BoingBoing Goes BodyArt
Maintaining an ever-open and curious eye towards Body Art
BoingBoing has their fingers on the pulse of many modern currents, including body modification. With connections direct to the extreme cutting edge, they link to where bodies are explored, modified, digitally photographed and uploaded.
Your rights to do these things to your own body is debated and defended, along with your right to display the results. Browsing this sort of material is not always recommended before lunch but it can give you that perfect topic to talk about around the water cooler.
Here are books that discuss a wide range of body modifications. Re/Search's MODERN PRIMITIVES not only documents many forms of body art, but since its publications in 1989, it's become a sort of handbook for body mods.
This book is often credited with helping body art move into the mainstream in modern American culture. Not only do you get a good rundown of nearly all the forms of widely practiced body art, you get a who's who of where these practices came from and why people do these things. This book was the one that introduced me to the photography of Charles Gatewood.
The Inked and the Geeky - dermagraphical graffiti
Literally, geeky tattoos on nerdy people. Or maybe that's nerdy tattoos on geeky people. Or inks on geeks. Or words on nerds. Or something like that...
- Nerd tattoo gallery
When brains and art collide in the dermis. - Geek tatts
Geek tattoos. - Full-back HTML tattoo
HTML for your backpiece... bet you wish you'd thought of something that geeky. - Random excellent nerd tattoo
Nice back of neck tattoo. - Mac tattoo roundup
You've got the computer, you've got the laptop, you've got the iPod, you've got the stock. But do you have the tattoo? - Fan-art tattoo gallery
It's no more or less weird than anything else that fans do in the name of their fandom. These just can't be resold on eBay later... - Star Wars-inspired tattoos
Tattoos and Toys sports an impressive (but hard-to-navigate) collection of tattoos inspired by toys, movies and cartoons: Star Wars, GI Joe, Transformers, and others. - Snakes on a Plane - The Tattoo
Fans will ink ANYTHING on themselves... really... - MC Router, "queen of nerdcore," just got this new tattoo.
This tattoo is 900 petabytes of awesome. - Boing Boing: Interview with artist Mitch O'Connell
Craig Yoe interviews the excellent illustrator Mitch O'Connell on the Arf Lovers blog. Mitch has a new book out called Mitch O'Connell: Tattoos. - Tattoo of text under peeling skin
This gentleman's tattoo makes it look as if he's got a bunch of handwriting under his skin. - Tattoo typography
Here's an interesting photo-book about tattoo typography -- "Body Type: Intimate Messages Etched in Flesh," by Ina Saltz (09-2006). - What do you do with an old Transformer tattoo?
Two options: (1) Saw off your leg and sell it to a Dreamworks publicist before July 4. (2) Transform it (heh) into an even bigger tattoo.
BME founder, the late Shannon Larratt put out MODCON, which really takes off where MODERN PRIMITIVES left off. These aren't just little navel piercings, this is subdermal implants, large scale cutting and branding, and amputations.
There isn't much that shocks me about body art, but a few things in this book did... which is probably why I like it so much. If you've ever wanted to explore bodily rights and just what people will do to their bodies, just because they can and they want to, this is your guidebook.
Human Evolution - When body art and science collide, merge or just get it on...
Like something out of a David Cronenberg movie there are always humans who are going to explore the design limits and redesign possibilities of the body.
