We’re working our way through submissions! Thanks to everyone who has emailed so far.
The initial goal of this 65-needle play piercing sent in by Elly was to see how many piercings Phebe could handle. They still don’t know: the team ran out of needles before Phebe tapped out.
Elly alternated piercing with Kat, and they were assisted by Connor to help the two-hour piercing marathon — set to Florence + the Machine — go smoothly. This was the biggest set they’d ever done, and we’ll leave it to Elly to say how it went:
Overall, it was one of the most beautiful experiences that we have all been involved with, and we wanted to share it with a community of people who would understand how special it was for all of us.
Additional photos and a video (filmed by Connor, edited by Phebe) below.
Want to be featured in the ModBlog? Send submissions to [email protected].
Dana and Cherish, two seasoned practitioners from the Portland area, made their way to the Ontario Suspension Convention this year — not just to support others, but to step into the experience themselves. Like many who spend their time behind the scenes facilitating powerful moments for others, this was a rare chance to set down their roles, take off the gloves, and feel the weight and release of hooks in their own skin. OSC offered them something practitioners don’t often get: space and support to reconnect with the personal, emotional, and transformative core that brought them to this work in the first place.
With the first month since our relaunch under our belt I must apologize for not getting this specific post together sooner. Please join me in thanking and congratulating Cherish on being the first BME Girl to grace the front page of BME.
I’ve been fascinated by suspension since I was a teenager, but was never really able to connect with the right people to be able to experience it until 2020, when I met Dana. He invited me to help out and hang out (ha) during a little backyard suspension gathering and I fell in love with everything about it. When he moved out here a while later and we started working together, he kind of absorbed me into his team that has since been renamed Cryptid Creek Suspensions. Now we facilitate suspensions pretty well year round, weather pending, so I’ve had the chance to learn a lot over the past few years.
OSC was my first actual Suscon, by far the largest suspension event I’ve attended to date and I’m so deeply happy I was able to go! I was so excited at the end of each day that I was just buzzing, ready to get back the next morning and do it all again. It felt like finally coming home, but for the first time and I wanted as much of that feeling as I could soak up.
I had not really met Alex before the day of my cube suspension, but I followed him on instagram for years and was moved by how he can turn people into living works of art so I knew I wanted to do something different. The three of us, Alex and Dana and I went to lunch that day and made a loose plan to make it look like I was floating or falling in water and that was that. It was such a beautiful experience all around. It was my first suspension in a cube as well as the most hooks I’ve taken at once. I also couldn’t really move so this particular suspension required me to surrender to the experience in a way I hadn’t before. Once the table was fully lowered and everything was double checked, Alex and Dana sat in front of me and talked with me for a little bit, just being the kind and supportive and lovely people they are. It was one of my favorites of the many sweet moments I got to share throughout the weekend.
OSC was life changing for me, sincerely. I think of all of the beautiful things I witnessed or had the honor of being part of often and I look forward to going back when I have the opportunity.
An X-ray of Anastasia Synn’s arm. In this photo, 20 implants can be seen, about half of which are microchips. (Courtsey of Anastasia Synn)
When biohacker and magician Anastasia Synn holds her phone over her heart, it speaks: “This is the day I married my best friend.” Her wedding video begins to play.
A small, glass-encased microchip implanted under her skin holds close the memory of her marriage to fellow magician The Amazing Johnathan. Next to it, another implant holds his ashes. They were previously implanted in her arm, alongside a magnet, so Johnathan could keep performing his favorite trick after his 2022 death.
“After my husband died, I wanted to have his ashes implanted, and it just made sense to have our wedding video, have his funeral video,” Synn said. “I had a chip that told his favorite joke, and I have one in my hand that calls his phone. I don’t scan them all the time, because it’s emotional for me still.”
The microchips — more specifically, radio frequency identification tags, which operate without a power source — can be programmed to trigger different actions. Synn had her first chip trigger a fat noise on her phone. Some of her chips are functional, like the one that serves as her housekey.
Though functionality would become the dominant use of RFID chips, the first human implantation was an artistic endeavor by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac in 1997. Kac implanted an RFID chip meant for animals into his ankle, and added himself to a U.S. pet ID registry in a project titled “Time Capsule.” He still has the implant today.
