OPERATIVE SYSTEM
The operative system at the basis of this method – to which we always return – is extremely simple: we make a square with a scotch paper tape. We set the convention that their is a “outside” and a “inside”. The participants all start on the “outside” side, looking at the “inside” one. “The inside” space works as a potential space that will, as time goes by, absorb the “outside” space (and the other way around), ultimately abolishing any distinction between the two. When that happens – when the ones that are outside “feel” inside, and the ones that are inside “feel” outside – it means that the practice of the method is at its “optimal” state.
In this first phase, the space remains “open” until somebody takes the decision to act upon it, starting the game. The decision to act has to be absolutely voluntary. Only so can you assume responsibility for the acts you carry out. To be responsible for what you do is a sine qua non condition for the success of this work. Not only to reduce the possibilities of misunderstanding or to avoid data manipulation, but also to allow feedback, a paramount tool for the embodiment of concepts, to be effective.
The first action reduces the possibilities, frames the possible and obliges all the other participants to “let go” of any other hypotheses of relation that they may in the meanwhile have developed in the form of small “holograms” in their minds. This “being able to let go” is another central activity within this process, and a required condition to succeed in the practice of the method. A second person then acts, according to the principles and rules of the method, interfering with the first image and once again obliging all the others to “resituate” themselves, taking the new proposed framing into account. This second action has in the meanwhile “re-written” the previous action, following a logic that will be continuous in this practice, thus promoting a circular and nonlinear perception of time. When the third person, confronted with the new situation, moves forward and interferes with the space, a pattern is established that makes a given topology of the place appear. Still subtle, that topology can nevertheless already be shared by the group. The sooner this common place is shared, the faster an idea of community can be established, one of the goals of this work.
In short: the first action worked as an “event”, the second proposed a direction, and the third confirmed that direction. These are the first steps for the “initial conditions” of this system to be established. To earn a collective sensibility to those initial conditions within an auto-organising process in which there is no leader or script, is the challenge of this practice, and the only way to set up a “line of thought” which is at once open and steady. That is why it is important not to confound “direction” with “meaning”. Despite de fact that both terms refer to the word “sense”, in this work the only thing that matters is to define the “direction” that an action takes. The only thing that matters is the coherence of the structure and not the coherence of its content. Precisely to allow the “meaning” to remain there in potentiality, leaving the “other” – the one “on the other side” – the onus of projecting herself on what she sees.