APP 2026, Part Two

Several weeks ago we posted our yearly roundup of the 29th annual Association of Professional Piercers Conference and Exposition, which took place at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas on June 7-12. Here’s APP 2026, Part Two, my personal experience at this year's event.

I often do the yearly review of the event for the Infinite blog, describing what we, as part of the Infinite team, did at the conference and what we found the most memorable. As I get older, the difference between my experience and that of the younger staff gets larger, and my experience as an old-timer gets less and less like those of the rest of the team. This year, Infinite’s operations manager, Jes, helped organize the voices of our jewelry specialists to give an overview of this year's event. While that post much more accurately provides a snapshot of what the APP experience is for us, collectively, this year’s event was an impactful event for me personally. So at the risk of being self-indulgent, here’s my experience of this year’s event.

Thirty Years of the APP in Las Vegas

I have a long history with the APP and its yearly conference. The first APP event took place in the summer of 1996, which was at that time an “open meeting” of the organization. This was the first event I attended, and Infinite had been open for a little over a year when I made the trip. I stayed at a budget motel off the strip and walked to the events at the larger hotels. I knew no one there. I ended up approaching someone I saw with beading on their forearm and asked them about it, and that interaction led me to later being in their hotel room getting the webbing under my tongue cut. (Rules regarding hotel-room procedures were not part of the experience yet!) The following year was the organization's first educational event, and was held in Florida (I missed that one), and the event has been held in Las Vegas since. Besides Florida I’ve attended every one. With two years skipped for COVID, this is the thirty-first year of this event. 

I became an APP member in 1999, and in 2005 I surprised myself by getting elected to the organization’s board of directors. From 2005 until 2008 I served as the APP’s medical liaison, and in 2008 I was re-elected and served as the organization's president, staying in that position until 2011. I also edited The Point, their quarterly journal while I served on the board (plus an additional year after I stepped down from the board) from 2005 to 2012, overseeing twenty-seven issues over seven years. I’ve also been teaching classes at the conference since 2003.

I’ve been around for a while, and I’ve seen the APP and its yearly get-togethers change as well: from a small gathering of like-minded piercers, mostly centered around the West Coast of the US, to the huge international event that it is today where planning for the next conference starts even before the current one has ended. In the thirty-plus years I’ve changed a lot as well, and so have the reasons I go to Conference, and what I hope to bring home from it.

[APP Conference 2015. Photo Matte Erickson/Facebook]

When Infinite opened its doors in ‘95, piercing was still new to the mainstream, having really just hit the popular consciousness in the summer of ‘93 with the release of the Aerosmith video for "Cryin'" where a teenage Alicia Silverstone has her navel pierced. (This is true!) While piercing was popular enough to support a piercing studio in Philadelphia, there still wasn’t a local community of practitioners on the East Coast; it was small pockets and small studios here and there. Traveling to Las Vegas was a way to meet other piercers, other members of what was at the time a very small, very niche group. 

And it’s different now, obviously. What then was dozens of people attending the meeting in ‘95 is now approaching several thousand, with the overwhelming majority of them much, much younger than I am, and at a much different place in their piercing careers than I am at now. While the number of people I connect with is shrinking, that connection gets more intense as the years go on. Nowhere else will I get the opportunity to talk to other studio owners, people whose time in this industry is measured not in years, but in decades.

Modern Piercing and Industrial Music

The last few years have seen some big changes in my life that have me reflecting on my life and career with the intensity of a mid-life crisis. I’ve been looking back on things that influenced me when I was younger, and especially my preconceptions around art and creativity. Part of this was re-examining the things that drew me into piercing all those years ago, and as I look back at the culture that shaped me, as an artist and as a piercer, I’ve started to explore the music of my adolescence, and industrial music in particular. Through this I’ve been fascinated by the parallels in the history between the development of industrial music and the history of the early piercing industry.

