Within this research, I use embodiment to describe this process: the way relationships with tools, spaces and technological systems become incorporated into how a body perceives, moves and acts.This led to a formulation that recurred throughout the practical research: I embody the tool, space and environment; the tool, space and environment embody me.

The first part describes how the possibilities of a tool or environment can become incorporated into bodily practice. To embody a tool does not mean that it literally becomes part of the biological body. Rather, its possibilities can become part of how the body understands what it can do.

The second part—the tool, space and environment embody me—requires more care. It does not mean that an environment possesses a body or experiences me in the same way that I experience it. Rather, my bodily actions can produce consequences within the arrangement around me. My hand changes the position of a mechanism; my voice becomes a signal that directs a drawing instrument; my movement can be detected by a sensor and become information through which an environment responds.

There is therefore a reciprocity here, but it is not necessarily symmetrical. Merleau-Ponty’s flesh describes a fundamental reversibility within embodied perception: touching and being touched, seeing and being visible. Technological mediation complicates this reciprocity. A sensor may detect my body without being perceptible to me. A computational system can respond to my presence without experiencing my presence as I do. It encounters only what its material and computational construction allows it to register.

This distinction becomes crucial. I do not understand technological systems as simply extending Merleau-Ponty’s flesh into a digital domain. Instead, his account provides a way of asking what happens when technological systems begin to participate in the reciprocal relationship between body and world.

A body entering a room, for example, is an embodied event involving movement, intention, orientation and context. A sensor may encounter the same event only as an interrupted beam. Both participate in what happens next, but they do not encounter the event on equivalent terms.

This gives another meaning to a formulation that kept returning throughout the practical research: I embody the tool, space and environment; the tool, space and environment embody me.

The first half is relatively easy to understand. I do not literally absorb the lettering guide into my biological body. Rather, through use, its possibilities and constraints can become part of my bodily repertoire. My hand learns to move with an edge. A gesture becomes possible because a material constraint is there. The second half is more difficult. A tool does not experience me in the same way that I experience it. A sensor does not have a body like mine. A computational system does not perceive the world as I do. So when I say that a tool or environment “embodies me,” I do not mean that technological objects possess an equivalent bodily experience.

I mean that my actions can enter their material and operational arrangements and produce consequences there. My hand changes the position of a mechanism. My voice becomes a signal that directs a drawing instrument. My presence may become a count that changes the configuration of a room. Something passes in both directions, but reciprocity does not mean symmetry.

This becomes particularly important once sensing and computation enter the relationship. Merleau-Ponty describes the reversibility of touching and being touched, seeing and being visible. A technological encounter can be much less balanced. A sensor may detect my body without making its own act of sensing perceptible to me. A computational system may respond to my presence without encountering that presence in anything like the way another body would.

If I enter a room, I arrive as more than a detectable object. I move with intention, orientation, expectation and history. I may hesitate at the doorway. I may know somebody already inside. I may want to be noticed, or I may want to disappear. A sensor encounters something much narrower.

This does not place technology outside the relationship. It means that its participation is selective. What it can encounter depends on how it has been built: what can be sensed, what can become information, which distinctions matter to the software, and what forms of response have been made possible.