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 just around the individual experience of the instant, but the ordering of time into a series of thens and nows.

What I’m getting at, as I try to edit myself, is that synchronicity is an explicitly enumerated element in my evaluation of current teledildonic scholarship, and I want to use my dissertation project to show how teledildonic apparatuses (and their ever-present attendant technologies) disrupt the phenomenologically obvious synchronicity implied by the constructed experience of one signaling body and one receiving body. The PiShock (and other digital sex toys that do not rely on apparently instant transmission of sensation) demonstrates that the construction of time is itself an anthropocentric metric.

What this insight opens more broadly is an understanding of time for these devices that operates at (at least) three valences: embodied time, computational time, and social time, further complicating the dyadic synchronous structure assumed in most teledildonic literature.

This leads into some additional research insights that arose this week as the PiShock manufacturers have taken a sudden tonal turn. The heavily controlled and moderated Discord through which advertising and promotional events are largely announced has suddenly become a platform for the company administrators to air grievances about political, supply chain, and industry challenges with denunciatory and aggressive language. What this reveals is yet another temporal and emergent valence through which teledildonic devices operate: a single company (in our heavily networked age) cannot supply or maintain the necessary supply chains and networks required to produce, distribute, and operate these devices on their own, and these interconnections structure the timing of the experience.

Critical making has also continued this week as the last lingering mail-order pieces of the sculpture trickle in and I start the laborious process of construction. Testing has been successful, so the build can begin in earnest.