Embodiment therefore does not describe a seamless fusion between human and technology. Nor does technological mediation eliminate bodily agency. Instead, embodiment describes an ongoing process through which bodily capacities are shaped through relationships with material and technological conditions, while bodily actions simultaneously produce consequences within those conditions.

This clarifies the distinction between relationship and embodiment within the research. Relationship describes the conditions through which bodies, objects and technologies affect one another. Embodiment describes what those relationships do to bodily experience: how their possibilities, constraints and responses become incorporated into how a body perceives and acts.

But embodiment does not automatically constitute an environment.

A further shift occurs when these technologically mediated relations are no longer occasional—when they cease to belong primarily to a particular tool that can be picked up, used and put down, and instead become persistent conditions through which bodies perceive, move, communicate and act.

When does technology cease to function primarily as a tool we encounter and begin to function as part of the environment through which we encounter the world?

Embodiment, then, is not a seamless fusion between body and technology, nor does it mean that the body loses its agency. It describes an ongoing process through which relationships with tools, spaces and technological systems become incorporated into how a body perceives, moves and acts.

A relationship, as I use the term in this research, describes the conditions through which bodies, objects and technologies affect one another. Embodiment describes what those relationships do to bodily experience and practice.

Then what happens when technological relations no longer belong to a particular moment of use, but become part of the conditions within which bodily experience takes place?

That is where a tool begins to become an environment.