This quickly turned into a passion project. (You could call it a hyperfixation and you wouldn’t be wrong.) I find myself in an interesting time in my life, where much of the culture that I participated in, be it music or piercing, is now being written about and studied, so I have the ability to read about these cultural points academically while also having the experience of having lived through them. This is true both when talking about music or other cultural movements, like modern piercing. All this became the lecture “Industrial Music and Modern Piercing, 1975-1994.”

The stages of development and audience growth in early industrial music coincide exactly with the same time period as the growth in audience for modern piercing: You have industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle founded within months of the formation of the original Gauntlet; the release of the hugely influential book Modern Primitives came out the same year as Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, both having introduced modern piercing and industrial music in similar ways to similar audiences; and the video for Aerosmith’s “Cryin’” was released the same year as the album that really introduced industrial music to mainstream audiences, The Downward Spiral. Secondly, much as rap music can be considered a single component of hip-hop culture, along with MC-ing, graffiti, and dancing/b-boying/breaking, modern piercing has enough shared ideas and themes with industrial music to be considered part of the same artistic movement.

I was given the opportunity to present this lecture at last year’s BMXnet conference in Berlin, and this year I presented it in Las Vegas. I’ve been speaking at APP conferences since 2003, and even after all this time I don’t get any less anxious leading up to my presentations. In the end, I figured if I can lecture on industrial music to Berliners I should be fine presenting this information to an American audience! This year I was talking about an idea that was much more personal, and honestly, a little more “out there” as APP lecture topics go.

The response was wonderful, both immediately after the class and even later in the week people would stop me to talk about their feelings on industrial music, to talk about how industrial music and culture have always been intertwined with their passion for piercing. I talked to younger attendees about their experiences in both communities; I nerded out talking about Nine Inch Nails’ recent Coachella performance while between classes.

Through working on this project, I also discovered that one of the people I have known for over thirty years as a huge figure in the piercing industry also participated in the beginnings of the industrial music scene in Japan as well.

Ryoichi “Keroppy” Maeda

I first met Ryoichi at one of the first ModCon events (I don’t remember which), which would have been in 1999 or 2000. As a journalist and photographer he has chronicled the modern body modification scene in Japan over the last thirty years, since the mid-’90s. We’ve crossed paths at many modification events over the last three decades, and spent time with each other in both Japan and the States.

Ryocihi presented two lectures this year in Las Vegas. The first was on his most recent project: Jōmon Tribe. For this he has been working with tattoo artist Taku Oshima to revive an ancient form of tattooing believed to be practiced by the indigenous hunter-gatherers that inhabited Japan between 14,000 years and 3,000 years ago, during the Jōmon Period. Ryoichi showed off the new book of photographs documenting the project.

The second was “The History of Piercing in Japan, from Ancient to the Present.” After talking again about body art during the Jomon period, the second half of his presentation was the history of modern piercing in Japan, starting in the 1990s up the the present—the era in which Ryoichi has been tirelessly documenting (and participating in) the body modification scene in Japan.

Even after knowing Ryoichi all these years, I had no idea about his place in the history of industrial music. Ryoichi was a member of what was considered Japan’s first industrial band, Zeitlich Vergelter, formed in the wake of Einstürzende Neubauten’s first tour of the country.

I was excited to be able to include information about this in my talk, as Ryoichi was in the audience when I spoke! Sitting in on his classes during the week I was pleasantly surprised to see that Ryoichi has now included it in his biographical information as well.

Sheree Rose

Flying back to the East Coast after Conference usually means a flight out Friday morning, skipping the last morning of classes. It’s that, or an evening red-eye flight—and I’m way too old for those. So this year I ended up staying an extra day in Las Vegas to hear a lecture by Sheree Rose on Friday afternoon. It ended up being the highlight of my week.

