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M1 is a public experiment testing how people negotiate the figure-ground relation between intentional and unintentional gesture. In this 8 week threshold performance, participants embedded an algorithmic, pre-scripted series of motions into an everyday situation: a crowded public eating space at a major university.

M1 explores the cusp between visible and invisible performance, between scripted and chance events and emergent social patterns.

M1 algorithm:
  1. The event must be situated in a public place.


  2. The event must be repeated at the same time each day.


  3. Each participant must originate a repeatable sequence of actions within a master timeline.


  4. All actions must be ordinary in the context of the site.


  5. Each player must appear and behave the same in every repetition regardless of changes in the environment.


  6. The event must be repeated on a regular schedule until such time as an ideal spectator recognizes the "performance" as an artificially constructed event.
    7.

In accordance with these rules, M1 can be performed by anyone, anywhere. The first iteration of M1 by sponge took place at Tressider Plaza, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Califonia during the spring of 1997. On Mondays and Fridays, 5 individuals began their performance at 12:30 pm. The cycle was executed once, followed by a five minute break, and then repeated in its entirety, concluding at 1:45 pm.

M1 is a barely perceptible anomaly that does not emerge into the visible during one cycle of viewing. It makes a slow and cumulative imprint. Over time and after many reiterations, the ideal spectator will begin to discern intention and pattern in otherwise seemingly unrelated and nondescript activities.

Once thus engaged in anticipating certain actions by certain people and predicting the attendant consequences and response, the process of recognition rapidly accelerates as the geometry of m1 leaps from the ground into a figure at which point the ideal spectator notices the event, effectively ending it, or may enter into the M1 construct as a player by originating a repeatable sequence of activities in accordance with the M1 algorithm.

 
               
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© sponge 1997 - 2002