tongue splitting

The tongue splitting procedure is the central bifurcation of the tongue, so as to achieve a "forked tongue." With practice, each half can be separately controlled.

Placement

The median fibrous septum that centrally divides the tongue is cut, separating the two lateral halves of the tongue. Done carefully, very little damage should be done in the process.
The tongue can, in theory, be split back to where it meets the base of the mouth. Attempting to split past that would endanger muscles that shouldn't be split, as well as glandular structures in the area. Note again that once the tongue is split further than suggested, there may be some minor speech artifacts.
It is not a good idea to cut the tongue in more than two pieces. To do so would risk cutting into the lingual nerves, the lingual glands, numerous major blood vessels, and it is dubious whether full nervous control could be sustained even if done by an oral surgeon. Attempting a "trifuraction" (or more) would almost certainly end in disaster.

Procedure

Tongue splitting can be accomplished by one or more of the following methods:

Oral surgery

The most recommended method is to seek an oral surgeon. Any oral surgeon who uses a laser should be able to bifurcate a tongue with ease, providing their ethics allow it. A doctor will normally charge between $500 and $3000 for this procedure. After applying anesthesia, using a laser, the practitioner will first create a guideline along the top and bottom of the tongue. Then, they'll slowly cut through the tissue until the tongue is fully bifurcated, cauterizing the wound as they cut. This is usually, at most, a fifteen-minute process. In general, there is little to no blood during this stage. The only bleeding tends to be during suturing.
Laser procedures usually take 1-2 weeks for primary healing, and a month for the healing to be complete.

Scalpelling

To put it simply, the tongue is split down the middle using a blade. This is generally very bloody, and this bleeding can be difficult to control. Many practitioners choose to use cauterization, either from electric cauterizing pens or traditional branding tools, on large blood vessels. Others use chemical or herbal means to control bleeding and/or to assist in healing.
Prior to the split, many practitioners insist on a well-healed large-gauge tongue piercing being in place. If there is no existing piercing of this type, a large-gauge piercing is often made by performing a piercing using a #11 scalpel along the grain of the muscle, followed by a taper and 2ga or 0ga jewelry. That should heal within a month or so, setting a good foundation for the split.
Other practitioners choose to use a "clamp and cut" method similar to the home-meatotomy technique, although it is relatively uncommon. Using a long clamp, the tissue to be split is compressed to almost paper-thickness and left that way for 45 minutes. When the clamp is removed, the cut is made along the center of this compressed tissue in hopes that the extreme compression will provide a "seal," minimizing or eliminating bleeding.

Cauterizing

A cauterized tongue splitting is similar to a scalpelled tongue splitting, but a heated blade or tool is used to burn the split through the tongue, hopefully (and generally successfully), cauterizing the tongue in the process, almost totally eliminating bleeding. This technique does carry a greater risk of peripheral damage and may be outrageously painful.

Suturing

Suturing pulls the top skin of the tongue down into the split, leaving a more "natural" and rounded appearance that many people prefer. While similar healing often occurs without suturing, in other cases a non-sutured tongue may heal with a somewhat "flat" inside that looks artificial rather than natural.

Risks

Assuming the procedure is done by a doctor, the risks are negligible, and complications that arise in a controlled medical environment can typically be dealt with easily. Doctors will provide you with paperwork explaining the secondary risks, such as reactions to anesthesia.
If the procedure is done outside of a controlled medical environment, loss of blood is the single largest risk. The tongue contains major blood vessels, and without proper training and tools, amateur practitioners may find themselves unable to control blood loss. In these situations, a visit to the hospital emergency room is advisable.
Damage to nerves and glands in the tongue is also possible, although unlikely if the split is not extremely deep and remains centered. Care must also be taken not to accidentally damage glands in the base of the mouth.
Infection and scarring are certainly possible as well, but they are very rare.

Healing and aftercare

Tongue splitting takes about as long to heal as tongue piercing does. Primary healing (where you can talk and eat relatively normally) takes between one and two weeks, and full healing is usually complete within one month.
Regrowth is quite common. Some re-growth (where the tongue slowly heals back together) is normal, and in the case of short (1/2" or less) splits, total closure is not unheard of. Even in deeper splits, if care is not taken to combat re-growth, 50% closure is not uncommon, but this can be prevented by keeping the wound open. The smooth body of a cotton swab can prove useful for this task. It should be done regularly as the body heals incredibly fast. In addition to the regrowth that will occur during the initial healing, there will be some closure over the first year or so. Short of re-cutting, there's not a lot that can be done to stop that.
Many people have found that a well-healed large-gauge (4ga - 0ga usually) tongue piercing can act as an anchor for the split. Because the piercing is surrounded by solid tissue that does not, by nature, want to seal itself, if this tongue piercing marks the rear of the tongue split, closure may be all but eliminated.