Sheree Rose is a photographer and artist most known as the partner/muse/Dom to performance artist Bob Flanagan. Flanagan was an early piercing pioneer who incorporated body modification and BDSM into his life-long battle with cystic fibrosis, with his most famous performance being the exhibition Visiting Hours, done in collaboration with Rose. (You can see the two of them interviewed about the project here.) Bob passed away in 1996, with two projects exploring him and his work before his death: Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist published by RE/Search books, and Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, a film documentary that was released in 1997.

As a photographer, Sheree has been documenting the piercing community since the early 1980s. She was the first to film a documentary of Gauntlet, and her photos of pierced luminaries can be seen in the pages of Modern Primitives and PFIQ. Her work as an artist has historically been overshadowed by Flanagan’s, and while she has stated she prefers a role outside of the spotlight that shone on Bob, a new book has been recently published exploring her as an artist in her own right.

The lecture consisted of Paul King, APP treasurer, piercing anthropology lecturer, and former Gauntlet employee, with Sheree Rose herself and Yetta Howard, editor of the the new book on Rose’s work, one that seeks to position Rose as the artistic (and feminist) icon that her work deserves. I spent a good deal of time talking to author Yetta Howard after the talk, and discovered that she had authored an academic paper titled “The Queerness of Industrial Music,” so we nerded out on shared topics for a bit.

Also attending the lecture was Rose’s son, whose new documentary Dom Mom explores Sheree’s life as he experienced it.

After Sheree’s talk I stayed behind (along with other admirers) to talk with her. I’ve been in the industry long enough to have met most of the people a younger me would consider their  heroes. Some have been friendly and personal, some have been arrogant and standoffish, and there are one or two that turned out to be pretty awful people. That being said, it was wonderful to find Sheree Rose was incredibly (and genuinely) friendly and warm, and I found myself talking with her long past where everyone else had left. As things were winding down, Paul King graciously volunteered to take our photo. When I took a seat next to Sheree and we started to position ourselves for a picture, She asked if she could put her hand on my thigh, to which I answered, “That would be wonderful!” Paul perfectly captured this interaction.

BattleBots

With the extra day in Las Vegas I found myself with a free evening on Friday, after the rest of the Infinite staff (and the majority of the rest of the Conference attendees) had all headed home. I figured with an extra day in Las Vegas I should do something: a show, or an event—or at least something. Then I discovered it, in the back parking lot of Planet Hollywood and visible from my hotel room, was the warehouse where BattleBots shows took place. I checked the schedules, and that evening’s performance started at 6 pm, which for someone who was still on an East Coast, early-to-bed schedule, worked out perfectly!

My deep dive into industrial music for my talk had recently reintroduced me to the work of Survival Research Laboratories, a San-Francisco-based artists collective founded by Mark Pauline in 1978. Survival Research Labs (or SRL) put on performances where large-scale, custom-built anthropomorphic machines ran amok and destroyed each other and themselves. Think of BattleBots where the robots are the size of cars, and they often included taxidermied (and reanimated) animal carcasses. They are also fascinating to me as they were a big part of what was the burgeoning industrial music and performance scene in San Francisco without having a musical element, which advanced my argument that industrial music was part of a larger artistic movement and more than just a musical genre. Reportedly, a not small number of SRL alum went on to be part of BattleBots over the years. 

After a short walk from the hotel I discovered why the show started at 6, as the main audience for BattleBots was ten-year-old boys and their families! Even then, it was still a blast. Described as an “intense, fast-moving, family-friendly, fight-fest,” it’s hosted by Bil Dwyer, the original host of the Comedy Central BattleBots series. It was pretty much a perfect ending to my week in Las Vegas.

Next Up, BMXnet

It always takes a few weeks after Conference to organize my thoughts about the event, to put everything I’ve experienced into any sort of context. Then finding the time to blog about it takes even longer, and that’s why you’re reading this over a month after the event ended. Next week I’m headed to Berlin for BMXnet with Ursula, Amelia, Marina, and William, so expect an update from that when we return to the States—or a month or two after we get back, depending on how long it takes.