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 was reinstalled with the support and sponsorship of iArt Gallery. The work is indexed here as part of Smith and Van Wyk’s revisiting of the Dada South? Archive of materials at A4 Arts Foundation.

Speak Naturally and Continuously… continues Matthew Hindley’s interest in audience interaction in a constructed project environment. Selected as a finalist for the 2003 MTN New Contemporaries Award and later acquired by the South African National Gallery as a permanent installation, the work collects sounds via microphones planted at various points in the museum. The sounds gathered, after being subjected to the processes of the project environment, are displayed on eight metres of LED screen running across the National Gallery’s entrance.

Sounds and voices will be picked up, transmitted and then converted by a text engine, and will finally scroll, as random commentary, across the LED display. The corruption of language and self-expression is guaranteed in this process. Cogent argument is useless, and all language will lose its hierarchy: shattered in collation, made equal in assimilation, and redeployed inevitably to be lost in translation.

– Tracy Murinik, 10 Years, 100 Artists, Bell-Roberts Publishing, 2004