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Immersionism (Art Movement)

Immersionism in the arts refers to a philosophy of creative immersion in a shared ecosystem that took root in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 1990s. The environmentally engaged, interdisciplinary movement played a significant role in transforming a struggling industrial district the City of New York had all but abandoned. The Immersionists explored a range of rejuvenating events and cultural experiments in the streets and battered warehouses and often referenced living things in their nomenclature. Instead of artificially dividing the senses into separate industries, and separated art and meaning from the body and life, the Immersionists nurtured vital local confluences of culture, information, community and environment. While creative districts in New York had emerged in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Manhattan's West Village in the 1950s, Soho and Chelsea in the 1960s and 70s, and the East Village in the 1980s, the Immersionist community gave rise to the first major New York arts community to take root outside Manhattan. This was a significant shift commemorated in the museum exhibit Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, curated by the art historian Jonathan Fineberg at the University of Illinois in 1993.

With participants from across the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, the dynamic international “artists’ colony,” as Die Zeit has called the creative community near the Williamsburg Bridge, catalyzed a renaissance that spread through much of Brooklyn and beyond. Not to be mistaken for virtual reality or the simulated worlds of computer games, Brooklyn Immersionism was a fully embodied, visceral aesthetic that reconnected art and culture with a living environment. On the website for his arts broadcast on Yale Radio, Brainard Carey expounded on the Immersionists' ecological vision of being:

“ The creative community that came together during the early 1990s in Williamsburg, now referred to as the Immersionists, shared a common interest in cultural innovation and deep involvement in their local environment. These young artists, musicians and urbanists made immersion in their immediate world more critical than participation in a remote, and often disappointing ‘art world’ across the river. Culture, art, entertainment and biological survival fused together into a highly spirited local ecosystem. ” — Brainard Carey, Yale Radio

Working within a complex and distressed urban habitat, the Immersionist community shifted its approach from 20th century commercial paradigms of mass production and "high art" to various forms of cultural and environmental cultivation. It was a process of environmental nurturing that in many ways transcended the arts and entertainment. Spanning over a decade of experimentation, it formulated a new vision of both meaning and beauty as a creation shared with the environment. Although some Immersionists focused on installations, others on event creation, and others on neighborhood media networks, their creations often overlapped and their environmental engagement operated on many levels at once: sensory immersion, social immersion and ecological immersion. In 1998 Suzan Wines notes in Domus Magazine that these interconnecting webs emerged into a living system:

“ During the early 1990s Williamsburg, Brooklyn, located directly across the river from the popular East Village, was home to New York’s most vibrant art scene... their work integrated the raw material of Williamsburg’s industrial wasteland with its inherent human diversity (mainly Hispanic, Polish, Hasidic and Italian) to create a living, breathing exquisite corpse constantly responding to new input. ” — Suzan Wines, Domus

Williamsburg's industrial waterfront became recognized by many of the Immersionists as both an aesthetic element of their work and a contributor with agency. Unlike the disembodied communities formed on the internet, the creative community in Williamsburg participated in physical social networks that were rooted in a complex, struggling neighborhood. These local connections had a mutually transformative nature and grew increasingly rich as the artists, musicians and performers collaborated on installations and events in the streets, rooftops and abandoned warehouses. The web of activity was further enriched by a local media network that connected the neighborhood discourse to larger planetary concerns. The Immersionists' innovative, interdisciplinary culture rapidly gained international influence through a wide range of media representing art, music, architecture, culture, science and the environment. The Manhattan press began to cover this dynamic culture as early as 1991, and by 1993 Newsweek was taking note of the artists' emerging language of immersion, including Lalalandia's “omnisensorial” systems and Nerve Circle's “web jam.” By the mid to late 1990s, Immersionists were being interviewed on Japanese television and Williamsburg’s “immersive environments” and "environmental events"were being reported in the Village Voice, Domus, Wired, Die Zeit, The Drama Review, The New York Times, and Flash Art.

Brooklyn Immersionism represented a unique fusion of physical and cultural environments. Many of the Immersionists' innovations in ecological engagement and nurturing — 360° sensory immersion, social networking, recycling, and subjective ecology — anticipated developments in the arts, psychology, urban ecology and technology. Italy's first International Generative Art Conference at Milano University, for example, appeared towards the end of Brooklyn's Immersionist era in 1998. Echoing the Immersionists' largest experiment in cultural ecology, Organism, which debuted in 1993, J. Scott Turner's book The Extended Organism was published in 2000. It was well over a decade after the Lizard Tail's "multidimensional convergences" and Worm Magazine's "publishing network" emerged in Williamsburg that the first International Social Ecology Gathering took place in Lyons, France. That 2016 conference brought together scholars and activists from Belgium, France, Spain, Switzerland and the Americas to conceptualize a framework for environmentally engaged communities that the Immersionists had explored in earnest years earlier. In the new millennium the emergence of extended cognition as a wider context for human thought process echoes the Immersionists' approach to aesthetics as a phenomenon that emerges most intimately and intensely out of local interactions.

Although the City of New York had provided little to revive Williamsburg's economy in the late 20th century, once a creative culture had emerged and began to attract an influx of young, creative people and small businesses to Williamsburg, Michael L. Bloomberg set into motion zoning changes and tax abatements favoring large corporate developers. Often mislabeled gentrification, a process originally associated with individual home buyers, these city-sponsored high rises in the new millennium caused a steep rise in the cost of living. A creative and intimate village of row houses, light industry and small businesses was deliberately turned into an extension of Manhattan’s corporate welfare system. Where a 2004 study actually showed a decrease in attrition rates among Williamsburg's disadvantaged populations in the 1990s, Bloomberg's policies after 2001 were instrumental in removing many of the lower income Immersionists and their neighbors from the district they had collectively revived. Numerous articles and films have investigated the takeover of the neighborhood by outside investors and questioned the city’s pivotal role in the process. Although their post-industrial village along the Brooklyn waterfront was largely upended after 2001, many of the Immersionists continued to employ immersive strategies in their work around the world. Some have reflected on their formative years in films such as Su Friedrich's Gut Renovation, and Marcin Ramocki’s Brooklyn DIY which premiered with a sold-out screening at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009. The most salient indication that Immersionism made an impact, however, is in the transformation of Brooklyn itself. As Jillian Steinhauer states in Hyperallergic in 2013, "It’s indisputable that Immersionism had a big impact on the culture of Brooklyn as we know it today."

Definition

Habitat as medium

In contrast to the singular immersive events of black box theater, Earth art, Happenings and online communities, the creative community near Williamsburg's waterfront cultivated an entire weave of activity within their own habitat. In their most immersive efforts they blurred the boundaries between themselves and their living context. The vitality of the relationship was the goal, not art as a separate category within life. Immersionism was a significant departure from a human centered view of culture, and even a challenge to post-enlightenment objectivity which harbors within it an assumed human observer. By making their shared environment as critical a player as the humans, the Immersionists went beyond even the Living Theater which still operated within a western, human-centered tradition. In many ways, Immersionism echoed indigenous cultures founded on a sense of interdependence with nature.

Immersionism in Brooklyn was a response, in part, to the alienating industrialization of culture. But it was also an answer to the postmodern detachment of the 1980s which was offering a critique of modernism and industrialization, but few solutions. Perhaps most significantly it was also a genuine response to historical conditions. Coming of age during the civil rights and environmental movements of the 1960s and 70s, and finding themselves confronting an unusually depressed and toxic waterfront, many members of Williamsburg’s creative community began to address their immediate living conditions. Cultivating an inclusive neighborhood culture characterized by ecological and animal vitality seemed more urgent than creating products for a removed and often elitist arts industry across the river. Rather than divide the arts mechanically into separate professions, and remove human culture from nature, the Immersionists initiated a cultural reformulation. They made human culture and its environmental support systems a new hybrid phenomenon. Such a confluence represented a conscious form of embodied and extended cognition that psychologists began to embrace as a research focus decades later.

A comparison to early 20th century Surrealism helps to illustrate the significance of what the Immersionists had innovated. Where the Surrealists explored the wild inner landscape of the individual, the Immersionists cultivated a common urban wilderness, radically moving subjectivity into a shared realm. Waterfront Week’s cartoonist, Tony Millionaire even titled the Immersionists’ collective confabulation an “Urban Pastoral.” In a peer-reviewed article for the London-based journal, Digital Creativity, Nerve Circle's director Ebon Fisher theorized that a form of “subjective ecology” was emerging in Williamsburg. In the catalog for Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm Jessica Nissen ruminated poetically on “circuitous systems” in an “internal/external" continuum. The Lizard's Tail Cabaret introduced its large, all night Cat's Head gatherings as a "multidimensional convergence." Williamsburg, one of the most toxic industrial districts of the United States, had given birth to one of the largest instances of an environmental philosophy of culture.

