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ihung.org » events

Ontario SusCon 2025!

Hey hook fam, it’s been a very long time, and I’m sorry for that. Today I just want to share that up here in Canada, the wonderful Ontario Suspension Collective, of which I’m a member, is hosting our first ever Suspension Convention this March. It is set to be an amazing event, modelled after the Dallas SusCons of yore, with education as the driving force, and with the intention of (re)building community, and reminding the world that Ontario has historically been a powerhouse of suspension activity.

I will be giving a presentation around the history of body suspension around the Ohio/Great Lakes/KY area, basically the old stomping grounds of this blog and the ihung team over it’s life, focusing on 2000-2010. It will be a lot of “listen to the old man talk about the old days” but I’m hoping the information and timelines and advancements/milestones will help connect some of the dots between Fakir Musafar doing private stuff to body suspension being somewhat mainstream.

Anyhow, I hope to see familiar faces at the event!

one of two studios at the venue

Obsolete Body: Suspensions Sequel by Stelarc and PS Media

Look, a new post! Despite being quiet for quite an obscene length of time, we are indeed still around and still doing stuff sporadically. But that’s a post for a different time.

I’m writing today to implore all of you to go and support a new CrowdFunding campaign to get a sequel to Stelarc’s fantastic Obsolute Body: Suspensions book printed. For those of you who don’t know, Obsolute Body: Suspensions has been out of print for ages, and was a rather niche run to begin with, meaning that getting your hands on a copy nowadays will run you over $500 for a paperback, and over a grand for the hardbound! Which leads me to this book. It’s a sequel of sorts, since the first book didn’t contain enough of Stelarc’s suspension experiments to sate the current generations appetite for knowledge on body suspensions. This book promises to include more information on Stelarc’s early work, and then build on that with his body suspension experiments since then, such as Ear and Arm, and also his projects with the Wings of Desire folks in Oslo and Dallas.

Speaking of the WoD folks, they are also the masterminds behind PS Media who have worked tirelessly to both engage Stelarc in the modern suspension community as well as to get this book off the ground. If you’ve ever worked with, or seen any of the work that WoD and Pain Solution do, you already know that they set a very high bar in all of their endeavours. This latest book appears to be no different.

So please, if you are into performance art, art history, body modification, body suspension, supporting independent artists, etc, then head over to IndieGoGo and contribute. I’ve not seen the book yet, but I can attest that every other book from PSMedia is gold, and this will certainly raise the standard.

Creativity vs Safety

All too often in the suspension world, someone comes up with an idea for a suspension that is amazing but we don’t have the exact right tool for the job. Being the creative family that we are, this situation becomes an episode of MacGyver, which is awesome, however all too often we see this situation unfold in unsafe ways.

A few weeks ago, I showed up to a suspension day and was asked to take care of an 8 point lotus suspension, 4 hooks in the legs, 2 in the back, and 2 in the chest. Hell yeah I want to do this! So, we get Chris cleaned and hooked, which was awesome because it meant working with some old friends, one of whom coached me up my first time. Anyhow, back to Chris, we get him ready to go, and then it’s time to start rigging and I hit a roadblock. The only rigs we have are small rigging plates, which would be fine other than the hooks in the chest. If I’d continued to use a standard bearclaw, he’d have riglines running directly in his face and pressing into his chest and back.

this is not going to work
Once I realized that hanging the bear claw in it’s normal vertical orientation, I started trying to use a couple of carabiners to hang it horizontally. Well, none of the carabiners were long enough to really reach a central carabiner without their angles being way too extreme. I then remembered that I brought me a tall aluminum rig that had various holes along the top and bottom edges, and tried the 3 carabiner configuration with it. Not only were the angles too acute, it was remarkably unbalanced side to side. Starting to get frustrated now because the rigging was getting to me and also because Chris was sitting patiently with hooks in all set to go. I decided to use some cord to cradle the rig, which took a few iterations to get right.

almost there
This iteration was really close, but it still suffered from the same acute angles problem as I’d run into with carabiners AND I didn’t trust it to not shift front to back once Chris got swinging. At this moment, I remembered working with Oliver back in the day at an old ROP SusCon where he did some fantastic static rigging and wrapped the cord bundles near the carabiner to keep the cords all in place and to tidy them up. Bingo! I cradled the rig with a loop of cord created with a tape knot, looped the two sides of it through a carabiner three times each, and then bound that together with an additional piece of cord to prevent the rig from tilting. From there on out, it was a case of simply running lines to the hooks and getting them balanced, and with that, Chris was airborne.
cradled

viola
Pics courtesy of James Santangelo
Even though we didn’t have the ideal rig on hand, by using some troubleshooting skills and relying on previous experiences and knowledge, we were able to pull off a great suspension. Chris thoroughly enjoyed it, we had a fantastic time making it happen, and it contributed to an all around fun day.
hanging

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