This also complicates the apparent autonomy of a responsive technological environment. When a computational system senses a condition and responds automatically, its behaviour can appear to emerge directly from the environment itself. Yet between sensing and response lies a series of prior decisions: what can be detected, how it will be categorised, where a threshold will be placed, and what action should follow when that threshold is crossed. The technological rule therefore carries human decisions into the environment and allows those decisions to operate at a distance from the moment in which they were made.

This is where the exposure of the mechanism in Breathing Room becomes significant. The sensing method is deliberately simple, the count can be explained, and the threshold can be stated. The aim is not to suggest that transparency removes the authority of the system, but to make that authority available for examination. A visitor can ask why their presence becomes a count, why ten matters, and why crossing that threshold produces a particular spatial consequence.

The question raised by bodily translation is therefore not only what is lost when a person becomes data. It is also what forms of authority become possible once that data has been made operational.

The buzzer sounds. The curtain moves. The door refuses to open. The recommendation appears. And the decision can begin to feel as though it came from the technology itself. This is why exposing the mechanism of Breathing Room matters to me.

The system is deliberately simple enough to be explained. Behind each of the components and functions is a decision. Making those decisions perceptible does not make them neutral, or automatically make them good. It simply makes it harder for them to pretend that nobody made them. And this leaves me with a more difficult problem than choosing the correct number.

Franklin argues that practices of care depend on immediate feedback and adjustment, and resist being completely organised through predetermined steps. Yet I had built a system that was supposed to respond to bodies through exactly such a predetermined rule.