Primal being

Seeking a deeper relationship with their shared cultural and physical environment, many Immersionists attempted to tap into a more primal sense of being and village life. As an expression of this primal ethos, they often referenced animals, habitats and biology in their nomenclature. In his essay for the exhibition catalog Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm at the University of Illinois, Professor Jonathan Fineberg spoke of the community's “recourse to biological metaphors.” Likewise, in an article for Domus magazine in 1998, Suzan Wines identified a biomorphic aesthetic at work in the Immersionists’ approach to “place as a web of convergent forces.”

Beginning with the mischievously titled Sex Salon of 1990, large convergences of music, dance, performance and installation art in Williamsburg's abandoned warehouses and streets employed a language of rebirth and animal vitality. These included (in order of appearance):

The Sex Salon, Cat’s Head I, Cat’s Head II, Glow Nighttime, Flytrap, Human Fest I and II, El Sensorium, Organism.

Most of the Immersionist groups and their enterprises also referenced living things, habitats and systems (in alphabetical order):

The AlulA Dimension, The Cave, Colored Greens, Endless Tissue, Fit the Beast, Floating Cinema, Floating Point Unit, Galapagos, The Green Room, Keita the Mermaid, Lalalandia, The Lizard’s Tail, Miss Kitty, Mustard, Nerve Circle, Ocularis, The Outpost, PoGo (a cartoon possum), Room Temperature, El Sensorium, Society of Animals, Thrust.

The Immersionists' holistic and biomorphic approach to the arts took many forms in Williamsburg. Floating Point Unit and Fake Shop explored theater and installations that surrounded the human body with an array of beguiling media systems. Members of the Green Room often took performances into the streets and local environmental protest marches. The Pedestrian Project positioned mysterious figures in the streets as silent inducements to civic awareness. Nerve Circle, an immersive systems theater group "nurtured" interactive street and warehouse events, and conducted "fleshlinks" and "slurms" billed as "media organisms." Lalalandia immersed their audiences in a rich weave of live music, food, strange aquatic lighting and materials recycled from the surrounding factories. In reference to the social and biological toxins that were prevalent in their distressed industrial neighborhood, Lalalandia member, Greg Asch codified Lalalandia's strange, turbulent music as "illbient." A commitment to meaningful neighborhood engagement was vividly demonstrated by the Hungry March Band and the artists Robin Perl, Kate Yourke, Sasha Sumner and Gene Pool Harding who helped to organize local environmental protests. Pool often performed at anti-incinerator protests while wearing a suit of recycled cans and riding a unicycle.

Some of the largest expressions of primal engagement with the community and the environment were instigated by artists associated with Epoché (The Sex Salon), The Lizard’s Tail (Cat's Head I and II), the Flytrap Group (Flytrap), Doc Israel (Human Fest I and II), and Nerve Circle (Organism). Setting into motion large interdisciplinary events in abandoned warehouses and streets, these projects took a demonstrably visceral approach to nurturing community. In a form of primal media sharing, media artist Jon Rubin presented screenings from a raft on the East River, and situated the act of watching within a living community that was fully exposed to the elements. Another primal connection to media emerged a little later in 1997. Galapagos Art Space held intimate film screenings on its roof with the film collective Ocularis. Along the same lines, Galapagos also hosted discussions about ecology and art called The Society of Animals next to a pool of water inside its repurposed mayonnaise factory.

A concern for primal survival issues among the Immersionists was vividly apparent in the local media's coverage of protests. Word of Mouth (later Worm) and Waterfront Week invited the public into a local “publishing network.” Worm and Waterfront Week also facilitated a discourse on multisensory immersion, neighborhood participation, and ecological thinking. Even these endeavors leaned towards referencing living things, habitats and the outdoors: The Nose, The Curse, El Pitirre, The Outpost, Sandbox, Undertow, Waterfront Week and Worm. A number of local bars became hubs for meetings and dialogue. One popular spot, The Ship’s Mast Pub at 107 North 5th Street, became a de facto office for the weekly zine Waterfront Week. Quoted in the New York Times, Nerve Circle’s director, Ebon Fisher described the pub in organic terms as “a place where people could gather and weave culture.”

Setting into play, as Domus has stated, “a web of convergent forces,” Immersionism was a highly adaptive and organic art form. The Lizard’s Tail billed its Cat’s Head gatherings as a “multidimensional convergence.” Echoing a term coined by Karthik Swaminathan, Lalalandia used the term “techno-organic” to describe its transformation of industrial waste into sensuous environments. Nerve Circle billed its communal media rituals as “media organisms.”

Instances of adaptive living systems appeared both inside and outside of the large Immersionist events. In addition to its street performances, Hit and Run Theater drove its audience in a serpentine path through the neighborhood in a darkened van. Lauren Szold’s spills of kitchen materials were sometimes left on the waterfront to bubble up on their own terms. Dennis del Zotto inserted translucent inflatable pods into various environments. The structures were completed by the presence of people lounging within them.

Before he arrived in Williamsburg, Jon Rubin had gained over a decade of experience projecting films in watery environments. “There’s something both very attractive and yet threatening about water, especially at night” said the director of Floating Cinema to Jay Boyar at The Buffalo Courier-Express in 1982. “It’s a voluptuous medium...” Like many of the Immersionists, Rubin was not just interfacing his work with the physical environment, but also attempting to “meet the audience halfway” by drawing families out to a body of water:

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“This is a way for me to go directly to the people. It's a way of presenting it to the people, in a sense, on their terms. Rather than expecting them to come to some small theater tucked away somewhere, I'm meeting them halfway in an environment that they are at ease with.”

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In one performance, the artist Andrew Hampsas even immersed himself half-naked in the East River. As a gesture of animal presence, varying degrees of nudity were also in evidence at Keep Refrigerated, Fake Shop, Mustard, Radioactive Bodega, El Sensorium, Galapagos and many of the large warehouse gatherings.

Where media technology might normally be used to package and polish a performance, the Immersionists employed it in a more visceral fashion to reveal the body and enhance neighborhood networks. Most rejected high technology in favor of more accessible middle technologies. Despite his background at MIT’s Media Lab, Ebon Fisher deliberately chose more affordable consumer media for Nerve Circle’s “Media Compressions”at Minor Injury Gallery and used a standard phone machine for a local call-in poetry and rant line. Public access and dialogue was the goal, not technological dominance.

In a more deliberate rejection of technology, Rob Hickman, with the help of Kit Blake, Ilene Zori Magaras, Richard Posch and the Aldus-Jiminez Gallery, gathered a large crowd on South 11th Street to witness five televisions, two mock satellites and an array of fluorescent bulbs being jettisoned off a six story industrial building. Many of the items were plugged into long extension cords and lit the sides of the building as they fell. In the ceremony, Glow Nighttime, the primacy of the human animal and ritual street life were celebrated. In another symbolic transmogrification of technology, Medea De Vyse sported a name that referenced both media technology and an ancient Greek force of nature. She immersed her outré drag persona in both a column for Waterfront Week and appearances at events and community meetings, effectively turning her own body into an enigmatic media device.

Surrounded by vivid examples of industrial society’s collapse in Williamsburg, the Immersionists sought a reset by emphasizing less oppressive and more vital relationships between the animal body and its environment. Where Dada artists confronted the damages wrought by the industrial world during WWI and found solace in absurdity, the Immersionists approached Williamsburg's industrial decay as a challenge to cultivate a vital alternative. Although the Immersionists explored different materials, different technologies, and different strategies of immersion, they made their entire environment, comprised of both objective and subjective phenomena, their medium.

Terminology

Although the first established publication to use the term “immersive” to identify Williamsburg’s emerging scene was Domus in 1998, a call “to immerse” appeared in a Nerve Circle manifesto, You Sub Mod as early as 1988. Similar terms and philosophies appeared soon after that in local Brooklyn papers such as The Greenline, and newer DIY publications such as Word of Mouth (later Worm Magazine) and Waterfront Week. Williamsburg's first major gathering of artists, The Sex Salon, almost immediately invited neighborhood immersion through the entreaty "GET INVOLVED” on its announcement. The interdisciplinary gathering was launched on Valentines Day 1990 by a cross-section of groups who would later adopt the terms "Immersionist" and "Immersionism." The writer Sam Binkley describes the three night festival in Word of Mouth as "inventing a new sense of community." Later that year the Lizard’s Tail cabaret launched another community-building gathering called the Cat's Head, seeking to foster an all night “multidimensional convergence” in a large abandoned warehouse, The Old Dutch Mustard Factory. The immersive systems group, Lalalandia often used the term “omnisensorial” for its experimental nightclubs and feasting systems. Gabrielle Latessa Ortiz, one of the founders of Lalalandia spoke of creating a “netherworld atmosphere.” Domus notes that Jeff Gompertz, one of the co-creators of another immersive systems group, Floating Point Unit (FPU), took a “multi-layered” approach to FPU's networked installation and theater work. Underscoring the community’s immersive ecological aesthetics, the name of another early club, The Green Room suggested both a space of preparation and a greenhouse. In every case the community signaled an interest in complex participatory systems that adapted to their social and physical environments.