Eduardo Kac inserting his RFID chip in 1997. (Courtesy of Eduardo Kac)
In 1998, University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick had a small RFID tag implanted in his arm for 10 days. He, not Kac, is commonly identified as the first human to receive such an implant. Because the chips are unpowered, they are limited in range. Still, Warwick’s chip could be programmed to open doors ahead of him and log into computers, both of which remain popular applications of RFID implants.
When the DIY-cybernetics community coalesced around implanted chips, they followed in Warwick’s footsteps, creating new ways to interact with their environment and devices. At home and in garages, they pursued a transhumanist vision by pushing the limits of human capability. It was in this environment that Amal Graafstra, who had his first chip implanted in 2005, decided to start Dangerous Things, now a leading RFID implant manufacturer.
“I started seeing a lot of people doing implant installations using stuff they were pulling out of car keys, doing it in a haphazard way,” Graafstra said. As a business, he wanted to “focus on two things: One, making sure the thing people are putting in their body is actually safe, and two, the way they’re getting installed is actually safe.”
Constructing body-safe chips was straightforward enough: Dangerous Things source their own materials before manufacture and do batch testing for quality control. Nothing goes in that isn’t vetted, and defects are caught early — Synn herself prefers Dangerous Things’ glass-encased RFID chips for longevity.
Safe installation would take a bit more work. Even the easy installs, like smaller chips that can be inserted with a needle, require sterility and a level of anatomical knowledge. Graafstra turned to piercers, attending the annual Association of Professional Piercers conference and explaining the technology.
The VivoKey Apex, currently the most advanced RFID implant sold by Dangerous Things. (Courtesy of VivoKey Technologies)
Today, Dangerous Things has an array of installation partners — body modification artists who can safely install the chips. One of them is Katie Lynn Patterson, a Texas-based body piercer at Stubborn Anchor Studios, who does a few installations a month. While she doesn’t have implants herself, she sees biohacking as a natural extension of body modification.
“I was so in love with the idea that a human can customize themselves, push their bodies to their limits, and ascend to a higher state of mind,” she said. “That later came to include embracing the modern marriage between body modification and technology, and its relation to the future of biohacking.”
According to Patterson, healing and aftercare for the microchip implants is relatively fast — full healing usually takes up to four weeks with precautions like cleaning the implant site and minimizing movement. The wound itself typically closes within a week, but the body needs more time to create a pocket of scar tissue that helps anchor the device. While the procedure has similar risks to getting a piercing — rejection, infection, migration, irritation, and scarring — these can be minimized by proper, safe installation from an experienced artist.
Though Graafstra would eventually come to work closely with body modification professionals like Patterson, he didn’t consider himself part of the body modification community, at least at first. He had no tattoos or piercings, seeing them as an aesthetic addition he had no interest in. Shortly after his first implant in 2005 went viral, however, BME covered the story.
“It never really crossed my mind as a body mod in that way — it was, for me, just a practical, functional thing,” Graafstra said. “It really opened me up to the idea that there might be a philosophical and psychological aspect to this, rather than just the pragmatic aspect of enhancement capabilities.”
For Graafstra, the philosophical aspect now has a new dimension: With the rapid rise of generative AI, he’s concerned that verifying someone’s identity, or even humanity, online is growing increasingly difficult. While some have proposed biometric data as a better identification tool, Graafstra’s not convinced. It’s too easy to fake, he says, and erodes an individual’s ability to remain private — with gait analysis and facial recognition, any camera is a means for revealing identity. He argues that public key encryption, like that used for accessing Bitcoin wallets, could be a solution.
The biggest downside of such systems is their unbreakableness: “if you lose your key, you’re fucked,” Graafstra said. But if the key is stored on an implanted RFID tag, “your digital identity and your biological identity are together.”
It’s not something he expects to see anytime soon, if ever. But it is an inversion of a commonly expressed fear about microchip implants.
The concerns have led to legal action: 13 states have issued preemptive bans on businesses requiring employees to get chipped. In 2019, Nevada went further, introducing an Assembly bill threatening anyone who established or participated in a voluntary implantation program with a felony conviction. Though it passed unanimously in the Assembly, it faced a harder fight in the Nevada Senate when local biohackers showed up to counter the bill.
