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[Glossary]
Personal Bubble is the model through which this research reconceives personal space — not as a fixed zone around the body, but as a condition produced through relationship, sedimented through embodiment, and increasingly translated into data by the environments a body moves through. Its boundary, in this sense, is not a physical edge but wherever that condition is currently being negotiated. Body is understood not as an autonomous physical object but as a situated, sensing and relational way of being in the world. Lived experience emerges through the body's continuous relations with other bodies, tools, technologies and environments, and therefore cannot be fully contained by the data through which these relations are increasingly measured and represented. Boundary refers to a relational threshold through which bodily experience is negotiated. Rather than coinciding with the physical limits of the body, it emerges between body, others, technologies, and environment, continuously changing according to proximity, attention, perception, and response. Relationship does not refer primarily to an interpersonal or emotional connection. It describes the conditions through which bodies, objects, technologies, and environments affect one another. A relationship exists when the action or condition of one changes the possibilities available to another. It therefore describes a dynamic arrangement of influence, constraint, response, and possibility rather than simply a connection between two entities. Embodiment names a mutual but uneven process, not a literal merging of body and tool. To embody a tool, space, or environment is to develop bodily habits through relation to it; in turn, the tool, space, or environment embodies the body by conditioning how it can perceive, move, act, and respond. A relationship does not automatically constitute embodiment. Relationship describes the structure of interaction. Embodiment describes what that relationship does to bodily experience. Embodiment is what happens when a relationship becomes consequential for how a body perceives, moves, acts, or develops habits. Environment is not simply what surrounds the body, but the conditions within which bodily experience takes place. Technology becomes environmental when it operates as part of these conditions rather than as a discrete tool one occasionally reaches for. Unlike a singular interaction, a technological environment establishes an ongoing set of possibilities and constraints within which the body perceives, moves, and acts. Presence does not mean simply being physically located somewhere. It names the condition of becoming perceptible and consequential within a relation — not just being there, but registering as something a relation can act on. Relationship names the structural condition itself: that one thing's state changes what is possible for another. Presence names something narrower — whether, and how, a particular body has actually become one of the terms within that structure. A body can be physically present in a space without being present to a given technological system, if nothing about it has registered within that system's sensing apparatus. Translation is the process through which embodied experience is transformed into another system of representation or action. In technological systems, this means transforming experience into particular, measurable qualities that can be sensed, classified, stored, and processed. Translation is therefore neither a neutral copy nor a destruction of experience: it makes certain qualities and actions possible while producing a remainder — what that particular system cannot recognise. Digital Flesh — The research began with a search for what was called digital flesh: an attempt to imagine what kind of body might inhabit digital space. This was expected to lead toward another form of the body — perhaps its representation, extension or informational counterpart. Instead, the practical research gradually made the distinction between body and digital space itself difficult to maintain. What emerged was not another body, but a series of relationships through which bodies, technologies and environments become perceptible and consequential to one another: a gesture becomes constrained by a tool; a voice becomes a trace; a doorway crossing becomes a count; a count becomes a rule; a rule returns as sound or spatial movement. Across these translations, neither body nor technology remains entirely on one side of the relation. If digital flesh still has meaning within this research, it therefore names not the body translated into data, but the relational tissue through which bodily and technological conditions continually pass into and alter one another.
[References]
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