Outside media began to attempt its own encapsulation of Williamsburg's new culture in 1991. At that time Mark Rose described Williamsburg's creative scene in The New York Press as a form of “activism and interconnection.” By 1993, in the introduction to his exhibition of Williamsburg artists at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Professor Jonathan Fineberg acknowledged that a distinctive creative community had emerged outside of Manhattan, with an exhibit called “Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm.” Later that year, in a story on post-rave art tribes, Newsweek discussed both Nerve Circle’s ecological algorithm, the “web jam,” and Lalalandia’s term “omnisensorial.” By 1995 Flash Art concurred there was an emerging neighborhood tribal “tradition,” and the New York Times spoke of Williamsburg's creative community as “pioneers” of an “ambient” cultural form. Other prominent arts journals and news media noted there was a new culture emerging in the neighborhood without settling on a term. These included The Village Voice, The Drama Review, The Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), Die Zeit, Fuji Television and Wired Magazine.

What both the local zines and established press made clear, however, was that this new creative community had begun to weave their efforts together into a heightened sense of life in their shared environment. It was not until 2011 that a cross-section of Williamsburg's creative urbanists, by then scattered across the globe, were able to meet online and settle on an umbrella term. The discussion group included members of the Lizard’s Tail, Nerve Circle, Lalalandia, Floating Point Unit, Waterfront Week and Worm Magazine. A consensus was reached to identify their ecological aesthetic in the 1990s with the labels “Immersionism” and “Immersionist.” It was agreed to let definitions continue to emerge through dialogue, allowing Immersionism to be an evolving and living principle.

Bounded vs extensive immersion

Since the Immersionist movement emerged in Williamsburg, ambient environments have appeared in galleries, corporate environments, and in digital simulations which are more restricted in their outreach to their larger social or ecological context. Such commercial forms of immersion actually separate participants from the larger environment and are sometimes even promoted as an escape. A statement by the developer of Summit One in Manhattan, for example, uses the rubric of immersion to simply sell units in a new high rise: "An experience that takes advantage of One Vanderbilt’s Midtown location, height and views, while truly immersing visitors in a spectacular way.”

Such bounded, and precisely controlled experiences do not reflect the depth of neighborhood involvement that the Brooklyn Immersionists were exploring. Immersionist practices in Williamsburg involved what Susan Wines described as “place as a web of convergent forces.” Social networks in the neighborhood were rooted in the environment, tied to genuine life as citizens and organisms in an ecosystem, and reflected a much richer matrix of physical interactions.

In a similar fashion, the term “social network” has also been drained of its environmental context in the new millenium. In a 2021 opinion piece for the New York Times, Kara Swisher even seems to suggest that the only kind of social networking possible is online:

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“As hard as it may be to imagine, social networks weren’t around in 2001. Now they seem to govern every news event we experience —from elections to troop withdrawals to how we think about that suitcase scene in ‘White Lotus.’”

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In Williamsburg in the early 1990s, a wealth of signaling emerged between the participants in very physical events, live gatherings dedicated to discussions about the arts and local concerns, and even more explicit media networks such as Word of Mouth Magazine’s “publishing network” and Nerve Circle’s call-in bulletin board 718-Subwire. As Melanie Hahn Roche has stated in The Drama Review, the process by which Williamsburg's events were organized emphasized “relationships above the need to come up with answers efficiently.” She insisted that the “activity is necessary for the well-being of the community.”

Williamsburg's neighborhood-based forms of immersion, networking and participation were fundamentally different from that of the culture industries which later used such labels. Where the former embraced a rich ecological and even civic paradigm for its work, the latter took a modular and commercial approach, separating experience from agency. Likewise, where the deep culture of neighborhood immersion in Williamsburg helped to catalyze a borough-wide renaissance, the bounded variant was limited to selling products and services for singular enterprises.

A Brooklyn renaissance

The Immersionist community’s sensuous, inclusive and often ecological vision of subjectivity became a significant alternative for a younger generation that was growing weary of Manhattan's postmodern distance and professional isolation. Their sustained creative involvement with their environment at the end of the 20th century drew thousands of young people to Williamsburg and helped to catalyze a cultural renaissance that spread through much of Brooklyn.

Combined with other neighborhood-centered arts movements, such as that of the Black community in Fort Greene, Immersionism significantly helped to move New York’s cultural cutting edge eastward. In 2019, two decades after the creative transformation of Williamsburg, Joseph Giovanni acknowledged in the Architectural Record that Brooklyn had “taken the baton of avant-gardism from Manhattan and run with it at uncatchable speeds. Manhattan was stuck. Many arts lovers hankered to be on the far side of the East River, living in other zip codes.”

Long before Brooklyn took on the mantle of an avant-garde city, it had gone through several phases of evolution. Originally inhabited by the Lenape Indians, colonization by Europeans in the 1600s led to a 200 year run as prime farmland. Queens and Brooklyn (Kings County) became the top two counties in market garden production in the U.S., however [although?] this distinction was obtained through labor practices that included slavery. In the 1800s Brooklyn’s proximity to East River shipping routes eventually established its waterfront as one of the most industrialized in the nation. The historian Thomas J. Campanella states that up until the late 20th century, Williamsburg’s factories and the 5th Ward had been “the busiest industrial quarter in North America for nearly a century.”

Industrial outsourcing in the 1960s and 1970s began to collapse much of the economy of north Brooklyn and a rise in crime followed the loss of jobs. Cecilia Nowell of BedfordandBowery.com observed “how desolate Williamsburg was for a few years after factories and companies moved out of the area.” An activist community emerged in the 1970s to help families struggling with the new conditions.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, artists who could no longer afford work space in Manhattan began to move into Williamsburg's abandoned industrial buildings and under-utilized apartments. This first wave of artists and musicians, however, continued to make Manhattan the center of their professional lives.

In the late 1980s a small creative community began to assemble in an area near the Williamsburg Bridge where economic activity was especially depressed. Removed from both the arts infrastructure of Manhattan and a subway to get them there, this new community of artists and musicians began to focus their creative activity where they lived. This was a highly adventurous community willing to come to terms with one of the most distressed areas of New York in order to create.

While community organizations such as Los Sures, the People’s Firehouse and El Puente had been working to rejuvenate parts of Williamsburg since the 1970s, the creative groups that formed near the waterfront began to introduce an intensely experimental form of cultural change. Some even reached across disciplines to work with the activists. What immediately distinguished the Immersionist community was its desire to make Brooklyn itself the focus of their work. One of the early indications of this neighborhood orientation appears in 1989. Ladislav Czernek, the founder of the creative warehouse space Epoché, declares in Williamsburg's monthly zine, Word of Mouth:

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“Epoché is a not-for-profit, autonomous, multi-disciplinary, artist-run exhibition space, the aim of which is to cultivate and engage an audience within our community. Epoché aspires to be as much a meeting house, a laboratory or a school, as much as it does to be an exhibition space... to feed, and feed off a neighborhood, not just occupy it.”

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Other creative clubs near the waterfront began to emerge that also cultivated a local community. These included the Lizard’s Tail, the Bog, and an informal dance space in a storefront called Rub a Dub. The geographic separation from established centers of the arts in Manhattan provided the psychic space to reflect on neighborhood life, and to transition away from a system of thought and production that characterized much of the 20th century. That system often stressed art for the art market, a division of the arts into separate disciplines, and the paradigm of the solo artist separated from, and even placed above, nature and society.

In contrast, the Brooklyn artists near the Williamsburg Bridge immersed themselves in their local, interdisciplinary world and began to turn the streets, warehouses, rooftops and local community networks into an extended medium for creation. Large, immersive, interdisciplinary events in the streets and warehouses became focal points for the community.

Even with their own system of media in place to generate interest in their works, the Immersionists did not simply set out to produce“multimedia” products intended to drive ticket sales or interest from music producers and art dealers. Worm, Waterfront Week, the Curse and other zines were dedicated to building a local discourse on a range of concerns, from the personal to the political to immersive aesthetics. Artist and event organizer, Anna Hurwitz noted that the Lizard’s Tail’s activities – which extended from open mic nights at the cabaret to large warehouse events – were largely focused on neighborhood transformation. “It wasn't done to change the face of art,” Hurwitz stated in an event program from 1993. “It was done to change the face of our existence.”

