This complicates the meaning of presence developed through this research. Presence is not simply physical location, but the condition of becoming perceptible and consequential within a relation. A body can therefore be physically present while remaining absent to a technological system if nothing about it becomes detectable. Conversely, a person may be physically absent while remaining perceptible through data, traces and networked activity.

Presence is therefore not equivalent to complete legibility. Privacy, from this perspective, need not mean becoming completely invisible or withdrawing entirely from relation. It can instead describe a capacity to negotiate how one becomes perceptible, to whom, to what degree, and with what consequences.

Breathing Room knows very little about me.

It does not know my name.
It does not know how I feel.
It only knows that I crossed a boundary.

Perhaps that is enough? But there is another boundary I had not considered at first. I enter the room and it notices me. Someone else enters. Then someone else. And instead of becoming more accommodating, the room gives us less. The curtain moves inward.

I can withdraw from the room, but perhaps the room can withdraw from me too.