Nio

This is one of the best pieces of audiovisual poetry. Nio was commssioned by turbulence.org so thanks for letting us include Jims project. So you can visit the project via the link below . Visit the work to engage in it and read his essay or click below and read an interview. Thanks to Helen from turbelence for allwoing us to link to Jims work.

This is a piece thats beautifully designed incorporating a strange musicality using spcken words and singing.

"When I first started interactive audio, being a writer, I was attracted initially to trying stuff with poetry. But since I was interested in layering sounds, it seemed, after some experimentation, that musical sounds were far more interesting and engaging layered than poetry. When you layer words, they make a certain type of sense and have certain resonances, but they're quite different from musical sense and resonances which, at the moment, I find more intriguing.

I did a fair amount of sound poetry some time ago. It was a way into things that cannot be said in words but do need saying. Written words and sentences do not have easy access to the primal or the harmonic/dissonant reveries of pure sound or the meaningful repetition, variance, trance, and pattern of the drum. Though, on the other hand, poetry has access to beauties, voices, song and thought that music can barely contain. Inscribed language and voice extend along many dimensions.

As sound poetry is to spoken poetry, so is visual poetry to written poetry, often. I've been drawn for years to visual poetry, particularly lettristic visual poetry that deals in syllables and letters as opposed to words, phrases and sentences. For the above reasons, but also because in the digital realm, the shapes of letters are more various than the shapes of words, which tend to be elongated rectangles. And, as a programmer, a letter is typically a continuous thing on which various transformations/animations are more visually appealing and suggestive than on whole words or sentences. Letters are characters. They have more character than words do, in some ways. And since they take up less memory than whole words, they're more amenable to smooth animations. Which opens up the possibility of experimenting with the tone and rhythm of motion, whereas much literary animation on the Web is sufficiently jerky that it needs to depend almost completely on the conceptual dimension of the animation, the sense of the words and how they permute, rather than being able to dance with human feeling, with the gestures of the body, with the body of the body. So I regard my visual and interactive poetry not really as departures from language but as explorations of feeling implicit in language, and all of my work as writing."