Long-term health issues

Initial bleeding and infection can be a risk, especially with home-jobs. In a worst-case situation, the tongue can swell and block the airway, although this has not been documented. As far as long-term risk, there may be minor changes in some speech sounds, but this rarely happens, and effects are extremely minor at most. Tongue splitting does not appear to have any side effects with regards to eating.

History

Tongue splitting, to some, a pinnacle of "Khechari Mudra" practices, is a part of Hatha and Kumbhaka yoga where the tongue is split and then "milked" until it is long enough to be turned back inside the mouth and flipped up to the epiglottis. It then is used in breathing exercises, the goal being to seal the body's energy leaks and become aware of only the internal, thus entering a catatonic state, crossing back and forth between life and death (note that Westernized versions often omit, and even censor, the splitting).
Yogis that practice these rites believe that it allows them to be absorbed "into God" (that is, becoming conjoined with the universal soul, an experience that is also common in suspension and other body rites).
In addition, Kaliya and other characters in Hindu mythology are depicted as having split tongues, as are characters (often evil) in various other faiths. Most obviously, Christian mythology bestows a forked tongue upon Satan.
Recently, starting in 1997, tongue splitting became very popular in the West. I Am Not My Body (issue #2, summer 1997) postulated the possibility, and the first person (modern/Western) to be clearly documented as having this procedure was a man in Italy who had it done progressively by his dentist using silver nitrate for cautery. The second is believed to be Dustin, featured in Fakir Musafar's Body Play Magazine (issue 16). Dustin achieved her tongue split using the tying-off method over several weeks. Next is believed to have been The Lizardman and then Shannon Larratt, with their promotion of the modification starting the snowball rolling. Documenting the other "firsts," after that, Patrick Bartholomew did the first cautery (heat) tongue splittings in 1998, followed by Allen Falkner's strike branded split; the first scalpelled tongue splittings are believed to have done by Todd Bertrang and Blair at about the same time (first on himself and then on Philip Barbosa).
Since about 2000, tongue splitting has been one of the most popular, common, safe, and highest long-term satisfaction extreme modifications out there.

Reversal

By removing the skin on the inside of the split and then suturing the tongue back together, it can be induced to "go back to normal." While, to date, no one has gone on record as willingly having undergone such a procedure, it has been forced on some people by new military regulations in the United States. Tongue splitting reversal is far more painful than splitting, takes far longer to heal, and seems more prone to complications.
Because of scarring and other damage done during the reversal operation, permanent damage to tongue mobility is not unheard of, leaving a shortened and narrowed tongue that is not as nimble, which of course damages speech and other activities. In addition, nerve damage from the reversal procedure is more likely than from the initial split, and there have been reports of damage to both touch and taste sensations in tongue splitting reversal procedures.
Reversing a tongue splitting is strongly discouraged—don't split your tongue if you think you might have to reverse it in the future.

STELARC

I came across this artist about a month ago and have been trying to figure out what to write about him and so far i still cannot come up much to write however i did find an interview with him...

Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc

Paolo Atzori and Kirk Woolford
Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, Germany
Stelarc is an Australian performance artist, born in Limassol, island of Cyprus. Stelarc moved to Australia, where he studied Arts and Craft at T.S.T.C., Art and Technology at CAUTECH and M.R.I.T., Melbourne University. He taught Art and Sociology at Yokohama International School and Sculpture and Drawing at Ballarat University College.
Stelarc has been extending his body through performances since the late 1960s. His performances include attaching a "Third Hand" to his body, extending himself into virtual space with a "Virtual Hand", and over 25 "suspension" events where he hung his entire body from hooks piercing his skin. Stelarc's artistic strategy revolves around the idea of "enhancing the body" both in a physical and technical manner. It originates as a polarism between the "primal desire" to defeat the force of gravity with primitive rituals and a low- tech and the hi-tech performance with the third arm and the related cybersystem. His intention in both cases is to "express an idea with his direct experience."
Through Stelarc's work, we reach a second level of existence where the body becomes the object for physical and technical experiments in order to discover its limitations. When Stelarc speaks of the "obsolete body" he means that the body must overcome centuries of prejudices and begin to be considered as an extendible evolutionary structure enhanced with the most disparate technologies, which are more precise, accurate and powerful: "the body lacks of modular design," "Technology is what defines the meaning of being human, it's part of being human." Especially living in the information age, "the body is biologically inadequate."
For Stelarc, "Electronic space becomes a medium of action rather than information".