Speaking to a reporter at the Greenline along the same lines, one of Lalalandia’s members, Gabrielle Latessa Ortiz stated that the group’s “omnisensorial” restaurant Comfortzones was also a vehicle for social transformation. The goal was to create an affordable restaurant for the neighborhood while simultaneously immersing the public in a “wondrous netherworld atmosphere.” Speaking more generally, the video artist Al Arthur described Williamsburg’s neighborhood ethos no less poignantly: “It’s a gift.” Ebon Fisher, the director of Nerve Circle, described the neighborhood’s ambience as “one really strange continuum” in his Web Jam Manifesto of 1993. He also wrote about the ecstatic nature of the neighborhood’s many forms of community building, and how a sense of community might become ecological in scope at Organism, an all night immersive event he initiated in The Old Dutch Mustard Factory:

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“We are a storm of undefinable presences, suckling up to one another, congealing, integrating, staring into a mutual murk. We cyclically strain against, and surrender to, some wild howling node that lures the cosmic waters into its pretty little vortex. And the question emerges from this timeless cocoon: how do we extract pleasure from such an equation? Can human beings integrate with rusting steel, plants, socio-economic forces, local and international media, the very biosphere in which we breath, and still delight in the mix? Can we dance with such a monstrous Organism?”

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Writing about that event, the largest of Williamsburg’s creative convergences in the early 1990s, the writer and artist, David Brody spoke of a collaborative world that was “unique, on the edge of containment, and yet full of good spirit, rare spirit… a cigarette was lit and for me it’s still smoking.”

By the end of the 1990s, the Immersionists played a significant role in moving the epicenter of New York’s cultural innovation to Brooklyn. However, despite their proclamations to “Bring your sensuous images, poems, sounds and self, not your speculation capital,” the scene attracted extensive national and international media attention. In 1996, the New York Times referred to Williamsburg’s artists, musicians and performers as “pioneers” of an ambient culture that had begun to spread around the globe. Referring to Organism, the German newspaper Die Zeit stated: “Events like these finally established Williamsburg as an artists’ colony.”

All of the large interdisciplinary events and clubs near Williamsburg’s waterfront – The Sex Salon, Cats Head I, Cats Head II, Flytrap, the Salon of the Mating Spiders and El Sensorium and Organism – were the highlights of Williamsburg's “Golden Age” in a chart by the artist Ward Shelly that documented Williamsburg’s renaissance. The serigraph, titled The Williamsburg Timeline, has circulated widely through the arts press and is in the collection of the Brooklyn Art Museum and The Museum of Modern Art.

Mainstream recognition

It wasn’t just the New York Times that recognized Williamsburg’s cultural “pioneers.” In 1992 the art historian Jonathan Fineberg flew out from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to investigate the creative upwelling in Williamsburg which had just been given the moniker “The New Bohemia” in a New York Magazine cover story. Fineberg soon organized a large exhibition of works by 23 members of Williamsburg’s “vibrant community of artists” at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois. More than half the exhibitors were associated with the Immersionist movement near the Williamsburg Bridge and the waterfront.

Later that year, Melissa Rossi covered the large Immersionist warehouse event Organism for Newsweek in an article titled “The Gathering of the Art Tribes.” Citing Lalalandia’s term “omnisensorial sweepout” and Nerve Circle’s social-ecological algorithm the “web jam,” Rossi zeroed in on a web of watermelons at Organism installed by Myk Henry, and a daring rappelling and scuba diving performance by Hit and Run Theater:

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“For 12 hours, more than 2,000 people pushed into an abandoned mustard factory to see the work of 120 artists, featuring everything from exploding watermelons to performers rappelling down silos... ‘The fine arts are dead,’ one of the organizers explains, ‘and we're taking advantage of decentralized media to create a new cultural forum.’ ”

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Reflecting on that Immersionist event a few years later, Suzanne Wines states in Domus that “Organism became a kind of symbolic climax to the renegade activity that had been stirring within the community since the late eighties” and that Williamsburg as a whole had become “home to New York’s most vibrant art scene.” Wines gives close attention to other Immersionist efforts such as El Sensorium, The AlulA Dimension, Fake Shop, Floating Point Unit, OVNI and We. Wines even compared Lalalandia’s immersive club, El Sensorium to the Alhambra in Spain:

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“The bar of El Sensorium merged the ritual of drinking with the existing dampness of the basement space into a complete aquatic experience. The bartender served drinks through a curtain of raining water which followed the contours of the bar. Other spaces appeared to merge with furniture, food and guests into a homogeneous unstable fluid via light and video projections through walls of flowing liquid. The dimension of a room made of tangled golden wire found on site dissolved into a texture of indeterminate depth like the tiled patterns that adorn the Alhambra.”

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By the end of the 1990s a widely circulated chart created by the artist Ward Shelley and exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum, also underscores the Immersionists’ impact on Brooklyn. The print, “The Williamsburg Timeline,” refers to the early 1990s in Williamsburg as “The Golden Age.” Virtually all of the events, groups and venues that Shelley highlights in that period were associated with the Immersionist community.

The European art journal Flash Art noted in 1992 that the Immersionist artist Ebon Fisher had convinced Williamsburg's only commercial gallery, Test-Site, to honor the neighborhood’s immersive “tradition.”After first rejecting the idea of a non-curated community event as “crazy,” the director of the industrial scaled gallery opened the establishment’s doors to Fisher’s large communal event, The Salon of the Mating Spiders. With a poster by another Immersionist, Kevin Pyle, the salon attracted contributions by over 600 local artists and performers, including the Immersionist musicians Dina Emerson and Ken Butler who performed on a scaffold outside.

In 1997 Immersionist works in Robert Elmes’ club, Galapagos Art Space, along with interviews with the creators, were broadcast on the Fuji Television show “OK:NY” to 10 million viewers in Japan. In 2003 Galapagos also became a setting for Jim Jarmusch’s film Coffee and Cigarettes. The scene featured a conversation between the actors Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan.

In 2016 the Yale Radio host Brainard Carey described the creative community arising in Williamsburg in the 1990s as an ecologically oriented generation that was “immersing themselves in a 24 hour matrix of parties, printed matter, urban agriculture, music and gender fluid performances.” He noted that “Brooklyn’s reinvention was a lot deeper than the rote gentrification that is so often associated with urban art scenes.”

Other Journals and media covering the works and life of the Immersionists included The Village Voice, Res, Mute, Wired, the Drama Review, the Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), The Guggenheim Museum Magazine and Die Zeit.

In addition to the Brooklyn Museum and the Krannert Art Museum, Immersionist creations have been presented by the Cooper Hewitt Museum, the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, the Guggenheim Museum and a travelling exhibition in Britain sponsored by the Royal Scottish Academy. The art historians Jonathan Fineberg from the United States and Frank Popper from France included Immersionist works in their books on late 20th century art. The composer Elliott Sharp presented music by several Immersionists in his 1997 music anthology, State of the Union.

Conceptual origins

Religious immersion

The word “immersion” first appeared in English in the late 15th century and stems from the Latin, immersio, to “dip into.” Since then it has accumulated a variety of religious, cultural, and ecological connotations. Baptist Christians have used the term immersionism since ca. 1835-45 in reference to baptism in water, and some Christians of Hindu origin have translated baptist immersion to mean “holy bath.” Hindu Christians also practice the sacrament of immersion, although it is often a form of ritual washing rather than full immersion. Ritual washing and aspersion, or sprinkling, is also practiced in the Baháʼí faith, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism, and the Rastafari movement. In most of these cases the ritual evokes spiritual cleansing, a loss of control or death, and renewal.

Secular immersion

References to immersion, death and renewal in film, literature and the arts are extensive. Classic examples include Alice's transformation in the pool of tears in Alice in Wonderland, and the swimming pool scene in Mike Nichol's film, The Graduate. Williamsburg's Immersionists were varied in their religious roots and did not espouse any particular theology, but their largely secular approach to culture did involve transformational immersions in the streets, waterfront, abandoned warehouses, and the neighborhood as a whole. The cathartic experience of complete immersion and transformation lead to the adoption of Immersionism as a general term for their movement.

References in the creative community's writings to immersion, participation and renewal were extensive. As early as 1988, Nerve Circle published a manifesto, You Sub Mod, that suggested an immersion into a habitat or “burrow” which it described as a fluid, dreamlike world:

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“You have integrated yourself into the endless unfolding of spectacles. You found that to immerse yourself was the thing, sensing that objectivity was only another dream.”

”

Creative participation in their own neighborhood ecosystem was referred to as a “venture into the waters,” by Lauren Szold and Stavit Allweis in Worm Magazine in 1991, and in 1993 members of the Outpost spoke of their media practice in Williamsburg as entering another kind of liquid, a “neuroelectronic brew.” Laurel Casey, while not explicitly discussing an immersion in water, extolled the virtues of plunging through “city mishmash” and entering “the bottomless potholes on Kent Avenue.” These were spiritual notions underscored by the statement, “Somehow I’ll get down there.” Alejandra Giudici’s “everybody does everything,” Kelly Webb’s “very alive whole,” and Megan Raddant’s call for participation in the “cultural ecosystem.” Echoing Raddant, Robert Elmes spoke of an “ecosystem of the senses.”

