This artwork was loaned to the exhibition Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance curated by Kathryn Smith and Roger van Wyk, Iziko South Africa National Gallery, December 12, 2009–February 28, 2010. It is indexed here as part of Smith and Van Wyk’s revisiting of the Dada South? Archive of materials at A4 Arts Foundation.

This work attempts to blur the lines between body and language by asking us to confuse the two. Here, viewers-turned-participants use their entire bodies to touch and trigger activation points laid out in a Mondrian-styled grid. Each rectangle in the work’s projected image is not filled with primary colours, but animated text and spoken word. The saturation of these ‘virtual buttons’ creates an inverse relationship: move quickly, and the piece will itself stutter in a barrage of audiovisual verbiage; move carefully, even cautiously – ‘stutter’ with your body – and both meaning and bodies emerge.

Viewers must navigate their arms and hands, legs and feet, or neck and head, laboriously back and forth, on and off, each individual button. They shift between intention and passivity, speaking and listening, to control the piece. How the interaction works is transparent and easy to understand, but the performance it engenders is often alien to those involved. You move in ways you normally wouldn’t, and through this, experience communication and embodiment as difficult and opaque.

– Nathaniel Stern, artist’s notes