In June 2008, at the Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication conference (CATaC 2008) in Nîmes, France, held June 24–27, three researchers from the University of Wollongong (R. Ip, Katina Michael, and M. G. Michael) presented a paper with me as its subject: "The Do-It-Yourselfer RFID Implantee: The Culture, Values and Ethics of Hobbyist Implantees: A Case Study."
This one I did not write. It is a paper about me: an ethnographic case study that took my practice of implanting and using RFID tags and turned it into academic material: what a hobbyist implantee does, why, and what it says about how people relate to technology they carry inside their bodies. Being written up rather than writing was a strange feeling, and a telling one. By 2008 the Wollongong group had settled on the DIY implantee as a canonical case for thinking through the social implications of humancentric chips, and I was the DIY implantee they kept coming back to. It came out of the same research relationship that later produced the 2009 IGI Global book chapter and the ISTAS 2010 paper, my practice documented from several different angles.
For the archive: R. Ip, K. Michael, and M. G. Michael, "The Do-It-Yourselfer RFID Implantee: The Culture, Values and Ethics of Hobbyist Implantees: A Case Study," CATaC 2008, Nîmes, France. University of Wollongong Research Online record: ro.uow.edu.au/infopapers/582.