Mar 21, 2010 0
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye – Trailer from Marie Losier on Vimeo.
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is a documentary in post-production on the lives of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge.
Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
The filmmaker is raising money on Kickstarter, though it looks like they’ve already met their goal.
(via Esoteric Heritage)
Mar 8, 2010 1
Above: Amal Graafstra’s self-administered RFID implant.
It sounds like something from a sci-fi film, but one in four Germans would be happy to have a microchip implanted in their body if they derived concrete benefits from it, a poll Monday showed. [...]
In all, 23 percent of around 1,000 respondents in the survey said they would be prepared to have a chip inserted under their skin “for certain benefits”.
Around one in six (16 percent) said they would wear an implant to allow emergency services to rescue them more quickly in the event of a fire or accident.
And five percent of people said they would be prepared to have an implant to make their shopping go more smoothly.
PhysOrg: One in four Germans wants microchip under skin: poll
(via Chris S.)
See also:
Feb 22, 2010 0
I’m sort of inured to pain by this point. Anesthetic is illegal for people like me, so we learn to live without it; I’ve made scalpel incisions in my hands, pushed five-millimeter diameter needles through my skin, and once used a vegetable knife to carve a cavity into the tip of my index finger. I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot working in the name of progress: I’m Lepht Anonym, scrapheap transhumanist. I work with what I can get.
Sadly, they don’t do it like that on TV. The art of improving the human is shiny and bright in the media. You see million-euro cryogenics policies and hormonal life-extension regimes that only the elite can afford. You see the hypothesis of an immortal silicon body to house your artificially-enhanced mind. You could buy that too, maybe, if you sold most of your organic body and the home it lives in. But you can do something to bring it down a notch: homebrewing.
Read More – h+: Scrapheap Transhumanism
(via Grinding)
See also: Lepht Anonym’s blog.
Feb 16, 2010 0
Not much info about this:
This ThinkAnApp augmented reality tattoo looks like a plain black box, but when placed in front of a webcam, a winged dragon emerges.
Video and more pictures as TrendHunter
(via Chris Arkenberg)
Jan 13, 2010 0
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Thee Psychick Bible (Part 2) from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.
Update: The embedded video isn’t working right now, so try this direct link instead.
Jan 10, 2010 2
Oct 23, 2009 1
Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan put up a post about an extremely brutal hate-crime attack on an openly gay man. The 2-minute news report he embeds is depressing, but there was something to laugh about at the end. The studio interviewed one of the attackers’ friends, who proudly displayed this tattoo.
It’s a tattoo reading “[Thou] shall not lie with a male as one does with a woman. It is an abomination. Leviticus 18:22?. Who else sees the problem here?
Leviticus also forbids tattooing. In the very next chapter.
“Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD. Leviticus 19:28?
The Friendly Atheist: Why is this anti-gay Leviticus tattoo extra absurd?
(via Paul Bingman)
Oct 7, 2009 1
Jeff Kepner gabbed with his brothers and snoozed in a chair at his mom’s house in Manheim Township over the weekend, ordinary activities for a trip back home to see family.
But the 57-year-old former Lancaster resident also showed off his two new hands, which he received in May in Pittsburgh during the nation’s first double hand transplant.
The former McCaskey High School student and retired noncommissioned Air Force officer visited here before he finally returns to his Augusta, Ga., home at the end of this week, following four months of recovery and rehabilitation in Pittsburgh.
Lancaster Online: Ex-county man ready to go home after double-hand transplant
(via Grinding)
Mar 9, 2009 0
A Canadian filmmaker plans to have a mini camera installed in his prosthetic eye to make documentaries and raise awareness about surveillance in society.
Rob Spence, 36, who lost an eye in an accident as a teen-ager, said his so-called Project Eyeborg is to have the camera, a battery and a wireless transmitter mounted on a tiny circuit board. http://www.eyeborgblog.com/
“Originally the whole idea was to do a documentary about surveillance. I thought I would become a sort of super hero … fighting for justice against surveillance,” Spence said.
“In Toronto there are 12,000 cameras. But the strange thing I discovered was that people don’t care about the surveillance cameras, they were more concerned about me and my secret camera eye because they feel that is a worse invasion of their privacy.”
Spence, in Brussels to appear at a media conference, said no part of the camera would be connected to his nerves or brain.
(via Phase II)
Jul 24, 2008 1
Radar has a great long article Genesis P. Orridge up:
He and Breyer wouldn’t actually get to talk to each other until the next evening, when they accompanied Sellers to a party at the S&M club Paddles, jabbering away like kids while Jackie ground the heel of her motorcycle boot into some guy’s testicles. On the morning in question, though, there wasn’t time. Jackie had to go to work, and Gen was on his way out. He hadn’t really come to Terence’s dungeon for punishment, anyway; he’d already had more than enough of that in his life.