Synn, who had just returned to Las Vegas after touring with her husband, attended at the urging of two biohacker friends. She was frustrated to see that misunderstandings of the technology seemed to be a major motivation for the bill.
“I babbled for, like, eight minutes straight without letting them get a word in edgewise,” Synn said. “And then I stopped. One senator looks at me, and she just laughs, and looks at everyone else. And she goes ‘ok, so, wow, thank you. We did not know any of that, thank you.’ And that senator voted against the bill.”
Synn posing with a syringe used to insert certain types of microchips. (Courtsey of Anastasia Synn)
The law Nevada eventually passed only restricted coerced implantation, in line with other states’ bans, and even included language clarifying that it did not forbid voluntary implants. Synn was even invited back to talk to legislators about transhumanism.
It’s a moment she’s proud of. Synn herself had been somewhat skeptical at first, but quickly fell in love with the magnets and chips she had implanted. She now has so many she’s lost the exact count, but it’s somewhere around 54. And she’s always happy to “spread the cyborg love” by giving others their first implant.
“It’s fun just to make yourself something more than you are,” she said. “I don’t charge people for it, and usually I even give them the chips for free … so I feel like I’m the spreader of the cyborg myth. You want to become a cyborg? I got you. It’s free. I’ll help you out, right here, right now.”
Some suspensions are planned down to the last detail—others arise suddenly, yet carry just as much meaning. For Kyle and Aly, what began as a spontaneous idea became a deeply symbolic expression of shared history and emotional connection. The number of hooks told a story only they could read—one of trust, synchronicity, and the power of finding each other in such a short time, yet with such lasting impact.
Kyle and Aly are also practitioners here in Ontario and work with the Ontario Suspension Collective. If you’re in the area looking for suspension they’re a fantastic crew with semi-regular events.
Facilitators and practitioners—the very people who bring so many suspensions to life—often pour their energy into others, quietly setting aside their own opportunities. Brenton and Brittany are one such example. Traveling all the way from Houston, TX, they came to the Ontario Suspension Convention not just to support, but to reconnect and release. In a rare and intimate moment, the two shared a couples suspension that allowed them to step out of their roles as caregivers and into a vulnerable space made just for them. Held aloft— inseparable—floating in the moment.
This was my favorite suspension I’ve done to date. I’ve done well over 100 suspensions at this point in time. I wish I had kept count over the past 16 years. This one was very special. My partner and I both went through some traumatic experiences before finding each other in this capacity. We’ve known each other for over 10 years though. And now together we feel like we can finally breathe and just live our lives. As facilitators we don’t often get the opportunity to let go and have others care for us. I feel like we grew together in that moment and bonded even deeper than we already were. It was like time stopped and everyone and everything around us disappeared and only we existed on those hooks together. I wish we could have stayed in that moment forever.
In 2010, a German study was published involving subjects with tongue piercings. The tongue piercing was used as part of a device designed to relieve obstructive sleep apnea.
Obstructive sleep apnea is a disorder affecting many individuals. Severely affected individuals may suffer from various long-term health issues: cardiovascular, neurological, etc.
Treatments or symptom relief range from the most invasive, surgery, to less invasive lifestyle habit improvements. Other treatments include using continuous positive airway pressure machines or tongue-retaining devices like this one, which uses a suction effect:
So, how was the piercing used to achieve this purpose?
The proposed device is quite simple. Using an elastic band, they fastened the tongue to a mandibular splint (the kind used for bruxism) via the tongue jewelry.
This way, the tongue would theoretically be pulled forward, preventing the back of the tongue from blocking the airway during sleep.
Since the subjects didn’t suffer from any related sleep disorder, not even snoring, the researchers interestingly made them drink alcohol before sleep, as it induces snoring by relaxing various muscles in the area — including the throat and tongue.
They also emphasized that they purposely chose people with existing tongue piercings to avoid “invasive procedures, such as fitting objects with a tongue implant”.
While the idea was interesting and clever, the results unfortunately showed no significant effect, as the back of the tongue was not sufficiently pulled forward by the device. Additionally, the sample size was small and only included 10 people.
With effective suction-based tongue-retaining devices for obstructive sleep apnea available, there’s no clear reason why someone would prefer a custom, tongue-piercing-based device to treat their condition.
