One-sentence claim
Plasmatic Multitudes treats the body's edge as a design variable: boundary precision can change, but coherence must remain strong enough for the body to be located, inhabited, addressed, or related through (Shusterman; Hook et al.; Wagemans et al.).
This is why the project does not reduce semi-corporeal avatars to visual style. A soft edge matters only when it changes perception, action, contact, agency, trust, or felt bodily meaning.
Conceptual map
The map deliberately mixes fields because the same body problem recurs in different materials. Gestalt grouping and biological motion explain sparse coherence. XR embodiment shows why representation matters. Media genealogy supplies transformable and spectral body grammars. DiffeoMorph gives a current computational analogy for many-agent form. Pain research keeps the translation cautious and testable (Johansson; Yee and Bailenson; Eisenstein; Pahng et al.; Ho et al.).
Three reusable claims
- Coherence is the mechanism. Soft boundaries work when perceptual binding and sensorimotor trust remain intact.
- Representation is consequential. Once coherence holds, transformed self-representation can alter conduct, self-perception, and relation.
- Boundary precision is a design variable. The body's edge can be staged, tuned, and tested rather than assumed in advance.
Boundary
This is not a theory of ghosts, spirituality, loose quantum language, or therapeutic certainty. Ghosts, auras, particles, swarms, and fields are useful only when they clarify how a transformable body maintains legibility while changing relation, perception, or affordance.
The somaesthetic test is practical: does the transformation preserve enough coherence for ownership and trust, does it change relation or felt bodily meaning rather than add ornament, and can the change be staged and compared as a design variable?