Ecological immersion

An exploration of cultural and environmental immersion came easily to a generation that had grown up in the 1960s and 1970s. Ecological thinking had reached a new level of public interest with the first photographic views of the Earth from space in 1966, and the establishment of Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States in 1970.

Ecology had roots dating back over a century to Humboldt, Haeckel, Darwin and the Transcendentalists of the 19th century. Even in the field of education an ecological view of the mind began to emerge in the latter part of the 19th century. An early advocate for progressive education, Louisa Parsons Stone Hopkins spoke of hands-on, immersive learning at the 1890 Boston Mechanic's Fair:

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”It has been difficult to escape from the traditions of an exclusively book education. The grammar schools, as their name indicates, have tied the child to the dead past, and confined him to the medieval form of brain activity and thought expression, until his connective tissues have ceased to be sensitive to the environment of nature, and he forgets the material and laws that touch him on every side: he observes nothing; he discovers nothing; he constructs nothing.”

”

By 1900, in The School and Society, John Dewey had begun to map out an approach to education which situated it within an ecological context:

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“What is wanted...is not to fix up a connection of child mind and nature, but to give free and effective play to the connection already operating.”

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Taking ecology into the realm of culture in 1939, Virginia Wolf described the entire world as an interconnected ecosystem, inclusive of human experience and the arts:

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“...the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

”

A decade later Aldo Leopold brought an ethical dimension to ecological thinking. In A Sand County Almanac he proposed a “Land Ethic” which asserted that humanity was not just a user of the planet’s resources, but had a moral responsibility to nurture the land. Continuing his early inquiry into ecology and culture in 1958, Dewey discussed the possibilities of framing “a theory of experience in naturalistic terms” and opined that “experience is such an occurrence that it penetrates into nature and expands without limit through it.” Decades later Simon Jorgenson reflects on how Dewey’s work placed human affairs in an interdisciplinary continuum within nature: “Dewey set all aspects of human experience—scientific, aesthetic, moral, religious—in this naturalistic context.”

In the late 20th century, environmental thinking continued to blossom through the writings of Rachel Carson, Gregory Bateson, Annie Dillard and EF Schumacher. The Whole Earth Catalogue and songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” introduced environmentalism to even wider audiences. By the 1970s the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller began to see environmentalism as inextricably linked to a wide range of humanitarian and cultural concerns. Wangari Maathai from Kenya founded the green belt movement in 1977 in an effort to link issues of poverty with environmental renewal.

Inspired by Dewey and other ecological thinkers, numerous schools have employed some form of hands-on, environmentally-based learning. These include the Waldorf schools (begun 1919), Summerhill (begun 1920s), The Meeting School, a Quaker-based farm school (1957-2011), and The College of the Atlantic (begun 1969).

Immersion in a degraded environment

Immersionism was as much a continuation of a discourse on ecology as it was a sensibility that arose naturally out of the dilapidated and toxic conditions of north Brooklyn. Long before the Immersionist scene arose, Williamsburg had been home to a productive manufacturing district near the waterfront dating back to the 1800s. Advances in the first half of the 20th century made by the union movement and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal ensured a degree of prosperity for Williamsburg’s industrial neighborhood. In the late 20th century, however, government support for corporations, the offshoring of industrial production, and legislation that weakened the union movement, led to a decline in Williamsburg’s fortunes.

With little support from the City of New York, community activists in the 1970s and 80s began to address Williamsburg’s housing, education and crime issues that came with the collapse of its industries. These groups included Los Sures, the People’s Firehouse and El Puente. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Immersionist groups began to contribute a more visceral form of cultural activism. In the end it was the combined efforts of activists and the creative community that began to shift the ethos of Williamsburg’s industrial area from one of struggle to that of exploration, collaboration and aspiration. It was a trajectory from linear industrial production to El Puente’s “principle of holistic learning” to the Lizard Tail’s “multidimensional convergence,” Lalalandia’s “omnisensorial sweepout.” and Nerve Circle’s “web jam."

To be clear, the sensibility was not a parade of jingles but a local discourse. Writing for Fineberg's exhibit Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm in 1993, Yvette Helin spoke of reaching out to both physical and mental public spaces. She states that in setting her Pedestrian Project performances in the streets she wanted to “pull people into a collective consciousness,” and to encourage them to “reconstruct the place we are in.” Helin maintains that involving the public was intended to be transformative:

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“Onlookers can interject their own experiences in the performances, making the project accessible and transcending the hierarchies of education and class.”

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Gene Pool Harding, an artist who fused environmental art with protests and other public events, often joined Helin in hosting open mic nights at the Green Room, a club located in a garage Helin had turned into a live-in studio on Wythe Avenue. Pool described the communal creation process at Organism:

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“The idea was to weave all the artists' work into one big system… They got me to do a grass growing workshop and after that I was hooked... everybody working across ego boundaries. Helping each other — and you don't often see this kind of thing.”

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Pool was also known for seeding a suit, a hat and even an entire car with rye grass, but was not alone in making living things part of his art. In one instance, the local zine Undertow incorporated sunflower seeds into a special publishing project. In the May, 1994 issue the publishers announced:

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“Undertow is giving away one hundred sunflower seedlings which will grow to be giant, beautiful, goofy flowers. Please plant them where they can be seen by everyone who passes by… Seeds produced by the plant are tasty and nutritious for both humans and birds.”

”

In its own interdisciplinary Immersionist fashion, the zine then weaves local plant cultivation into the local media realm, stating, “Please tell us where you’re going to plant them and we’ll come and photograph them for the paper later in the summer.”

The distressed waterfront the Immersionists encountered in the late 1980s and 1990s played a key role in inspiring such acts of public gardening. For some, the severity of the district's decay even drew out the anti-industrial culture of their youth in the 1970s. Industrial civilization was in a dangerous state of decay in north Brooklyn and areas near the East River had approached a condition that ecologists refer to as “rewilding.” Writing for the London-based Mute Magazine in 1997, Peter Boerboom discusses how a creative practice in Williamsburg emerged out of such conditions:

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“As you ride the L train beneath the silent weight of the water or cruise over the looming Williamsburg Bridge, you cross a cultural schism. On one side Wall Street's financial engines hum endlessly, on the other empty warehouses and factories lie abandoned. On one side the energy of commerce drives human interaction, while on the other the ethic of neighborhood still binds communities. On one side the established art world is slick and lucrative business, on the other, up from between the cracks in the concrete and through the windows of the abandoned warehouses, grows a vibrant creative community.”

”

In his introduction to the exhibit, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm for the Krannert Art Museum, Jonathan Fineberg describes how some of the work reflected the toxic nature of their north Brooklyn home:

{{cquote|:“The old motor oil dripping down between the layers of Kit Blake’s Oil Curtain and the strange oozing substances in Lauren Szold’s drips and pours on the floor also evoke the ominous undertone of North Brooklyn, one of the most polluted pieces of real estate in America (where there is a toxic waste site and a lead level in the soil that exceeds by 500 times the acceptable standard).”

In Waterfront Week, Laurel Casey not only aestheticizes her immersion in Williamsburg’s streets, she even goes so far as to declare the district’s decrepit condition sacred. The traditional rite of immersion, virtual death, and rebirth are played out in a new secular form:

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“The soil is very dark and feels deliciously heavy in my hands. How can something so toxic be so beautiful? I want to take a bite of it. I want to BE it. About a foot beneath the dark, scrumptious dirt there’s a layer of red clay. Beneath that, a two inch layer of city mishmash. Pieces of cement, glass, chicken bones, clothes pins. Below that, the rats and the angels… My home town friends would suggest I move back to Vermont… But they don’t see that the potholes are the ONLY entrance into the underground where all the answers lie. They assume, from watching too many Star Trek episodes or reading Appalachian hiking guides or Zen Buddhist propaganda, that there are other options. The answer, as strange as it seems, lies beneath Williamsburg. This is a sacred dump.”

”

Casey, a descendent of Blackfoot Indians on one side of her family, felt that the Earth beneath Williamsburg “has its own destiny” and “we are supposed to inhabit it with petitions, clean-ups, sit-ins, editorials, or fist-fights.” Addressing the readers of Waterfront Week, she opined that she had “felt the earth in my back yard, and stared into the bottomless potholes on Kent Avenue. Somehow I’ll get down there and when I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

For Casey and others in Williamsburg, coming to terms with such a toxic home was more than an exercise in civic responsibility. Given that Williamsburg epitomized what our industrial systems were generating across the planet, transforming it took on deep poetic significance. A rebirth in the streets of Williamsburg involved the death of the old cultural and industrial order, a complete immersion in, and submission to local conditions, and a transformation. Buttressed by their youthful exposure to both the punk and environmental movements, the Immersionists became engaged in both a new kind of urban ecological art movement, but also the ecstatic rebirth of their very own neighborhood. It was a transformational culture harkening back to the early mythology of immersionism as a divine transformation in water. Williamsburg’s depressed and toxic condition was not an impediment to creativity, but a fundamental catalyst for shedding the older orders of art and industry, and a “submodern” reconnection to the Earth.