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CTHEORY: When did you first decide to hang yourself between two different worlds - to place your body between two levels of existence...
Stelarc: Well you have to remember the suspension events weren't the initial, sort of primitive and physically difficult events and the technology ones were the more recent, more sophisticated ones. In fact, the third hand project begins a year after the first suspension event. These things were happening simultaneously. On the one hand you were discovering the psychological and physical limitations of the body. On the other you were developing strategies for extending and enhancing it through technology. I've always used technology in my performances. The very first things I made in art school were helmets and goggles that altered your binocular perception which stylistically has this connection with virtual reality head-mounted displays and compartments which were whole body pods that you sort of plugged you whole body into, and that was assaulted by electronic sounds and lights.
CTHEORY: When people see your suspension events, they immediately think of Hindu, American Indian, or other rituals. Which of these practices did you come into contact with first?
Stelarc: It was the Hindu Indian ones that I knew about, but one has to put this into the context that for 5 years I was doing suspension events with ropes and harnesses, with a lot of technology. Laser eyes were first used when the body was suspended, oh, '70, '71 that sort of time scale, but one of the sort of visual disadvantages of all this paraphernalia was that there was all this visual clutter: all the ropes and harnesses were seen more to support the body than to suspend it, so when I first came across the notion of piercing the skin, I thought, if you could suspend the body using techniques like these, then you would have a minimum of support, you'd have just the insertion and single cable. Mind you, I never hid, there was no desire to make the suspension a kind of image of levitation. For me the cables were lines of tension which were part of the visual design of the suspended body, and the stretched skin was a kind of gravitational landscape. This is what it took for a body to be suspended in a 1-G gravitational field. The other context is the primal desire for floating and flying. A lot of primal rituals have to do with suspending the body, but in the 20th century we have the reality of astronauts floating in zero-G. So the suspension event is between those sort of primal yearnings, and the contemporary reality. Of course, suspension means between two states, so I think there is an interesting linguistic meaning that fits in with the idea of suspending the body. For me there was no religious context, no shamanistic yearnings, no yogic conditioning that had to do with these performances. In fact, they occurred in the same kind of stream of consciousness. In mean, I don't take any anaesthetics, I don't chant or get into altered states. I think metaphysically, in the past, we've considered the skin as surface, as interface. The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self, and simultaneously, a beginning to the world. Once technology stretches and pierces the skin, the skin as a barrier is erased.
CTHEORY: Do you follow a very strict discipline to train your body for your performances?
Stelarc: In fact, there's never really been any discipline and when I start feeling the performances have become, in a sense predictable, because the techniques assume more importance than the creative impulses, then I stop doing them. I stopped doing the suspension events 4 years ago because having done 27 of them in various locations and different situations there seemed to be no more raison d'etre to continue doing them. The interest was really coupling the expression of an idea with the direct experience of it. That applies to all of these performances whether the suspension events, the stomach sculpture, the third hand performances, or the virtual arm event. These are all situations where the body is plugged into for direct experience. So it's not interesting for me to talk academically or theoretically about ideas of interface, the important thing for me is to plug in, extend the body with cyber-systems and see what it can actually do.
CTHEORY: So you've always been interested in enhancing the body?
Stelarc: Oh, absolutely. And the connection with VR systems is a very fundamental one with me because, as I said, the very first things I made at art school were these helmets which split your binocular vision and compartments which were sensory environments, multi-modal structures for experience with the body. So that was a primary concern, and really the suspensions are often taken out of context whereas they are part of a series of sensory deprivation and physically difficult events which include: making the 3 films of the inside of the body, where I had to film 3 meters of internal space, for example. All these actions occurred simultaneously. The agenda wasn't a stylistic one with a particular technology, it was a general one. A sort of probing and determining the parameters of physical and psychological interface.
CTHEORY: You always work with your body. Your body is your form of representation, your medium. How do you feel being both an artist and an artwork?
Stelarc: It's interesting you've pointed that out, I've never felt that I am the artwork. In fact the reason why my performances are focused on this particular body is that it is difficult for me to convince other bodies to undergo rather awkward, difficult and sometimes painful experiences. This body is just merely the convenient access to a body for particular events and actions. So I've really never been obsessed by the fact that somehow I am the artwork because I don't critique it in that way.
For me the body is an impersonal, evolutionary, objective structure. Having spent two thousand years prodding and poking the human psyche without any real discernible changes in our historical and human outlook, we perhaps need to take a more fundamental physiological and structural approach, and consider the fact that it's only through radically redesigning the body that we will end up having significantly different thoughts and philosophies. I think our philosophies are fundamentally bounded by our physiology; our peculiar kind of aesthetic orientation in the world; our peculiar five sensory modes of processing the world; and our particular kinds of technology that enhance these perceptions. I think a truly alien intelligence will occur from an alien body or from a machine structure. I don't think human beings will come up with fundamentally new philosophies. An alien species may not have the same notions about the universe at all. The desire for unity may well be the result of our rather fragmentary sensory system where we observe the world sensually in packets of discrete and different sensory modes. So our urge to merge, our urge to unify, that religious, spiritual, coming together might very well be due to an inadequacy or an incompleteness in our physiology.
CTHEORY: If such a philosophy is devised, it would not be a human philosophy. How would it be applicable to the human race?
Stelarc: Well of course one shouldn't consider the body or the human species as possessing a kind of absolute nature. The desire to locate the self simply within a particular biological body is no longer meaningful. What it means to be human is being constantly redefined. For me, this is not a dilemma at all.
CTHEORY: So a human is not this entity sitting here with these two arms and two legs, but something more beside?
