Official web site.

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I have a piece up in the new issue of Key 64:

Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, born Jacqueline Breyer in 1969, passed away Tuesday 9th October 2007. Lady Jaye and her partner Genesis Breyer P-Orridge spent the past several years living an “art as life project” sometimes called “Breaking Sex.” The couple altered their own appearances to look more and more like each other, forming a third ” pandrogenous” entity they called Breyer P-Orridge.

Lady Jaye met Genesis in 1993 and the couple began to align their appearances. Eventually, Genesis had gone as far as he could in making himself more feminine without surgery. So for their tenth anniversary, on Valentines Day 2003, the couple got matching breast implants together.

Full Story: Key 64.

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“Marketing experts know that consumers use products to help construct personal identity. When a person decides to purchase a Hummer rather than a Prius, for instance, that person is also buying a certain lifestyle or attitude. And with so many products to choose from, it is easy to change one’s identity by simply purchasing different products.

But what about tattoos? For marketing researchers, tattoos present interesting questions because unlike clothes, jewelry, cars and even houses, tattoos do not change. They are permanent, infinitely customized and essentially immutable products. A University of Arkansas researcher says people use tattoos as a way to find meaning, permanence and stability - and thus a coherent identity - in an increasingly complex and fragmented world. “

(via Physorg)

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I actually kinda like this one, but there are some pretty bad ones here. Some pics are NSFW.

See more: Type Brighter.

(Thanks Jessica!)

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Earlier this year, Stelarc finally found a medical doctor willing to implant a cell-cultivated ear beneath the skin on the artist’s forearm.

[…]

Stelarc is apparently planning to go through a few more surgeries to give it more definition.

“He’s also going to implant a mic inside the ear that will connect to a bluetooth transmitter, so the ear can broadcast audio from the internet wirelessly,” explains former BB guestblogger and sometimes Stelarc collaborator Karen Marcelo. “That Stelarc, always got something up his sleeve! He likes to say that too. ”

Full Story: Boing Boing.

(Thanks Natasha!)

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Dubdermals are old news in my book, but Wired News has this piece that makes it more compelling:

Shannon Larratt was a child when he first dreamed about modifying his body. When his father would make pizza and sit with him to watch Star Trek, Larratt was captivated by the diverse looks of people from other worlds. He was particularly taken with the forehead ridges.

In Larratt’s ideal world, “Everyone looks interesting, everyone looks different.” So when body modification artist Steve Haworth invented a way to implant jewelry under human skin, Larratt jumped on the opportunity.

Full Story: Wired News.

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Transsexuals are permitted to have sex-change operations in Iran by the decree of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself. The founder of the Islamic republic passed a fatwa allowing one transsexual woman to have the operation because sexual ambiguity made it impossible for her to carry out her religious duties properly. Iran now has dozens of people who have had a sex change.

The Independent.

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Speaking of P. Orridge, here’s a new interview with him:

I had an epiphany about the nature of the words themselves. Each word behaves in ways that attest to the idea that in a very particular way it, THE WORD is alive and can even have its own agenda as a result of repetition and transmission in ever more compressed layers over linear time whilst apparently serving the message of the being using the word. I believe words are alive then in a very literal sense, and because each word is alive it�s another hologram, another iceberg. Everyone who has ever said that particular word has invested it with their story and anyone who hears that word puts the context of their life around that word. So each word is a memory box and a prophecy box simultaneously. They�re very precious, powerful particles of thought and energy.

Link (via New World Disorder)

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The word biopunk has been bandied about for some time now. Google already has over 1,000 results for a search on the term. R.U. Sirius wrote a piece in Rolling Stone a couple years ago about the possibility of garage biotechnologists, a movement he called biopunk. But I’d like to throw a new meaning for the concept out there: the near future (already here?) biotechnology black market.

The biotechnology market has already captured the imaginations of the business world. For the past few years it’s been hyped as the next big thing, the new dot-com bubble. For instance, Paul Allen wants to turn a neighborhood in Seattle into a biotech industry fueled urbanist utopia.

Ample private and federal investment is being poured into biotech research, but I expect U.S policies banning cloning research and limiting funding for stem cell research will effectively limit the U.S.’s role in biotechnology development. Less restrictive policies and/or cheaper labor will give Europe, Russia, and Asia advantages in the global biotech industry.

But other factors will drive an underground biotechnology market: the crippling expense of prescription drugs, health insurance, malpractice insurance, and student loan debts.