A new cultural paradigm

Origins

With little support from the city the creative community that settled near the Williamsburg Bridge during the 1990s explored new ways to create something vital by immersing themselves creatively in the world they lived in. Whether staging an event in an abandoned boat or warehouse on the waterfront, or engaging the streets, rooftops and local media, the social and environmental context was as much a part of the expression as that which the artists brought to it.

An ethos that celebrated communal spaces, a shared lifeworld and living systems emerged. This was not only apparent in the way the Immersionists embraced their social network and environment as a medium, but was also reflected in their nomenclature (as laid out in the introduction). Reinforcing the shift in aesthetics, a discourse on a living immersive culture emerged. In 1991 a frequent co-organizer of Immersionist events, Anna Hurwitz, described the neighborhood ethos for the New York Press as a culture of participation. In the same article Nerve Circle’s director, Ebon Fisher summed up the emerging aesthetic in ecological terms as “Linkage. Integration. Interaction”

By 1993 the arts press began to take note of a serious change in sensibility taking root in Williamsburg, with articles in The Drama Review, Domus, Flash Art, The Performing Arts Journal, the Village Voice and Jonathan Fineberg’s book, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. Mainstream media began to note the growing numbers of creative people moving to Williamsburg and zeroed in on the large immersive events such as Human Fest, the two Cat’s Heads, Flytrap and Organism. Newsweek cited Lalalandia’s phrase “omnisensorial sweepout” in reference to its richly immersive clubs, and Fisher's term “web jam,” which was the principle behind Organism’s overlapping biomorphic systems.

What is clear in most of the coverage is that experiencing the vitality of their own neighborhood as a whole system was of primary importance to the Immersionists. Over time the neighborhood itself became an extension of the work. Writing for Domus in 1998, Suzanne Wines describes this inclusive, ecological aesthetic. An environmental architect herself, she was not unfamiliar with some of the Immersionists’ concerns:

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“During the early 1990s Williamsburg, Brooklyn, located directly across the river from the popular East Village, was home to New York’s most vibrant art scene. The artists living there were experimenting with the virtual notion of place as a web of convergent forces. Through their explorations of the effects of different media (audio, video, codes, language, information and food) on the souls, psyche and senses of their audience they celebrated the interdependence ‘between art, technology, the environment and politics. With a strong sense of their own as well as the global community, their work integrated the raw material of Williamsburg’s industrial wasteland with its inherent human diversity (mainly Hispanic, Polish, Hasidic and Italian) to create a living, breathing exquisite corpse constantly responding to new input.

”

Rather than producing modules of consumption to be distributed by a gallery or music label, the Immersionists began to create a collaborative and interconnected life. The vital interplay between artists, community and environment, sustained for nearly a decade, distinguished this movement from the singular environmental art projects created within the gallery system, or the transient community that emerges in a festival. The paradigm shifted, in effect, from creating models of convergence, to cultivating an actual living culture rooted in its environment.

Furthermore, Immersionism was not a command structure orchestrated from the top, but an emergent, rhizomatic network operating within a complex and struggling urban context. A measure of the success of such a paradigm shift was the post-industrial renaissance the movement helped to catalyze in one of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in the United States. While that renaissance was later exploited in the new millennium by corporate developers in conjunction with the Bloomberg administration, the ability of such creative urbanists to transform a neighborhood was undisputed. “Luis Garden Acosta, Founder of Program To Help Brooklyn Community, Dies at 73”: [Obituary (Obit); Biography] Author: Roberts, Sam Publication info: New York Times , Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]14 Jan 2019: B.7. </ref>

As discussed in more detail below, the Immersionist paradigm shift stressed a number of mutually reinforcing values which were antithetical to the prevailing postmodern aesthetics of alienation and disembodiment. These included interdependence, interdisciplinary culture, and living systems.

Rejecting the postmodern era

According to art historian Jonathan Fineberg, the Immersionists’ change in priorities from the industrial segmentation of the arts to the cultivation of a more integrated experience inside a local context represented, “a new paradigm for the relation of art to culture.” In her article for Domus, Suzanne Wines maintains that the Immersionists’ ecological approach to creativity in Brooklyn acted as a “vital antidote to the dogma of modernism.”

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, challenges to the Western industrial order have been a recurring theme in the arts and humanities, most notably in the Arts and Crafts movement, the Ashcan School, and in dystopian literature such as Huxley's Brave New World and Gibson’s Neuromancer. Immersionism, however, represented more than a critique, but an actual alternative to the industrialization of culture. Williamsburg's creative urbanists innovated forms of cultural cultivation within a setting where factories were literally collapsing and industrial jobs were being sent overseas.

Yet while some progressive thinkers of the late 20th century began to entertain the notion of a digitally connected planet, the Immersionists centered themselves in a local matrix. For example, as Timothy Leary was proclaiming in 1989 “We are going to colonize Cyberspace exactly as we have the rest of the world” the space the Immersionists were beginning to explore was the “Linkage. Integration. Interaction” of a local ecosystem.

Immersionism, in effect, represented a radical shift away from the corporate, modular and often alienating culture of the machine. Even where the artists and musicians utilized mobile power generators in their warehouse events, and employed personal computers for their zines, they did so in the service of local interconnection and communion.

From dancing all night at Keep Refrigerated or Flytrap to contributing to Worm’s networked journalism and The Outpost’s “neuroelectronic brew” of immersive media, the emphasis on creating communion also represented a departure from 20th century “avant garde” values of distortion and subversion. It could be argued that the Immersionists had merged the communitarian imperatives of African American music culture with the environmental movement, embodied by such Immersionist terms as “multidimensional convergence” and the “web jam.” As Netlingo explains: “With roots in African-American jazz and 1990's Rave culture, the web jam takes an improvisational, ‘emergent’ approach to cultural, political, and ecological systems.”

The avant garde had done a good job of highlighting and critiquing the cultural problems endemic to industrialization but rarely offered alternatives. As expressed in such movements as Dadaism and later, existentialism and postmodernism, avant garde tenets of disembodiment, abstraction, absurdity and fragmentation would often, in fact, draw attention to the oppressive nature of industrial society by intensifying its effects. In the end, Immersionism challenged both the orthodoxy of capitalist individualism and its corollary in the arts and humanities: alienated forms of subjectivity.

As the prevailing philosophy of disembodiment and alienation, Postmodernism in the second half of the 20th century was difficult to challenge. The modality, if not the label, was getting the headlines. Prominent examples of a postmodern approach included Robert Venturi and his appropriation of commercial architecture in Las Vegas; the meta-filmic features of Jean-Luc Goddard movies; and the often ironic rock acts of David Bowie, the Talking Heads and Blondie. Throughout the era Andy Warhol’s Postmodern influence could be felt. As Ken Tucker opines in Rolling Stone Magazine, Warhol’s aloof, machinelike persona was present in even the most popular bands of the time:

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“[Deborah] Harry has always managed to make a virtue of her stiff, severe crooning, and her vocals complemented Blondie's clipped, urban-raw playing. But the melodies were frequently lugubrious and much too involved with a Warholian despair that took the form of nonstop deadpan cheekiness.”

”

Initially a liberating investigation of cultural biases, Postmodernism and its close cousin, Critical Theory, had become new forms of cultural dogma towards the end of the 1980s. Rather than offering a meaningful challenge to the problem of industrial alienation, the Postmodern discourse had become another academic parlor game, or as Arthur Kroker and David Cook put it, “an indifferent play of floating signifiers.” In their book, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics, Kroker and Cook spoke of how such indifference revealed “the nihilism within the logic of Western civilization.”

Compounding this nihilism was an increasingly commercial emphasis on art stardom and elitist signaling that had gripped Manhattan’s culture industry in the 1980s. The tropes of rebellion and postmodern cynicism were used so extensively by marketing professionals, most notably in Punk and New Wave fashion, that any genuine critique offered by the artists was often neutralized. That commercial “art world,” along with its exhausted philosophies of subversion and disembodiment, seemed to magnify the surrounding decay of post-industrial America rather than offer solutions. Commerce and industrial segmentation, in the end, became the message.

Industrial segmentation in the arts remained a holdover from modernization. By the late 20th century such specialization had become so entrenched that identifying Manhattan’s reliance on it in the culture industry was significantly easier from the vantage point of Brooklyn. The writer Carl Watson, who lived in Williamsburg during the emergence of the Immersionist movement and often contributed to the local zines, has written of a character reflecting on Manhattan’s bifurcation into industrial specialties:

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“His sense of adventure was directly related to New York’s famous commercial segregation that made for strange, often isolated, “zones” of commerce that could be traced back to the city’s earliest days. Manhattan, for much of its existence, was made up of specialized districts, and then districts within those districts forming like polyps in the warm prepared climate.”