However, having an existing tongue piercing — depending on its position — could prevent the use of regular retainers. It also seems plausible that a deep tongue split could potentially interfere with suction-based devices due to a continuous airway formed by the split.
No studies has focused on these specific subjects yet!
There’s something undeniably powerful about watching someone working through the stages of suspension. We all build up ideas about ourselves—what we’re allowed to feel, how much we’re allowed to express, when it’s okay to break. For some, suspension is not about pushing physical limits its about giving you a reason to let yourself overflow uninhibited. Once there you can rage, cry, scream and its not too much. It’s exactly enough.
My feelings have always been big. So big they can be scary. Suspension gives me an outlet for my big feelings in a safe way. It’s a place where I can let those feelings out without feeling like I’m being too much. I can scream and cry and curse people out and it’s okay because I’m literally getting strung up by hooks in my skin. Suspension helps me confront the parts of myself I try to avoid. It helps me make peace with myself.
Some stories take their time, unfolding over decades, through life’s long detours and diversions. But dreams never rest until they’re fully realized. Even after 15 years, Robb knew there was still a suspension experience waiting for him. Something left unfinished, something essential. At the Ontario Suspension Convention this March, he may have finally found what he’s been seeking.
I never intentionally left the suspension scene but also, I was never really in it. All of my suspensions were private. I had never seen another person suspend in real life. Plenty of pictures of people I didn’t know. But I was the only person I knew personally who was into it. Over the years, I thought about suspension often and kept meaning to schedule another but it simply never happened.
My first suspension in 15 years was not exactly how I remembered. It was better. Far less painful than I remembered. Way more euphoric and mind altering. It was such pure bliss to return to something that’s always meant so much to me.
Nothing specific brought me back more than just having the opportunity. How long before my next one? I doubt it’ll be more than a year. I’d love to go up tomorrow! I’ve got a lot on my plate right now but suspension will be staying high on the priority list from here on.
Though Robb’s presence in the suspension community has been quiet until now, it feels safe to say we’ll be seeing much more of him in the future. His full reflection on the experience is up on Instagram (@RavenThePiercer), and it’s worth a watch.
First suspensions are rarely just about the body—they’re a meeting point between the physical and the deeply personal. Stepping into this experience isn’t simply about trying something new, but about stepping outside yourself to a version you had always sensed was waiting.
I’ve had a complicated, on-and-off relationship with intentional, physical pain, and I was very interested in finding a way to enter into that space with it intentionally in a healing way. I also admit I really wanted the community associated with it. In those regards—the release, the enjoyment, and the community, I definitely got everything I’d wanted and more. The release was exactly what I’d hoped for. There was a wall between parts of my inner self that I felt was breached while I was up there. And beyond just enjoying it, I had fun while up there! I loved being swung around by my mentor, Josh, and by Mike. I never wanted to come down! The community was also incredible, and I feel lucky I got to be first exposed to it in a space like Ontario Suscon. I barely knew anybody there, but I felt a close connection of love and camaraderie I felt with everybody in the space was almost instant. It’s an amazing experience to be in a space where everyone has come together and decided to be vulnerable in a shared space, and inherently trust over a hundred people to take care and respect their bodies and experiences. Especially as someone that was just learning to facilitate suspension as well, the number of people that were excited to let me throw a hook for the first time, or run their bio for them when I’d never done it before, was nothing short of amazing.
One of the most powerful things about being at a convention like OSC is the sheer concentration of experience, creativity, and capability in one place. When you’re surrounded by people who not only understand the technical complexities of suspension but are excited by the challenge of something new, ideas can move quickly from imagination to reality. This puppet suspension was one of those ideas—strange, evocative, and technically demanding. But with the right inspiration, the right rigging minds, and a performer willing to give themselves to the vision, it can become something unforgettable.
I was drawn to puppet suspension after hearing about it from Kevin Donaghy when the OSC was having a meet for our Halloween performance, which had my mind wondering how the rigging could work and how could we make it happen, once I saw who all was going to be at suscon I knew I had to do and see what other creative minds could come up with and loved the idea of other OSC members and friends being puppeteers.
The suspension was everything I wanted and more. Already have the gear turning to take this idea to another level hopefully in the near future.
