Samppa Von Cyborg
Samppa Von Cyborg changes people’s bodies for a living. The Finnish body modification artist can split your tongue in two, remove your nipples, implant stuff under your skin, or do just about anything you can think of to make your various limbs and appendages look slightly different to everybody else’s (within both his personal limitations and the limits of the human body, of course – I doubt he could, or would really want to, swap all your fingers for razor blades).
His is an underground world of home surgery and human polymorphs that operates in the cracks between legislation, where the aesthetics of the body go far beyond dip-dyes and belly button piercings.
The cultural origins of body modification stretch back millennia. It’s an ancient practice found in various peoples the world over, from the lip plates of Ethiopia’s Suri tribe to the neck rings of Burma's Padaung. Nowadays, those traditions have been adapted and evolved to incorporate everything from Japan’s “bagelheads” – people who inject saline solution into their foreheads – to Dennis Avner, AKA Stalking Cat, who, before taking his own life in 2012, reinvented himself as a tiger with the help of cheek and whisker implants, full body tattoos, lip bifurcation, nose flattening, removable claws and a mechanical tail.
“The human body is dying,” says Von Cyborg, lighting a cigarette in his east London home, which doubles up as the studio where he sees his clients. He’s a walking advert for his own style of body art, his face laced with tattoos and piercings, metal-tipped teeth and a bifurcated tongue, meaning it’s been split in two down the middle, leaving it forked, both sides able to move independently of each other. He demonstrates his by sticking each side out and curling them around each other.
His arms are ribbed with spine-like lumps from the silicone implants he’s buried under his skin. One of his signature mods, the subdermal implants come in varying shapes and sizes, from little magnetic squares to Space Invaders the size of your hand.
Samppa and an assistant in his flat-cum-studio
“It’s not natural to sit at a computer or go to the gym,” he says. “Evolution is going downhill. First we got stronger and healthier; now, it’s going the opposite way. In the future people will have arms amputated voluntarily because they can get a better arm. People want better capability – a robotic arm would be more accurate, have more power and a million other uses. The technology exists and they’re using it already for the medical industry.”
The body modification scene is made up of various sub-genres; some like to experiment with cybernetics, while others prefer to focus on fetish or spiritual rituals. There are trans-humanists, influenced by Nietzsche, and modern primitives, inspired by tribal anthropology; bio-hackers, who believe in using technology to enhance the human form, and body hacktivists, who believe in avant-garde experimentation with it. However, their common goal is to rediscover the body, to use it again as a tool rather than just a fashion accessory.
Von Cyborg is a biohacker – he believes that one day the human form will integrate with technology, changing the ways we use our body.
“I’m working on many kinds of functional implants,” he tells me. “And big companies are starting to get these ideas, too – a mobile inside your body or even a kind of telepathic communication using a brain implant. A few companies are already getting patents for implants. They know it’s not going to happen any time soon – not for maybe even 20 years – but they’re already working on it. This is the direction body modification is going.”
Samppa closing up a client's flesh tunnels
Universities offer Von Cyborg the funding he needs to develop his ideas, and he provides them with research papers in return. The body mods he currently offers didn’t strike me much as life-savers, but he’s also working on LED implants for a number of health issues – pulse meters that flash LEDs through the skin could serve as early warning devices for people with heart complaints, and others that run off blood sugar could help diabetics. His self-taught knowledge of the body’s healing process, of its limits, is impressive. As is his exhaustive research into potential power sources for his implants – kinetic energy, wireless charging, micro batteries. But sitting around a grubby reclaimed coffee table, it’s hard to connect the man to his work.
Two depressed scars run down Von Cyborg’s scalp where he’d once had two rows of inch-long metal spikes make up a sort of titanium mohawk. But not all mods last forever, and as his skin shifted and lumped over time he asked a friend to cut the implants out, taking large chunks of his scalp with them.
His first client of the day is interested in a corrective procedure much like this. James, a young guy from Manchester, is here to get his flesh tunnels closed. They’re boring, he says, “now that everyone has them”.
James takes a seat on a repurposed dentist’s chair in the centre of the room, a surgical lamp pointing down at him. A metal trolley is covered in the kind of implements you’d imagine – scalpels, scissors, swabs – and there are sterilisation units stacked up against the walls, metal boxes that look like kind of like microwaves with some extra dials and knobs.
It’s a strange scene to behold. His girlfriend is doing laundry, a flatmate is making carrot cake in a kitchenette round the back and he’s sitting here about to perform surgery.
The finished result
Over the next few hours the smell of baking permeates the room as much of James’ earlobes are cut away. Chunks of flesh are discarded, left sitting on the metal trolley like lumps of human chewing gum, and new lobes are stitched from whatever skin is left. The end result is neat and professional – the stitches tiny, and the dangly stretched lobes James had arrived with looking normal again, if not a bit small and red.
Body modification can, of course, be pretty controversial. In most countries – the UK included – it’s neither legal nor illegal. Some people criticise it for glamourising self-harm, and there’s often a link with sexual deviance; one of the projects Von Cyborg is most animated about is a vibrating genital implant, a sort of internal sex toy.
At its most extreme people are willing to bind their waist for an exaggerated hourglass figure, inspired by 50s pin-ups, permanently reshaping their own bone structure and risking harm to their organs. Some alter their genitals in various unfathomable ways – self-castration, FGM, splitting the penis in two, among others – often to fulfil sexual fantasies. It’s a fringe culture that’s looked down upon by those who don’t understand it, despite a recent surge in popularity. But are subdermal implants really any stranger than breast implants?
“We’re getting more and more professional,” says Von Cyborg. “People like me almost have the skill of a plastic surgeon, but without the mainstream qualifications. We’re capable of things that doctors can only dream about. I see a lot of people who hate themselves or their bodies. Body art can actually help them learn to love their bodies because it helps them look at them differently. If someone has a fat belly but, on this belly, they have, for example, a tattoo of a beautiful piece of art, the fat will lose the meaning.”
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