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 much of the formats, protocols, keys, and exchanges that are the symbolic functional data passed between humans and devices. Even further, it has revealed much about the trafficking in bits and webs of autonomous systems that facilitate effective data transfer.

Let’s think about it this way: I produced the code by piecing together information from a variety of sources, including much provided code. I composed the project generally across many multiple platforms (OneNote, Word, PowerPoint, Visual Studio Code, Claude, Google Docs, Google Slides, pen and paper, the PiShock, the iPhone and iOS, the M1 MacBook Pro, macOS, and more I’m forgetting). All of that software and tech connected to a variety of services scattered around the NW quadrasphere through generally arbitrary arcs of interlocking Autonomous Systems that fuse in the physically regional internet through a variety of yet more intermediate devices like routers, modems, nodes, hubs, servers, satellites, dishes, and cable. All communicating through complexly layered codes and protocols to manage and organize this disparate, asynchronous, asymmetrical, arbitrary flow of literal electrons and radio waves to facilitate the sending of a signal from my laptop to the small device on my knee that produces (at its current setting) a mild sensation of vibration. And each of these pieces is necessary to the function from its inception through production and into utilization. The experience is not “Oh, I’m shocking myself”; it is a body formulating experience emergent from a dense, complex, decentralized, geographically distributed network of mutually connected agents—both subject and object.

The body and the mind are indistinguishable; together they are a happening, a becoming, as are all things. Precognitive, haptic response to the digitally originated, mediated, and delivered shock in the context of pleasure-pain in the mind-body is coconstitutive: the experience, the experiencer, and the complex assemblage of agents in-between do not preexist each other but emerge together.

While the PiShock neatly demonstrates this in its own construction and function, the goal of PnP is to make these functionalities and interdependencies discretely legible to a user-viewer and, in doing so, document and explore the numerous relations engendered through/around the device.