dd:
With Nio you turn to sound poetry and visual music.
Here one can choose to activate six of 16 sound loops
represented through 16 letters or icons arranged in a
circle. These icons activate the appropriate sound and
animation. What does Nio mean to you in contrast to
your work in kinetic concrete poetry?
JA: Yes, that's
'verse one' of Nio. Verse two is a bit different, as
you know. Verse one deals with layers of sound and
animations, whereas verse two deals with sequences and
layers of sound and animation.
All during the nineties I
was concentrating on writing, on the visual, and on
programming. Interactive audio for the Web wasn't feasible
for a long time for bandwidth and tech reasons, as you know.
I did hardly any audio work at all during the nineties
though, as I've mentioned, in the eighties I did much audio
work. So it was a great pleasure to get back to audio and
combine it with what I learned in the nineties. Nio was a
kind of connection of the work I did in the eighties with
the work I did in the nineties. Sound poetry and music and
voice are important to me. I am excited to combine those
with kinetic poetry, which I love also. So Nio was sort of
twenty years in the making. It was an advance for me but
also a return.
dd:
As you say in a former 
interview
about Nio with Randy Adams you like "to watch the
ways letters and words hang out together". You call
Nio "a kind of lettristic dance", an "alternative
music video". This reminds me of a statement of Squid S o u
p about the aim of their work Untitled
(
review):
"A feeling of being somewhere". Untitled and
Nio are both audio-visual pieces, both interactive
and kind of hypnotic. They seem to fit with what Andrew
Darley pins down about visual digital culture: "a shift away
from prior modes of spectator experience based on symbolic
concerns (and 'interpretative models') towards recipients
who are seeking intensities of direct sensual stimulation."
(Visual Digital Culture. Surface Play and Spectacle in New
Media Genres. London und New York: Routledge 2000) In this
"aesthetics of the sensual" the point is the "curiosity or
fascination with the materiality and mechanics (artifice) of
the image itself". I have exactly this feeling dealing with
NIO and "Untitled": it draws me in, I can't help it, and it
is not about semantic interpretation anymore, it is all
about experimenting. I am not a reader anymore, I have
become a player. How do you see the relation of NIO and
similar interactive audio-visual pieces to immersion,
contemplation, semantics?
JA: I recall a recent
conversation in which people were comparing European net.art
and North American net.art. Someone said that in Europe
there is more concern with language and politics and culture
whereas in North America, it's 'blow my mind or get off the
fucking road.'
And, you know, there is a
crassness to that latter mentality, of course, that is
congruent with North American culture not just on the Web.
Yet there is also in it a certain imperative to dig in as an
artist as deep as you can and make that box and the monitor
and the speakers and the keyboard and mouse and the whole
thing jump into your face and your whole head and, yeah,
blow your mind. So, oddly enough, it has its plusses as well
as obvious drawbacks (like is there anything left of that
mind to blow?).
The guitar; the electric
guitar. The pen; the electric pen. When music underwent that
transformation, it must have seemed destructive of music to
many, and it probably was destructive of a lot of musics, in
certain ways. But music was and is very broad, and getting
broader, often via the electric and now the
digital.
And we associate with the
electric guitar an especially sensual, primal crawdad or
full-blood dynamo hum. Oddly, electric guitar is often
associated with music in which we sense a huge engine. The
rock and the roll in rock and roll is partly human, part
engine, dynamo. Rock and roll is an odd, raucous synthesis
of humanity and the machine.
I do think it's inevitable
that the electric and digital will change writing--in many
ways--but also via this infusion you speak of concerning the
sensual into the material of language. I don't think that
portends a diminishing of the contemplative in writing,
though, any more than music with the electric guitar is
incapable of the contemplative. We will learn to read both
sensually and contemplatively, thoughtfully. And write in
such a way. Text, sound, image, and interactivity will enjoy
more intimate relations than they do now.
When we look back at the
birth of electric music, we see that there was resistance to
it, though it was mainly billed as a youth/age conflict.
This one isn't so much a youth/age thing--I'm an old fart
myself--but you know it's hard to resist electricity for
long when it gets into media and arts.
dd:
You are certainly right to draw this analogy. Digital
aesthetics will become as ubiquitous as electric guitar is
today. However, there are different things an electric
guitar or synthesizer can do as well as a guitar or piano.
The sound can be pleasing and intense or sophisticated and
demanding. Maybe it is not primarily a matter of the medium
but of the cultural background or patterns as you pointed it
out. And maybe then the medium helps to spread out these
cultural patterns like McDonald's Burgers. I have the
feeling the digital medium with its animation and click
gesture is by default not the right place for
contemplatively, thoughtful writing. It demands a certain
power, and courage, to do so and to stop and stay in the
middle of the 'fucking road' (though, in the Web are so many
bypasses ;).
JA: I suppose there
would be a question about the types of contemplation. Do we
contemplate poems, pictures, music etc differently?
Suggesting different themes, meanings, etc and then leaving
it up to the wreader to make of it what they will has a way
of letting people bring their own creativity and meditation
to things rather than 'spelling it out'. Art is always
already interactive in this sense. Also, meditation can also
occur as reflection after the fact.
One reads at one's leisure.
There is no timer. This is one of the ways in which
meditation is naturally a part of reading. I do try to make
my stuff so that the wreader has that sort of control over
it. Pause buttons. The ability to go back and forward in the
piece as one pleases.
I imagine that when the
electric guitar emerged there were objections to its lack of
thoughtfulness. But that changes over time, as we find the
full range of our humanity in the art, find the full range
of the art.
The mouse is one of the ways
to interact with work. There's also the keyboard, which has
been known to be occasionally involved with contemplative
activity.
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