(via Tomorrow Museum)
Update: I had only read the first 3/4s of this article last night. The last 1/4 is even more amazing. It contains the first public statements I know of by Gen since Lady Jaye’s death.
This is the best piece of writing I’ve read in a long time.
May 29, 2008 9
Pauly Unstoppable from Canada has got the world’s 1st eye tattoo. The process involves forty insertions of a needle to turn a body-art fan’s eye blue. Pauly said that ‘The procedure was extensively researched and done by people who were aware of the risks & possible complications and that it should not be casually attempted.’
Full Story and More Pics: All Techno Blog
(via Mutans)
May 22, 2008 0
Will this be able to beat a male birth control pill to market?
A 10-minute operation could give men a birth control alternative to a vasectomy as early as next year.
The method involves making a small incision along the testicle into which doctors place a tiny tube.
The tube functions as a filter that blocks sperm, according to medics at the Family Planning Technology Centre in Guangzhou, China.
To stop the effect doctors simply remove the tube again, in contrast to a vasectomy that can be difficult to reverse.
May 15, 2008 4
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 co-owner:
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.
Mar 20, 2008 0
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.”
Pictured above: my friend Rex Church, who is one of Haworth’s clients.
Feb 28, 2008 0
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.
(via Disinfo)
Feb 23, 2008 0
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
(via Grinding).
Jan 9, 2008 0
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 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.
Genesis underwent the most visible changes, but Lady Jaye went through surgeries as well. The plan was not to make one look like the other, but for them to look like each other: to meet in the middle. In an interview with John E. Mitchell Lady Jaye said:
“My nose was made to look somewhat more like Djin’s. My chin was made to look more like Djin’s. Djin had cheek implants that resemble mine. There’s only so much that can be done in that way. We made a decision not to try to go after a conventional idea of beauty. We both could have changed our faces to look like some kind of ideal, but we wanted to look like each other, that was the idea. We didn’t want to look pretty according to someone else’s standard or anything like that.”
“Breaking Sex” was simultaneously an assault on the tyranny of gender and DNA and a deep exploration of Lady Jaye and Genesis’s relationship. In an essay titled “Our Practice in Art” Breyer P-Orridge explained the inspiration for hir art:
The work of William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin has been highly influential to us, particularly in relation to the practice of the “cut-up”. To liberate the word from linearity, they began to cut-up and, incorporating random chance, re-assembled both their own and co-opted literature “…to see what it really says…” They referred to the phenomena of profound and poetic new collisions and meanings that resulted from their intimate collaborations as the “Third Mind”. This was produced with a willingness to sacrifice their own separate, previously inviolate works and artistic “ownership”. In many ways they saw the third mind as an entity in and of itself. Something “other”, closer to a purity of essence, and the origin and source of a magical or divine creativity that could only result from the unconditional integration of two sources.
Breyer P-Orridge created art installations featuring photographs, collages, sculptures and personal items to share the experience of living in pandrogeny. The installations have appeared in galleries in both the US and Europe.
Genesis P-Orridge has not yet, to my knowledge, publicly discussed the question of whether Breyer P-Orridge died along with Lady Jaye. Lady Jaye told Mitchell “We view Breyer P-Orridge as a separate person who is both of us. Neither of us take credit for the work, the work is a melding of both of our ideas which we would not have had singly,” and “Both of us are in all of our art. That third being, Breyer P-Orridge, is always present.”
The idea that Breyer P-Orridge can exist without Lady Jaye seems counter intuitive. But consider this passage from the first Breaking Sex Manifesto:
The common view of cosmetic surgery is the Pamela Anderson archetype. In fact it is incredible how her particular idealized look has spread to hundreds of thousands of women. Almost as if she has cloned herself. Apart from the group idealization of an image made flesh this also culturally engineers a shift in what is an acceptable or desirable way to look both in terms of physiological technique and perceptual aspiration for people across all social and economic boundaries . The drone may mimic the queen.
Lady Jaye Breyer P. Orridge is dead. But she lives on through Genesis, and through the body of work the two created together. I don’t know if this extreme body transformation will catch on. But I’m certain that the sacrifices she made for art were not in vein. Her dedication has raised the bar for everyone.
More information:
John A. Mitchell’s interview with Jady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge.
Mitchell’s article on Breaking Sex.
Breaking Sex section of Genesis P-Orridge’s site.
Sex TV documentary “Breaking Sex” about Breyer P-Orridge (includes excerpt).
(This article original appeared in Key 64)
Dec 20, 2007 2
“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)
Dec 10, 2007 0
I actually kinda like this one, but there are some pretty bad ones here. Some pics are NSFW.
(Thanks Jessica!)
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