Breathing Room developed from a simple observation: bodies leave traces on their environments. The trace was not produced intentionally. It emerged through repetition: bodily presence gradually becoming material consequence.

This offered another way of thinking about the relationship between body and environment. An environment does not simply contain a body. It can receive its actions, retain their consequences and, in turn, alter the conditions through which that body acts.

Breathing Room developed this relationship into a proposed spatial installation. The initial idea imagined a room whose walls could register the presence of people within it, extruding around their bodies before returning to their original form when left alone. The room would metaphorically inhale presence and exhale in its absence.

To translate this proposition into a feasible spatial structure, sheer curtains were introduced as responsive walls. As more people entered, the curtains would contract inward; as people left, they would expand outward again. The choice of curtain was significant. A domestic curtain already regulates relationships between visibility and concealment, inside and outside, exposure and privacy. It does not eliminate what lies beyond it, but allows degrees of access and withdrawal. Unlike a fixed wall, it can also yield, fold, gather and move. The curtain was therefore conceived less as an enclosure than as a membrane: a boundary capable of being affected by the bodies within it.

This membrane does not belong to any single person. Each person entering contributes to the state of the same spatial boundary. Presence becomes a collective condition: one body alters the conditions available to the others.

Presence, here, names the condition of becoming perceptible and consequential within a relation. It is not simply a matter of occupying space, but of becoming capable of affecting what happens within that relation.

For the membrane to respond to presence, however, presence first has to become perceptible to the technological system. This introduces a problem of translation.

In a house you've probably never entered, Johnny has been resting his head in the same spot every afternoon after work, for almost twenty years. The light grey paint thinned away on the wooden wall, the natural wood showing through—slowly, without intention. He is not there now. But the wall remembers. It holds the shape of a life close to it—a trace that was never meant to signify anything, and yet does.
What if a room could yield to the bodies inside it?

I kept thinking about Johnny’s wall. It had been changed by somebody simply being close to it, again and again. No sensor. No database. No intention to leave a trace. Just a body and an environment slowly becoming different through contact.

I thought of my room, I thought of a space not simply contains people and can be affected by them. I thought of a room, whose walls can sense and extrude out the shapes/ presence of the people in it, and return to its original form when nobody’s there. It inhales the presence, and exhales when left alone, like a sigh of relief. A breathing room.