BECOMING DEVICES:
Technosexual Assemblages of Cybernated Flesh, Erotic Circuits, and Queer Becoming
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You’ll have to ask the NC State Fair
Genuinely, though, why did a haunted house ride at the State Fair in 2026 feature multiple portraits of homosexual serial killers? A question for another day. I have completed an initial draft of Chapter 1 and received copious feedback. While that draft had a couple of dangling sections at the tail end, feedback suggests that both of those sections move into the theory/lit review chapter. Which actually makes my job of tidying up the draft all the easier! That said, it will take more time than I anticipated to integrate the initial round of feedback into the extant draft, especially…
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Shocking, I Know
Ok, gonna keep it particularly short again this week, since I’m focused on more submittable writing. I attended the CRDM Short Circuits event on Thursday to hear from two Brazilian scholars; both of their presentations resonated with my dissertation. Prof. Joana Ziller offered thoughts on research that deals with vulnerable populations and our ethical and political responsibilities as scholars when studying such groups, including: Acknowledgment of how close we are to the population studied (including membership) while balancing this innate understanding against the human tendency to universalize personal experience. Crafting research that both records and challenges the violence done to…
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It’s Fall Y’all!
I am so ready for Fall Break! Committee members seeing this can expect an email to follow immediately with relevant updates. This week was a continuation of troubleshooting the wifi/radio issues on my PiShock and the minishockers. Yes, that’s right, shockers, plural. I got an additional one. Having two shockers enables a few things: 1) it makes the embodied feedback of the PnP system much more stable, but 2) it also highlights some of the layered capacities of the PiShock system. The PiShock isn’t a single, discrete object: “a shocker”. Rather, it already is a constellation of devices and software…
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The closer you look, the more you see
Short post this week, but with huge and exciting news. First, the PiShock has remained an unruly object. I’ve managed to trigger a bug that has locked me out of the processor entirely because the PiShock itself is trying to furiously to connect to a wifi network that doesn’t exist. This means I can’t update the wifi name either…PiShock support ticket pending. For a consumer-facing sex toy, I sure have spent a lot of time talking to their support Discord. It was working, so it certainly can work again. This type of debugging has dominated the week. Other committee-specific updates…
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Kinks in Time
This question of time keeps surfacing in my exploration of the PiShock. Queer theorists have made much of queer vs. straight time, though exactly how either of those chronologies is constructed varies radically from theorist to theorist and project to project. Queer time is, perhaps fittingly, irregular. But chronology is an important element to unpack for analysis of the flows of energy and power through these productive systems of emergence—how these digital media objects and networks manifest and structure time between bodies, the various scales at which they operate, and the rejection or refusal of chrononormative structures of arrangement, not…
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It’s All *Coming* Together
Ok, this time the image isn’t thematically related to either the post or the diss, but c’mon! I am SO fascinated by the fact that we, seemingly instantly, started mining this person’s digital footprint for images to eroticize, found a BUNCH of content, and, of course, got it up on AZMen.com. I’ve had this screen cap lingering in my photos for several months already. Anyway, obviously, I had to make some religiously-motific glitch art out of the pic—hey, I don’t write the law. Anyway, despite the distracting influence of politically charged pornography, this week I continued grinding away at the…
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Waiting isn’t always the hardest part
Short post this week. Slowly, supplies and replacement pieces are arriving. I’ve started dry-fitting the pieces together as they come in and am only growing more excited. The operational coding is well underway and pretty direct. The PnP app itself is a much simpler construction than HWT. I’ve been writing continuously for a good streak lately, although my writing accountability group has sort of broken down. A substantial text already exists, but it requires more editing and more thorough exploration of the making process and its results.
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Complex Systems: Sociality and Digitality
Entering into the various layered networks of the PiShock user-dev community has provided numerous fascinating insights and clearly demonstrated the importance and accuracy of my dissertation argument. Many sexual experiences in our present historical moment are not only mediated by digital technology and networks, but the experience, the experiencing body, and the identity community (or public) centered on it are emergent from coconstruction with the technical objects themselves. What demonstrates this most plainly is that this ecosystem exists and functions at all: the diverse interactions happening between user-devs, regular users (both wearers and inputs), Discord, Reddit, StackOverflow, and the PiShock…
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IT LIVES!
I have been lavishing attention on my projects this week. Real, material things are happening, and people are surprisingly buzzing about my research. I have a working, functional PiShock, BOTH through the main web interface and through the API! IT LIVES! And what a tremendous journey these first few steps have been. Discords, web apps, documents upon documents, iteration upon iteration, Discord, Reddit, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, YouTube over and over. But the critical making process thus far has produced insights far beyond the exploration of the content communities through which these networked connections manifest; it has also helped me unpack…
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An Odyssey of the Mind
Not a reference to the Nolan film that I can only describe as a fever dream. Odyssey of the Mind (OM) was an incredible program for elementary, middle, and high school students where we competed with students from around the world in improvisational puzzle games and longitudinal combination playwriting and engineering projects. OM really did prepare me for this diss: a sorta robotics for art kids. We never did the actual robotics workflow per se, but we did code, engineer, build, and compose materially in response to challenges, strict rules, and specifications to functionally address complex philosophical and practical research…
About this Site
This site will serve as a documentary archive for weekly updates on the composition process, as well as a repository of building work for the Critical Making aspects of the project.
About Luke C. LeGrand
Luke C. LeGrand is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at NC State University.