Post Tagged with: "grinding"

Interview Stelarc, A Grinder Before It Was Cool

Wired has a profile of performance artist Stelarc, whose extreme body modifications predate the modern grinder movement by several years. He’s probably most famous for the third ear that he has on his arm, which is partly surgically constructed and partly cell-grown.

“At present it’s only a relief of an ear,” Stelarc said. “When the ear becomes a more 3-D structure we’ll reinsert the small microphone that connects to a wireless transmitter.” In any Wi-Fi hotspot, he said, it will become internet-enabled. “So if you’re in San Francisco and I’m in London, you’ll be able to listen in to what my ear is hearing, wherever you are and wherever I am.” [...]

William Gibson, a friend of Stelarc’s, once wrote: “Stelarc’s art never seemed futuristic to me. If it were, I doubt I would respond to it. Rather, I experience it in a context that includes circuses, freak shows, medical museums, the passions of solitary inventors. I associate it with da Vinci’s ornithopter, eccentric nineteenth-century velocipedes, and Victorian schemes for electroplating the dead — though not retrograde in any way. Instead, it seems timeless, as though each performance constitutes a moment equivalent to those collected in Humphrey Jennings’ Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Man-Machine in the Industrial Revolution — moments of the purest technologically induced cognitive disjunction.”

Wired Underwire: For Extreme Artist Stelarc, Body Mods Hint at Humans’ Possible Future

Meanwhile, doctors have grown an ear on a woman’s arm. I was a little confused by the story, but I think what they’re doing is growing the ear on her arm with intention of moving it to her head later.

October 5, 2012 0 comments

Shannon Larratt Interview On The DIY Transhumanist/Grinder/Biohacker Movement

BME founder Shannon Larratt was interviewed by io9 about the grinder/biohack movement:

Making a wristwatch implant would actually be quite simple. The electronics need to be as small as possible of course. Even though implants can be quite large (a single double-D breast implant has more volume than many laptop computers at this point), if the implant is kept thin it will be inconspicuous, perhaps even undetectable without touching it. So the wristwatch would be built with surface mount components in a tight package. The LEDs would easily be visible through the skin — it’s quite possible that some small backlit panels could be visible through the skin but simple round or bar-shaped LEDs would be my choice for a watch.

One could do a numeric display, a geeky binary display, or even just use a single light and flash the time with morse code. You’re probably not going to leave the light on all the time in order to preserve the battery, but triggering could be accomplished in many ways. An accelerometer could be used to trigger it with a specific arm motion, a pressure switch could respond to touch, or in my case, or a magnetic switch could respond to me waving my finger over it — there are many options, but whatever is chosen would have to be versatile enough to also allow the time to be set.

Finally — and this is the biggest issue — there’s power. You could have yourself cut open have the battery replaced — but there’s no need for that. Inductive charging is easy to build, and wireless chargers are commonplace these days — personally I would include such a circuit.

Full Story: io9: What does the future have in store for radical body modification?

Update: Here’s the full, uncut transcript of the interview
Previously:

Short Documentary On The DIY Bodyhacking/Transhumanist Underground

World’s First Eyeball Tattoo

Shannon Larratt Leaves BME

October 1, 2012 0 comments