Tonight at 10:30 CST log on to http://bodysuspension.org/ to view a live suspension performance by Stelarc!
TOKYO – 11 MAY 1980. PHOTO: KENJI NOZAWA
Stelarc has been featured on ModBlog before, most notably in the 2004 video interview he did with Shannon.
Don’t miss out on a chance to watch this event! As mentioned above it will begin streaming LIVE on bodysuspension.org starting at 10:30 CST (11:30 EST).
While Shannon is still out I wanted to drop in with a photo that was submitted to BME yesterday. I found it quite beautiful and wanted to share.
This was sent in by Pink_Jonka in Croatia. There is something so serene about it. While I’ve never suspended, I have been there for several suspension events and there has always been something really beautiful about the atmosphere, the way everyone comes together and supports one another, that I really love.
Photo by Katja Goljat.
See more photos like this in the Suspensions gallery.
Håvve Fjell and Pain Solution are back in the United States soon, touring with The Sqidling Brothers Circus Sideshow, and perhaps most excitingly wrapping up their tour in Dallas for the suscon with a performance with Stelarc (generally considered one of the grandfathers of modern suspension, along with Fakir Musafar). Jump to the website for up-to-date tour info, but here’s what’s been announced:
To get an idea of what Pain Solution‘s shows are like, check out these videos:
And as to the show with Stelarc, I’m not sure what they have planned for Dallas, but here’s what they did in Oslo last year. This is not something you want to miss — it’s one of those “once in a lifetime” events that will change the way you look at suspension. Any performer or practitioner able to make it to Dallas should do everything they can to make it!
The Ocean Beach Pier in San Diego is the largest concrete pier on the West Coast, extending almost two thousand feet into an often epic ocean, the kind of misty scene that deserves a soundtrack fit for a moon landing. Third Eye Perception Flesh Suspension (thirdeyeperception.com; who you may remember for the baby-bouncing superman) chose this modern yet primal landscape as the site for an ideal guerrilla suspension. If you like the picture, don’t miss the video.
It used to be that when you thought of insane over-the-top implementations of body modification and ritual, South Americans couldn’t be beat. But lately when it comes to bringing the crazy, it’s been impossible to the Russians, what with things like freefall suspension and now this four hundred hook suspension, facilitated in part by Modblog regular Maxim Yampolskiy, who is perhaps best known for his creative and innovative silicone implant work.
The idea was born in mid-December 2012 in the mind of Artem Kovalenko (of Krasnodar’s ArtMod Team) who went on to do the suspension. After reading about a 220-hook world record suspension (which I haven’t seen, but you may recall the 178-hook suspension I posted back in 2006, and the 296-hook suspension from later that year), he decided not just to break it, but to completely shatter it. He contacted Max (of Moscow’s Brutal Forms Group) and Renat Khalitov (of Astrakhan’s Blood Brothers Team) and since Max already had a hundred small hooks ready to go that he’d been hoping to use on something like this, he bought three hundred more and a plane ticket. They all got together in Krasnodar on February 13th, 2013, and because of time limitations on when they could use the space, Max and Renat began throwing hooks about two hours after their flights landed!
Having seen some issues with previous high-hook-count suspensions, Max looked at this as a technical challenge, eventually deciding on placing the majority of the hooks in Artem’s back and then more on his legs. Four hundred hooks means four hundred piercings, which is a gruelling thing to go through with or without a suspension — it wasn’t that long ago that four hundred needles would have been enough to land a play piercing world record! The piercings were done like a duet, with Max doing the piercing with the needle, and Renat instantly inserting the hooks, the two of them acting “like a punching machine”. They took occasional breaks, but managed to get all the hooks placed inside six hours. Rigging, using 200 meters of fishing line laid in parallel to save time, added three or four more hours of work.
Unfortunately by the everything was finished, Artem — to say nothing of Max and Renat — was pretty wiped out so the suspension itself was fairly brief (although it went well). When Artem came down, the hooks came out very quickly, being removed within half an hour. To celebrate their success and record breaking, they took off a couple of days to go snowboarding (Krasnodar is not far from Sochi, where the 2014 Olympic Winter Games will be held). Artem was none-the-worse-for-wear and the suspension experience didn’t limit his ability to enjoy the slopes.
The sharp-eyed may have noticed the white rigging plate. Unlike the metal rigging plates that are commonplace, Max has been developing rigging plates and even Gilson safety hooks using very hard and strong industrial plastics. When I saw them I asked Max whether he had concerns about safety and what their breaking point was, and he told me he figures these places are capable up to at least 3.5 tons — in his testing the metal components break before the plastic fails! Contact Max via his Facebook page if you’re interested in getting custom plastic suspension equipment.
Third Eye Perception Suspension (ThirdEyePerception.com) just hosted a touching tandem suspension for their good friend Joey, who has been with the team since their “very rocky start”, and who recently become father to a bouncing baby boy… “Bouncing”, literally, loving bobbing up and down in his jumper, so they wanted to set up a suspension for Joey and his son, combining their overlapping loves of suspension. Third Eye tells me,
“We rigged Joey into a modified face down suspension so that he could see his child and hold him while suspending, and everything went as amazing as could be. It was very emotional, and we all enjoyed seeing Joey lecture his little toddler as to not rushing into getting any tattoos or piercings until he was good and ready. Little Ward smiled the entire time and seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself, as you can see from the other photos, he was smiling the entire time and seemed to really enjoy getting some air while attached to his father.”
“The adorable climax was when after detaching Ward from Joey, he fell right asleep with the most adorable smile on his face.”
Joey (and Ward’s mother as well) both have “straight-world jobs” and are completely dedicated parents who “have given the entirety of themselves into making sure Ward is loved and cared for from the moment he wakes up”, but unsurprisingly they still got feedback on this suspension telling them that it was “child abuse” (among other criticisms). The unfortunate reality is that there have been multiple cases where suspension and body modification interests have played a role in causing people to lose their children, usually in the case of things like this being used as ammunition in bitter divorces by one parent against another. It’s sad for there to be any criticism of something like this suspension, beautiful from the conception, to the realization, to the epilogue.
There are more pictures after the break (and I should add that Joey’s scars on his shoulder blades were done by Pineapple of Shaman Modifications in Austin, Texas). If you have the bandwidth, enjoy the video in fullscreen, as it’s been posted at HD quality.
I haven’t worked up some “I just flew in from Toronto, and boy are my arms tired!” joke for this, but seriously, boy are my forearms and hands tired, because I’ve spent the last day and a half drawing different pictures of suspensions based on the “suspension positions” recently posted to Hook Life by Allen Falkner. There are a few missing, and I didn’t include motion-based concepts like mobiles, spinning beams, and so on — I figured 42 was the right number; you know why — but here we go! By the way, if there’s an interested, I can edit these into a t-shirt design or a poster.
Click to zoom in it nice and big or continue after the break for the same thing with slightly different layout and colors.