”

The intense competition and commercialization of Manhattan's culture was also more apparent from Brooklyn. The Immersionist Greg Asch (DJ Olive) of Lalalandia discussed how people in Manhattan’s music world seemed to be stuck in their “entrepreneurial self.” Interviewed in Medium.com he stated:

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“It's locking people out. And that to us, around late '94, was totally disgusting. It was everything about Manhattan that we disliked. You know, that horrible ghoul you always meet at Manhattan parties back then talking about their 'entrepreneurial self.' ...No one would just say 'hey, how's it going?’ Everyone was trying to sell you something about themselves. Kinda like Facebook now.”

”

In another recognition of Manhattan's hyper commercialization and industrialization of culture – and the Postmodern amplification of the same – Sam Binkley dedicated his monthly Worm column, Chaos Theory, to investigating what he called the “vertigo” induced by “life in an image saturated urban matrix.”

In one of the first references to immersion in the community’s literature, a Nerve Circle manifesto from 1988, You Sub Mod, questioned the entire modern and postmodern continuum. The street flyer suggested a “submodern” immersion in one’s habitat (or burrow) as a way out:

{{cquote|

“You are the SUB MODERN. You live in a million tribes and burrows, beneath the illusion we call the real world. While the Party passes over your heads you see its abject nakedness. You never believed in modernism and you aren’t fooled by its vain reflection, postmodernism… Without proclamation you have integrated yourself into the endless unfolding of spectacles. You found that to immerse yourself was the thing, sensing that objectivity was only another dream.”

{{

In another manifesto, Anoint Integrity from 1988, Nerve Circle maintained that the prevailing postmodern aesthetics of alienation, subversion and deconstruction should be abandoned for a process of organic integration:

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“Within this quivering field of feelings and sensations ‘the truth’ is simply a momentary convergence and integration of presences.”

”

In rejecting the Manhattan art establishment and its compounding problems of postmodern alienation, industrial specialization and art commodification, many of the artists in Williamsburg felt that a passionate reintegration of the senses, and a grounding of their bodies in their environment was in order. As if to encourage convergence, Nerve Circle followed Anoint Integrity with posters in both English and Spanish which stated simply “Love Needs Propaganda.” Dávid Dienes celebrated the “absolute proximity” of local immersion. Jessica Nissen spoke of her interest in participation in local “circuitous systems.” This radical reframing of the context for art, from an alienating Manhattan art market to a genuine immersion in Brooklyn, lead to an appreciation for what Lauren Szold called “the everything of the everyday.” Members of Lalalandia described this new realm as “place as a collective experience.”

It must be stressed that the Immersionist community's approach was not just an academic exercise in succession. Nor was it a precisely unified program of change. Given the declining state of their industrial neighborhood and a generational dismay with Manhattan’s culture, many artists in Williamsburg found that an aesthetic that embraced participatory and rejuvenating systems simply made intuitive sense. As one of the oldest and most degraded of North America’s industrial neighborhoods, Williamsburg’s condition in the late 20th century demanded new forms of coherence and deep caring for the environment. The Lizard’s Tail’s “multidimensional convergence,” Nerve Circle’s “web jam,” Lalalandia's “omnisensorial” clubs and Worm’s “publishing network” represented just such a deep, organic and sensuous, involvement.

In the end, Immersionism was an aesthetic of interconnection and healing that departed not only from many of the alienating modalities of the 20th century avant garde, but also from an industrial culture that had separated the senses into specialties and removed civilization itself from living systems. Immersionism represented a paradigm shift from cultural dissection, mechanization and disembodiment to vital ecological reconnection.

Interdependence

In a 1989 editorial for his monthly magazine Word of Mouth, Kit Blake stressed that interaction with the larger community was a fundamental goal:

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“Your input is highly valued at Word of Mouth. Your thoughts. Your letters. Your writings. Your poetry. Your art. Word of Mouth will, ideally, be an interactive, alternative publishing network.”

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Declaring “Brooklyn rocks!” in The New York Press a little later, Mark Rose noted that a form of “aesthetic activism” had emerged in Williamsburg. He cited the emergence of interdisciplinary zines like Word of Mouth, Nerve Circle’s live media sharing rituals, and the communal convergences at the Cat’s Head warehouse events. “Brooklyn rocks!” he declared.

Rose also zeroed in on a community project initiated by Nerve Circle that illustrates an effort to bring catalytic forms of interaction into Brooklyn's public spaces. A “Weird Thing Zone” on Grand Street was marked off with traffic cones and featured experimental areas of interaction within a traditional neighborhood festival. In one installation the artist Anna Hurwitz set up an office with an assortment of office supplies so children could visualize themselves as managers. Rose quotes the local activist, Chris Lanier on how the Zone connected with the larger community:

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“‘Oh, the kids loved it. They crawled all over everything,’ says Chris Lanier of El Centro Cultural de Williamsburg, sponsors of the Grand Street Waterfront Festival. ‘That was a unique festival… Something happened at that festival. A coalition was formed.’ ”

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Rose cites Hurwitz’s interest in shifting away from refined art objects to a process of collaboration. “I hate precious art,” she declares. “I measure the success of my installations by the degree to which people participate.” Rose also quotes Kit Blake, another contributor to the Zone, on the social capital beginning to build in the neighborhood: “Everybody chips in and does what they can. Money as compensation is never part of the discussion.” In another comment on Williamsburg's barter culture, Luisa Caldwell discussed The Shredded Money Show, a collaborative group exhibition she had organized with Judy Thomas at Minor Injury Gallery. Discussing the group's creative repurposing of shredded money, she states “Unlike the real thing, shredded money goes a long way. It's much easier to share, give away and joke about than its whole counterpart.”

Underscoring how creative immersion in a common space with common materials had inspired these aesthetic activists, Rose quoted Nerve Circle's director, Ebon Fisher from a 1990 article in Worm. The artist defined this space as a hybrid of subjective and objective environments:

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“‘Our western myth of the passive, consuming being who sits in a brain surrounded by concrete objects of prey and repulsion is beginning to dissolve... we are beginning to place the locus of attention beyond the mythical “self” and into a psycho-physical swirl as we might call common space.’”

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Rose elaborates:

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“Common space is what the Williamsburg art-activist movement is all about; a heady experiment to integrate into, defend, help build and somehow connect the community at large... In fact, the Williamsburg Way is to create art through activism and interconnection.”

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In October, 1992, Waterfront Week dramatically illustrated the community's intersubjective space by inviting its readers to not only submit materials, but to also take a turn at editing. The editing would often take place at The Ships Mast, a local gathering spot for many of the Immersionists.

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“Submissions welcome! Drop off at Ship’s Mast. ANYONE CAN EDIT WATERFRONT WEEK. Leave yr name & # at the Ship’s Mast.”

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After successfully launching Waterfront Week with the help of the somewhat unpredictable polemicist, Ethan Pettit, Genia Gould decided to move to a full magazine format with a new monthly publication, Breukelen. In order to retain the neighborly ethos of the first zine, Gould’s opening editorial defines Breukelen’s mission as an effort to get “close-to-the-pulse” of the neighborhoods of north Brooklyn. Breukelen would explore the manifold realms of artists, activists and their neighbors and underscore the interdisciplinary nature of the community’s search for interconnection:

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“Poets, essayists, lyricists, comic artists, illustrators, photographers, critics, political spectators, community organizers, scene makers, jokers, and other adventurers will report to you directly on the arts, clubs, bars, hideouts, hangouts, back rooms —as well as, on political, housing, health, and environmental issues. A legacy of artists and activists.”

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In 1993 Hurwitz humorously likened this community’s deepening creative interconnection to a form of “co-dependence.” The sentiment is echoed that same year in an article in The Drama Review by Melanie Hahn Roche. The choreographer and dancer touches upon what she saw was a sincere desire to cultivate the emotional welfare of the community and cites the use of consensus in the formation of two of Williamsburg’s seminal warehouse events, Cat’s Head I and II:

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“Consensus values relationships above the need to come up with answers efficiently. The insistence on consensus points to organizers’ unspoken belief that the purpose of these shows goes beyond simply throwing a good party. Rather, this activity is necessary for the well-being of the community.”

