7 acts, 11 hours

On the vast, windy plain of City Hall Plaza, one could hear the faint, odd sounds of clinking. Two men walked slowly across the plaza, each dragging a jumble of wooden dowels and sticks attached to their legs by snarled ropes.

Sound artists Larry Johnson and Lewis Gesner were out recently rehearsing for Mobius's ``InBetween: City Hall Plaza," a site-specific program of performance, installation, sound, and video that will be held all day tomorrow on the plaza.

The event consists of seven works by members of the Mobius Artists Group and their collaborators that explore interpretations of the idea of ``in between." The term has multiple meanings for the group, which has been a bit in between itself after losing its permanent space at Fort Point Channel in 2003. The event's title also refers to collaborations between artists, between media, and between art and public space.

Mobius, a 28-year-old artist-run collaborative organization for experimental work in all media, has presented site-specific pieces in a variety of settings here and around the world.

That the program is taking place now is a triumph of Mobius's persistence and vision. ``InBetween" was originally designed to be held last fall at an abandoned warehouse in Boston's Marine Industrial Park. But the group, which has successfully negotiated the use of city spaces for years, this time became ensnared in permit problems. When it became apparent five days before the scheduled opening that Mobius would not be allowed to present the work there, the project was canceled. Mobius director Nancy Adams had a baby in February and then started looking for new sites.

This time around, with the support of Sarah Hutt, director of visual arts programming for the mayor's office of arts, tourism, and special events, Mobius gathered the necessary permits, licenses, approvals, and sign-offs from various city departments for the plaza site quickly.

``I know Mobius and have worked with them over the years," says Hutt. ``I'm really excited they're bringing stuff to City Hall Plaza because they are performance artists, and they do need the public to interact with. This is such a great place to do that. There's tourists, and people walk through here all the time."

Johnson and Gesner's piece is called ``Probes," and here's how part of it works: The two artists each have a black-tipped stick that they throw into the air. Wherever the black tip is pointing when it lands is the direction they walk next. Throw and walk, throw and walk. Their paths might take them down stairs, in circles, or into each other.

`` `Probes' is an attempt to learn empirical things about the space we're in and to understand and interpret the results through the senses," says Johnson.

There are six other artistic teams. Two performers will balance 15-foot-high bamboo poles on their palms while speaking texts, backed by the prerecorded sounds of ceramic resonators and bells played by wooden sticks. A giant chalk drawing will be created on the plaza's concrete that incorporates images based on a Chinese tangram puzzle. A dog trainer will train a human ``dog," exploring submission and domination in cross-species, interspecies, and bureaucratic settings.

What else? Well, an artist will knot and unknot 400 yards of tulle as part of a narrative about union and separation while a video artist projects onto the walls of City Hall an animation of a hand knotting the fabric and a video showing slowed footage of a couple signing a license. There will be an interactive performance and mixed-media installation using plaster, wax, metal parts, detritus, and flowers in an exploration of the cycles of creation and destruction.

And in a piece by Adams and her husband, Slavco Sokolovski , nine performers dressed in white will lie down on a swath of canvas and have a cartoon brick wall painted over them, continuing the pattern of the plaza's bricks.

This is what they planned, that is. Forecasted rain may alter some of the projects or push the event to the rain date, Sunday.

Adams, who sounds exhausted as she handles two part-time jobs and two small children on top of these preparations, says it's not entirely clear why the first ``InBetween" venture didn't work out, but thinks that the city, in the wake of 9/11 and the Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island, is extra cautious about fire safety and egress for indoor projects. This one being outside, she says, is less problematic.

``We have our generator, and our generator permit," she says. ``Producing site-specific work is a process. Certainly [married French artists] Christo and Jeanne-Claude understand that. And the end result is sometimes not the one you originally intended, but resulting in something equally or more exciting. I'm delighted for the artists that their work will finally be realized."

Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com.