NeoNio

iOS Universel / Divertissement

NeoNio is an upgrade of the 2000 Director interactive music piece mentioned by Matthew Mirapaul in the New York Times in his column on the best net art of 2001. The artistic aspiration of Nio is toward a new interactive, visual and combinatory form of music: the heap. A heap is a collection of sound icons. Each icon has a sound and an animation. In verse 1 of NeoNio, the player can layer 16, 4-second music loops. In verse 2, she can both layer and sequence the 16 loops in a 4x4 grid. Each loop has both music and animation of the phonemes sung in the audio. The player creates/plays their own sequencing and layering of the music and animations.

Phones only play verse 1; they aren't large enough for the verse 2 display. Tablets or desktop monitors play both verse 1 and verse 2.

Reviews of Nio:

"Interactive-sound projects, which are programmed to produce music in response to a visitor's actions, are becoming more sophisticated. Doo-wop fans will adore Jim Andrews's ''Nio,'' at vispo.com."

Matthew Mirapaul in The New York Times article ARTS ONLINE; Driven by a Higher Calling, Not Dot-Com Dollars, Dec. 24, 2001.

"NIO: one of the most important Net Art pieces, but more than that, a sensitive and ludic experiment, that emancipates the user to become a co-creator of the audiovisual poems generated by its system."

Marcus Bastos (Brazil)

"Jim Andrews’ work Nio presents the reader with a complex aesthetic experience that makes use of phonemes and letters but not of words. Andrews’s piece is a cross between a sound poem, kinetic visual art, and an interactive musical instrument. In two verses, Andrews provides the reader with two different ways of mixing clusters of letters, each of which have a musical voice track attached to them. In the first verse, those clusters of letters then do a kind of animated dance in the center of a circle as the voice loop they signify is sung. The loops are layered on top of each other, allowing the interactor to compose a shifting doo-wop melody/animation. In an accompanying essay, ‘Nio and the Art of Interactive Audio for the Web’, Andrews explains that he’s ‘trying to synthesize and transform image, sound, and text, not simply juxtapose them. I seek some sort of critical mass to fuse them’. He describes the work as a ‘synthesis of literacies’. In Nio and in much of his other work, including his visual poetry, Andrews attempts to rethink the relationship between poetry and language, creating interactive poetic experiences that utilize texts of various kinds that don’t rely on words to provoke a response from the reader. Letters in motion and the human voice alone, devoid of explicit denotation, can impart a great of emotional and semantic content. Nio is proof of the idea that poems needn’t be composed of words in order to be poetic and evocative."

Scott Rettberg
From Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature

"Jim Andrews’ Nio (2001) is a digital “lettrist” poem that not only combines different medial processes, but also merges art with technology and technological applications. Here, as in much other digital poetry, the concept of play has pride of place as a bodily (re- )activity: Nio only materializes in a ‘ludic’ interaction with the reader/user. Displayed as a circle of icons issuing images and sounds, Nio’s design and appearance is to a certain extent dependent on my actions and interferences as a reader/player: the icons I bring to live participate in a dance of letters that change their shape with every new addition or deletion, the music changing only minimally in its repetitive gestures. If Wallace Stevens once claimed that «poetry is the subject of the poem», Nio performs this quite literally as the constant (re-)creation of lettrist shapes acting as the protagonists of the poem."

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth from
Multimediality, Intermediality, and Medially Complex Digital Poetry