- Subdermal implants: body-mods that give you cool lumps
Subdermal implants: bringing horns to the forehead of the kid at coffee shop in a town near you. - Pierce-nez eyeglasses
frameless eyeglasses held in place by a piercing - Piercing wannabees and near-fatal magnets
A case of possible devolution via wanting to just imitate piercings. - Brazilian magazine devoted to plastic surgery chic
Leave it to Brazil to break publishing ground as of yet untouched in the US. - X-ray piercing pictures
See the fusion of metal and flesh. - Tattoos for diabetes maintenance
Would you rather check your tattoo instead of pricking your finger? - Printable organs
And what color would you like your new liver to be? - Identical twins
This one might just be a little bit too much like Dead Ringers to me. - Biomedical Image Awards
The selections in the Wellcome Trust's Biomedical Image Awards 2006 are truly incredible. From bugs to brain cells, colon cancers to collagen fibrils, this look at the natural world just boggles my mind. - Wired News on future body hackers
Chris Oakes wrote an interesting feature for Wired News about state-of-the-art bionics and individuals who are itching to upgrade their own bodies whether they "need" it or not. The article, titled "What if Bionics Were Better" is the final part in W - Artist Andrew Krasnow's "Skin Works: Of The Flesh"
Artist Andrew Krasnow crafts art objects from human skin. An exhibit of his work will run at Los Angeles art gallery A.D.M. Project from Oct 27 through Dec. 14. - Body Hacking⨠& â¨Functional Body Modification
Quinn Norton's slides from her remarkable Body Hacking talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference. - Stelarc, posthumanist and artist, implants "third ear" inside his arm
Earlier this year, Stelarc finally found a medical doctor willing to implant a cell-cultivated ear beneath the skin on the artist's forearm. - Ten amazing body-modded people
Several are familiar freaks previously seen on BMEzine.com or various TV shows, but seeing them all together is quite a treat.
On the Legal Front
As with all they do, BoingBoing often reports on the legal logistics of body art.
- "Do Not Resuscitate" tattoo
This is a tattoo that Mary Wohlford, 80, has emblazoned on her chest. Wohlford, of Decorah, Iowa, got the ink in February to hopefully eliminate the possibility of any Terri Schiavo-esque controversy about her medical wishes should she become unable - German gov blocks access to body mod sites
German gov blocks domestic access to body modification web sites - Finnish anti-appropriationist painter plagiarizes from BMEZine
Painter claims his art is entirely original, despite using an online image in it. - Humanist transhumanism: Citizen Cyborg
Surely the ability to determine your own genome, the ability to choose to modify your physical self and to make the choices for your children are as fundamental civil liberties as the right to speak and assemble and otherwise author your own destiny. - Tattoo artist sues for copyright of NBA star's arm
So, just how can you "use" that tattoo on your arm, you know, the one you paid for? - Ink is speech
Fighting the battle to bring legal tattooing to the State of South Carolina. - Body art group slammed over language
Flame wars are more like culture clashes online. - Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights con, May 26-28
James Hughes, author of the remarkable book _Citizen_Cyborg_ is chairing a conference called "Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights" at Stanford on May 26-28. - Chinese professor strips in art class
Mo Xiaoxin, a professor at Jiangsu Teachers University of Technology in Changzhou, China, stripped naked during a class on "body art" to "challenge taboos," according to the Beijing News. - Copyright and tattoos: who owns your skin?
Jordan Hatcher did a fascinating presentation on copyright and tattoos at Gikii, last week's UK conference on copyright law. Hatcher explores the legal ramifications of tattoo artists who assert copyright over their works after they've been inked, ob
Dem Bones Dem Bones - when the body becomes art
- Trephanation kit
This magnificent trephination set, circa 1750, was up for auction on eBay recently. Trephination is an ancient surgical procedure where a hole is drilled in the skull. - Please don't carve an emoticon in my skull until I'm dead.
So I go on a Google tangent looking for milling machines used in bone harvesting and shaping, because I'm really curious about what they look like and stuff, and I come across this research project for a haptic/vr temporal bone surgery simulator. - Jessica Joslin's bone sculptures
Artist Jessica Joslin makes sculptures out of bones and other found objects. - Photos of bone-chapel in Czech Republic
Chandeliers made of bones, walls lined with skulls and femurs, wow wow wow. - Healing bones by printing out new ones
It seems like there's nothing inkjet printers can't do - Trepanation
BoingBoing Digital boldly goes where only a few men have gone before - Realistic skull tattoo on face
This gentleman sports a tattoo that looks like a skull. - Tooth "tattoos"
The Heward Dental Lab in Salt Lake City specializes in "dental tattoos," which are actually custom hand-painted crowns.
