There always seems to be more to do than there is time to do it. All the same, it has been another productive week for my dissertation work.

I have reached out to several folks who inspired me over the last few months of presenting and discussing my work (some even with committee membership requests). I also continued writing and made substantial progress on my critical making ideas to ground the projects more firmly in the things I am actually producing.

So, I will take a moment here to echo a conversation I had with Helen about a current debate in Artistic Research Practice circles over the role of prose/text in such research projects: The hot topic right now is “how much writing does my art project require?” Many artist-scholars are of the mindset that an artistic piece should speak for itself, that it is its own argument, and that writing an essay, book, or even a simple artist statement unduly restricts the viewer/participants experience of the object and speaks to a weak artistic practice, while others, more “trad scholars”, insist that the intellectual/critical work of academe lives in the text, and that the constructed object/experience can only be ancillary to it.

There are, of course, pros and cons to both of these approaches. I raise it here, and indeed think Helen raised it with me, because of a concern that I want to use Critical Making as an opportunity to escape some of the dissertation writing process—which could not be further from the truth. Critical Making emphasizes embodied, processual modes of interaction with the objects under study, looking to friction, glitch, and breakdown in the development/building process as nucleation sites for critical inquiry. I do not intend for any of these making projects to serve as a substitute for text, but rather to be the embodied research practice itself. I’m trying to do more work, not less, in order to fully explore the ecological relationships between queer digital sexual identity and bodies/objects.

In order to do this, I am taking a two-part approach to my design and building of objects because the imagination can so easily outstrip technical and technological capacities. First, there is a speculative design process. Here the goal is to imagine what is theoretically possible with the objects I’m studying/designing and to use the thinking process as a way to make the critical intervention explicit (specific project elements discussed below). Because these speculative products are not exactly feasible to build at a small, independent research scale, the ideas will be translated into a physical, functional prototype. These prototypes, while meant to communicate the functionalities of the speculative tech through interactive functionality, will be, frankly, clunkier representations of the speculative argument. The 3D printing, microprocessors, and tiny screens available through current research funds/resources can produce something functional and exemplary of my project, but will look and feel quite different from their hypothetical, speculative counterparts.

To wit: The three objects I’m ideating on now are

1. Chastity (Name TBD): Imagines a compact, digitally connected monitoring device that emphasizes the reshaping of the body/genitals into an alternative, queered bodily composition through sensors and integrated displays. This speculative technology specifically enables, but de-emphasizes, aspects of sexual control to better illustrate the diverse modes of practice and performance entailed in the use of penile chastity cages.
2. Pup Hood (Name TBD): This project looks to digital connectivity through the hood in order to emphasize the role of digital technologies in becoming within this highly reactive social space (Pupness, or Pup Hood vs Puphood). At once there is the possibility of imagining a pup hood that draws in the maximal amount of digital functionalities (internal screens w/ social displays, additional camera eyes, external LED screens to express emotion etc), but also, drawing inspiration from Teddy Pozo and my own students’ projects, the use of a modified pup hood as a controller/interface for an interactive digital experience (video game).
3. PiShock (Name TBD): Here the code presented at the CRDM Symposium forms the core of the critical making product. Speculatively, we can imagine a gamified or even more heavily code integrated sexual experience generator that specifically de-centers the human sub(ject) and human facilitator to emphasize the incorporation of the body directly into the electronic, data managed circuit. I think this may be the best use-case for the game building approach, as it would allow for greater latitude in exploring the physical and ideological connections between human and machine.