This observation also changed how I thought about digital tools. Their accessibility and flexibility can make them appear increasingly neutral: I click, drag, type or select, and something happens. Yet every interface contains affordances, limitations, defaults and assumptions about how it should be used. The more seamless the tool becomes, the easier it is to overlook these conditions. The question was therefore not whether a tool removes the agency of its user, but how agency is distributed between maker and instrument, and whether the conditions of that relationship remain perceptible.

This enquiry moved from the relationship between one body and a tool toward what a tool might organise between bodies.

I move the pen, but the tool guides the movement. I push against its edge and it pushes back. My hand affects what the tool does, but the tool also affects what my hand can do. Neither makes the letter alone. This simple observation stayed with me when thinking about digital tools. Digital interfaces often make these relationships harder to notice. I click, drag, type or select, and something happens. The better I know the tool, the more it seems to disappear. Yet underneath every apparently simple action are decisions about what I am allowed to do, which options are presented to me, which ones are hidden, and what happens when I choose them.

I became less interested in asking whether I or the tool was really in control. What interested me was what happens between us.

“We become-with each other or not at all.”