Stelarc: Yes, of course, if you are sitting there with a heart pacemaker and an artificial hip and something to augment your liver and kidney functions, would I consider you less human? To be quite honest, most of your body might be made of mechanical, silicon, or chip parts and you behave in a socially acceptable way, you respond to me in a human-like fashion, to me that would make you a kind of human subject.
CTHEORY: You keep speaking about redesigning the human body. Who decides and how should it be redesigned ?
Stelarc: (Laughs) There is often misunderstanding about these notions, partly because they are critiqued with a kind of rear-vision mirror mentality of a fascist, dictatorial, Orwellian-big-brother scenario.
I don't have a utopian perfect body I'm designing a blueprint for, rather I'm speculating on ways that individuals are not forced to, but may want to, redesign their bodies - given that the body has become profoundly obsolete in the intense information environment it has created. It's had this mad, Aristotelian urge to accumulate more and more information. An individual now cannot hope to absorb and creatively process all this information. Humans have created technologies and machines which are much more precise and powerful than the body.
How can the body function within this landscape of machines? Technology has speeded up the body. The body now attains planetary-escape velocity, has to function in zero-G and in greater time-space continuums. For me this demonstrates the biological inadequacy of the body. Given that these things have occurred, perhaps an ergonomic approach is no longer meaningful. In other words, we can't continue designing technology for the body because that technology begins to usurp and outperform the body. Perhaps it's now time to design the body to match it's machines. We somehow have to turbo-drive the body-implant and augment the brain. We have to provide ways of connecting it to the cyber-network. At the moment this is not easily done, and it's done indirectly via keyboards and other devices. There's no way of directly jacking in. Mind you, I'm not talking here in terms of sci-fi speculation. For me, these possibilities are already apparent. What do we do when confronted with the situation where we discover the body is obsolete? We have to start thinking of strategies for redesigning the body.
CTHEORY: This recombinant body implies a widening of our sensibilities, of our perception. But our senses are linked to our brains, everything "happens" in our brain. So it's not enough to have, for example, X-ray vision. We need to change our synapses, the connections in our brains as well.
Stelarc: We shouldn't start making distinctions between the brain and the body. This particular biological entity with it's proprioceptive networks and spinal cord and muscles, it's the total kinesthetic orientation in the world, it's the body's mobility which contributes towards curiosity. The desire to isolate the brain is the result of a Cartesian dualism. It's not really productive any more to think in that sense. We have to think of the body plugged into a new technological terrain.
CTHEORY: We can see things that were previously invisible. We can go to the very little through nano-technology, see into infra-red and ultra violet spectrums, but this is not a direct perception. We get this through artificial systems...
Stelarc: Yes, and what will be interesting is when we can miniaturize these technologies and implant them into the body so that the body as total system becomes subjectively aware again. New technologies tend to generate new perceptions and paradigms of the world, and in turn, allow us to take further steps. If we consider technologies as intermediaries to the world, then, of course, we never have direct experiences. At the moment, we operate within a very thin electro-magnetic spectrum, and I would imagine that as we increasing operate in wider spheres of reality, then yes our perceptions and philosophies alter or adjust.
Technology has always been coupled with the evolutionary development of the body. Technology is what defines being human. It's not an antagonistic alien sort of object, it's part of our human nature. It constructs our human nature. We shouldn't have a Frankensteinian fear of incorporating technology into the body, and we shouldn't consider our relationship to technology in a Faustian way - that we're somehow selling our soul because we're using these forbidden energies. My attitude is that technology is, and always has been, an appendage of the body.
CTHEORY: Stelarc, your latest work centers around a sculpture you built for your stomach. What was the impetus for creating a sculpture to display inside your body?
Stelarc: I've moved beyond the skin as a barrier. Skin no longer signifies closure. I wanted to rupture the surface of the body, penetrate the skin. With the stomach sculpture, I position an artwork inside the body. The body becomes hollow with no meaningful distinction between public, private and physiological spaces. The hollow body becomes a host, not for a self or a soul, but simply for a sculpture.
CTHEORY: Funding any artwork is difficult, especially getting money for high tech equipment. Did you have trouble finding funding for the sculpture?
Stelarc: Actually no. One of the museums in Australia was preparing a show and asking for sculptures which explored alternative display spaces. I told them I had an alternative way and place to display a sculpture.
CTHEORY: Can you describe the stomach sculpture?
Stelarc: It's built of implant quality metals such as titanium, steel, silver, and gold. It is constructed as a domed capsule shell about the size of a fist. The shell contains a worm-screw and link mechanism and has a flexidrive cable connected to a servo motor controlled by a logic circuit. The capsule extends and retracts opening and closing in three sections. An embedded instrument array, light and piezo buzzer make the sculpture self-illuminating and sound-emitting.
CTHEORY: How did you insert it?
Stelarc: Very slowly. The stomach sculpture is actually the most dangerous performance I've done. We had to be within 5 minutes of a hospital in case we ruptured any internal organs. To insert the sculpture, the stomach was first emptied by withholding food for about 8 hours. Then the closed capsule, with beeping sound and flashing light activated, was swallowed and guided down tethered to it's flexidrive cable attached to the control box outside the body. Once inserted into the stomach, we used an endoscope to inflate the stomach and suck out the excess body fluids. The sculpture was then arrayed with switches on the control box. We documented the whole performance using video endoscopy equipment. Even with a stomach pump, we still had a problem with excess saliva. We had to hastily remove all the probes on several occasions.
CTHEORY: Now you've penetrated the body. You've hollowed it out, extended it, expanded it, hung it out a window, mapped out several miles of its interior. What is the next step?
Stelarc: It is time to recolonise the body with microminaturised robots to augment out bacterial population, to assist our immunological system, and to monitor the capillary and internal tracts of the body. We need to build an internal surveillance system for the body. We have to develop microbots whose behavior is not pre-programmed, but activated by temperature, blood chemistry, the softness or hardness of tissue and the presence of obstacles in tracts. These robots can then work autonomously on the body. The biocompatibility of technology is not due to its substance, but to its scale. Speck-sized robots are easily swallowed and may not even be sensed. At a nanotech level, machines will navigate and inhabit cellular spaces and manipulate molecular structures to extend the body from within.