Chemistry students have been making money manufacturing LSD, MDMA, and other illegal drugs for years. But the demand for black market prescription drug clones could create a new use for the college chemistry lab. Imagine thousands of undergrads manufacturing HIV meds and other expensive drugs for cheap underground resale.

Meanwhile, medical school students, un-licensed doctors, or even licensed doctors trying to keep up with insurance payments will be performing a myriad of unauthorized procedures. Genesis P. Orridge could be at the forefront of a movement again. Sex changes are nothing new, but P. Orridge and Lady Jaye’s sex change as installation art project is on the forefront of the body modification movement, which constantly grows more extreme. Face transplants are about to become a reality. But these black market surgical procedures won’t be limited to weird body art projects. Uninsured Americans will be seeking all types of surgical procedures on the black market, and finding students and doctors to perform them will become increasingly easier.

Of course, those policy restrictions will create another biotech black market: clandestine cloning research labs and illegal human testing projects. Illegal human testing is almost certainly already a reality. And even with recent improvements in the job market, there are still thousands of desperate unemployed people to be taken advantage of.

And let�s not forget R.U. Sirius�s frightening prediction from his Rolling Stone article: garage production of germ weapons.

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Mindwarp’s first piece for Key 23 is up, a review of Psychic TV’s recent San Francisco gig.

GPO these days is quite a sight to see (here?s a recent pic), as he continues his experiment of alchemical/surgical/cosmetic fusion with his wife, Lady Jaye Breyer. The aim of this process (which the couple laid out in the 2003 essay ?Breaking Sex!?) is for the two P-Orridges to achieve the creation of a third entity through a process of ?cut-up? of their own bodies, which is making them more and more similar to each other. The two recently got a matched pair of breast implants, and Genesis? surgical alterations so far include a substitution of all his teeth with a set of gold replacements, and enhancements of his cheekbones (and, judging by their size, maybe his lips as well). Down to the smallest choice of gestures, schtick and vocal timbre, Genesis comes across more and more as the lascivious diva who, on some hidden level, he?s been all along.

Link.

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My host won’t let me post pictures from this, so just check it out yourself.
Link (via Notes from Somewhere Bizzare)

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Everyone needs a hobby:

Lieutenant Tom Brazil of the Coast Guard told the Key West Citizen newspaper that a young man, who also had hooks embedded in his heavily pierced and tattooed skin, assured him the group was “just enjoying the afternoon.”

A Coast Guard spokeswoman in Miami said the group had clearly done this before and intended to post photos of themselves on a Web site dedicated to “body modification” — the ritualistic piercing of the body.

Link.

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Bev Tang’s done a nice round-up of body implant art links.

Link.

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“We are our bodies, like it or not…

..it is likely that in a transhuman future the form of the trans- or post-human body will be extremely variable and individual, just as our clothing is today.”

Anders Sandburg

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The Miss World Organizing Committee for Sichuan province has agreed to allow Miss Chen Lili, a 24 year-old transwoman, to compete in the contest.
Link (via Cyborg Democracy)

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“Scientists in the United States have created hybrid human “she-males,” mixing male and female cells in the same embryo, outraging fertility experts and anti-abortionists.”
Link (via Die Puny Humans).

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Body modification guru Shannon Larratt has written an editorial on Better Humans about implants. He argues that wearable and bio aware technologies are more practical, because implants will become obsolete quickly “a fate no self-respecting futurist ever wants to face.”

But let’s assume briefly that we have reached a point at which technology is relatively static in terms of the devices that we seek to implant. Now we have to ask the larger question: Why bother? After all, these gadgets could just as easily be wearable, with projects such as Isa Gordon and Jesse Jarrell’s Psymbiote being excellent examples.

Link.

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I’ve just re-discovered Anders Transhuman Page, an extensive collection of links and resources on life extension, cryonics, nanotechnology, physical and mental enhancements, consciousness, etc.
Link.

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Eric Vinten, “famous for the numerous tattoos that cover his body,” will auction his skin to provide for his children’s future. The rest of Vinten’s body will be buried according to Christian tradition. Although exquisite tattoos have been preserved in the US and Japan, the writer of the article notes that Vinten is likely to have trouble registering his will in Great Britain.
Link (via New World Disorder).

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Engineers at the University of Singapore are researching the possibility of manufacturing human spare parts, such as “human tissue, bone, ligaments, nerves and even extra-strong fillings for decaying teeth.” Some of the parts have been successfully created in laboratory expereriments and are awaiting clinical testing.
Link (via New World Disorder).

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