His website can be found at....

http://stelarc.org/_.swf

MODIFY! (the movie)

All of us know we should not pre-judge others, not to judge a book by its cover.
Does this feeling of acceptance apply to people who modify their body beyond what
is normal? Extreme is relative to perception. It is human nature to fear what we do
not understand. What is ‘normal’?

Everyone modifies their body in one form or another to help show on the outside
how they feel on the inside.

Using intirely original music, including over forty never before heard songs from
more than twenty new artists, this original groundbreaking documentary hits the
screen rockin’ right from the start.

For the first time ever, in their own words, the finest, more well spoken, talented,
surgeons, piercers, tattooists, cutters, body artists, and pioneers of body modification
in the United States, show and tell all in the Committed Films motion picture
‘MODIFY’.

You will meet more than thirty of the most amazing modified people that have ever
lived, and the body artists that have changed them forever. We have traveled the
country and have filmed more than fifty body modification procedures including
tanning, waxing, piercing, branding, scarification, genital beading, elective
amputations, bodybuilding, tattooing, tongue splitting, non-surgical implants, plastic
surgeries, trans-gender surgeries, and everything in between.

Why have they chosen to do this to their bodies?

We explore their thoughts on the difference between body modification and
mutilation, their feelings on discrimination, addiction, religion and the legal limits
regarding the right to choose what someone can or can not do to their own body.

CHECK IT OUT!

http://www.modifythemovie.com/index2.html

it is also now available on netflix.