As opposed to operating within the narrow confines of the “fine arts,” an interdisciplinary approach engaged the public through an eclectic range of fields and activities. Many of the Immersionist groups employed street-friendly iconography in order to reach a wide variety of audiences. Employing its own humorously macabre name, The Lizard’s Tail also used the graphic of a cat with a single eye for its Cat’s Head events. Nerve Circle was represented by nerves chasing each other in a circle. Hit and Run Theater used a cartoon of a kid with a fist. Lalalandia’s emblem was a cluster of futuristic spheres. Nerve Circle’s AlulA Dimension was encapsulated by a cross-section of its own architecture. Numerous Immersionists used vivid pseudonyms: Gene Pool, Medea, Artemis, PoGo, Miss Kitty, Scotty the Blue Bunny, Tony Millionaire. Some even referenced an interdisciplinary range in their branding, as in the group Multipolyomni which defined itself as producers of “designs, systems, environments, effects, and other leisure mush.”

To be interdisciplinary, in effect, was to reach beyond the fine arts and open up to the neighborhood and the entire realm of human and natural affairs. The result was a continuum of creativity. As Greg Asch of Lalalandia and Multipolyomni stated in the New York Times: “We worked in all of the senses all of the time.”

To be clear, Immersionism did not just blur the boundaries between the arts, but also between professions. Instead of exploring “experimental art,” for example, Lalalandia proclaimed in its manifesto of 1992 that it was concerned with the broader, more popular construct “entertainment research” and “maneuvering the leisure mush.” Their bold refutation of professional art values and their subversive form of entertainment ultimately placed them outside of both and in a radical new context for creativity.

An example of Lalalandia’s fusion of disciplines could be a found in their experimental restaurant, Comfortzones. As Suzanne Wines states in Domus, the members of Lalalandia were “architects of spatial experience rather than space proper.” The goal was to “stimulate and nourish the senses and the mind.” Only an interdisciplinary approach could bring this about. These “entertainment researchers” hosted banquet events “where the interaction between ritual (dinner), the environment (recycled industrial spaces) and the guests created an improvisational multimedia experience.”

Just as the large warehouse and street gatherings placed the spirit of community above art for art’s sake, Lalalandia had begun to embrace an organic, post-industrial, and even post-art orientation. This was a “techno-organic” blend that integrated art, food, fashion, music, interior design, lighting, recycling, street touring, performance and even DIY engineering. Such boundary-free work was tied intimately to the Immersionists’ life in the neighborhood. It became for many an act of cultivation or nurturing. As Ebon Fisher’s crowd-sourced Wigglism Manifesto from 1996 maintains, when dogmatic faith in any single discipline or system of belief collapses, only a lively engagement with the contiguous world remains:

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“Creep along the rivulets and curls of writhing truth, this feral fetus squinting in a boundless womb of cultivations… May the lonely pools of science, art and heaven congeal into a sea of quivering being.”

”

Objectivity, in effect, gives way to a feedback-driven collective being, a presence emerging in the neighborhood’s “neuroelectronic brew” as the Outpost collective put it in an essay for Jonathan Fineberg’s exhibit “Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm.” In his own neurological approach to culture, Ebon Fisher explored the neighborhood’s social nervous system through his Nerve Circle rituals and even circulated a nervelike font, Nervegrowth through posters, handouts and an announcement in Art Forum for The Salon of the Mating Spiders which he had initiated at Test-Site Gallery.

Ken Butler’s interdisciplinary work combined recycling with instrument invention and the performance of his instruments in collaboration with other Immersionists such as Dina Emerson. In Ken Butler’s formulation an interdisciplinary culture leads inexorably to ecstatic “hybrid visions.” Emerson, in turn, went on to perform with the highly interdisciplinary circus group Cirque de Soleil.

An early example of the interdisciplinary approach came in the form of an exhibit on recycling at Minor Injury Gallery. Opening on January 20, 1990, the exhibit, titled Gyro!, immersed the audience in a sensorium of synthetic waste products and information, blurring the lines between art, activism and environmental science. As Richard Posch puts it in Worm:

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“The show transforms the gallery into a Polystyrene hell, complete with murals, puppets, architecture and walkways through mountains of the offensive material. The documentation on the walls is the result of several months of research and correspondence between the nine people behind Gyro! and the recycling world.”

”

Posch, who later collaborated with other artists such as Kit Blake and Rob Hickman, was attuned to the interdisciplinary culture of the emerging Immersionist scene. His concluding remarks reflect this sensibility:

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“Gyro! succeeds as an installation/information piece because it only vaguely resembles art and doesn't preach political issues without doing something about them.”

Nearly all of the Immersionist warehouse events were interdisciplinary and over time became increasingly interactive and “multilayered” as Jeff Gompertz described it. According to Domus, Gompertz's multimedia group Floating Point Unit (FPU) probed “the interface possibilities between cyberspace and real space on a physical, social and cultural level.”

”

Emblematic of the interdisciplinary modality was a project by the documentarist Pegi Vail. Through spot lighting and the arrangement of artifacts found on the site of Organism in 1993, Vail drew attention to industrial labor practices going back decades. Accompanied by the works of dozens of other artists and performers, along with an audience that danced among the artifacts, the neighborhood’s industrial past was brought back to life. In another interdisciplinary system at Organism, Genia Gould turned the circulation of a medical emergency kit into a nightlong performance.

At the same event Sasha Noë and Bradford Reed presented another ambitious interdisciplinary system: an elaborate bottle smashing machine which brought the recycling of reveller’s beer bottles to life in a form that doubled as a percussion instrument. To accompany the beer, food systems were introduced into the web jam by Danny Delgado and Eileen Schreiber. Vernon Bigman honored the Organism with a modified Native American barbecue outdoors on the afternoon after the event.

The ardent embrace of everyday life in the neighborhood was a daily expression of the Immersionists’ interdisciplinary ethos. Creations were often drawn from their environment and completed by their environment. Lauren Szold combined materials from her kitchen and poured them onto the floors of local abandoned factories. Andrew Hampsas conducted sparse, visceral performances on rooftops, abandoned factory yards and even in the East River. Hit and Run Theater invited an audience to gather inside an old windowless truck and drove it in a circuitous route through Williamsburg. Room-sized inflatable pods were created by Dennis Del Zotto out of materials from local hardware stores and installed within clubs such as Fake Shop and Galapagos Art Space. These biomorphic hives were completed by the presence of participants who often spent whole evenings inside them.

For the Immersionists, to be interdisciplinary was not simply the weaving together of professional vocations. It was the vital convergence of artists, media, community and even habitat. In 1990 a description in the Village Voice by Sarah Ferguson captures such a confluence at Cat’s Head II:

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“Three hours past showtime, with the men in blue still searching out fire hazards, a crowd of 300 was outside, getting restless. Suddenly Ethan Petit (a/k/a Medea de Vyse) stepped into the entranceway and began playing a kind of guitar-rigged light board, casting wild spectrums of color over the rubble-strewn lot. Meanwhile, the walls inside were trembling with the sound of an impromptu scrap concert, as folks began heaving rusted car parts into a pile of steel drums. ‘We’re squatting this place and they can’t stop it!’ shouted one guy, cracking a tail pipe over a girder, as a group of startled firemen scurried away. By midnight the authorities backed off, and the whole space was throbbing with people banging metal dangling from a huge web of ropes, putting neon golf balls up Jesse Helms’s ass, and dancing to Chemical Wedding, Lauren Stauber, Laughing Sky, Rats of Unusual Size, and Colored Greens.”

”

The “scrap concert” Ferguson refers to was Scrap Metal Music, by Michael Zwicky. Another example of interdisciplinary culture, this was a fusion of recycling, environmental context, visual art, music and communal experience. The artist scavenged metal debris from the abandoned factories which became both percussive instruments and drumsticks. Guests were invited to begin drumming at the start of the evening and a rhythmic atmosphere unfolded for nine hours, mingling with the other performances and installations in the warehouse. The next morning the scrap metal was strewn about the warehouse floor, reentering the flow of waterfront debris. To separate the art from its context would drain the vitality and significance out of both. The interconnection was the point.

Given the many collaborations between the Immersionists, and the blurring of boundaries between the creators, their environment and their audiences, the extended collective being they brought to life lasted years and penetrated deep into Brooklyn.

Living systems

Writing in 1989 for the exhibit “Art in the Urban Matrix,” Ethan Pettit underscores the importance of local lived experience – with all its conflicts and complexities – in the emerging Immersionist scene. He extols the virtues of structures which are “lifted from logic and tangled in life.” A few years later in his introduction to the museum exhibit, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, the art historian Jonathan Fineberg speaks of a similar shift from precise delivery of works of art carefully contextualized within a parallel world of theory, to lived process. He declares that Williamsburg, Brooklyn had become home to “a vibrant community of artists who are building a new paradigm for the relation of art to culture.” Fineberg continues:

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“After twenty-five years of a language-based focus to the art world – hand in hand with the demise of confidence in the ability of ‘vanguard’ artists to affect culture by showing radical work in SoHo galleries (much less ones in Kreuzberg or the Marais) – many artists today are returning to immediate experience, to the body, and to a neighborhood cultural interaction. As Ebon Fisher, a key figure on the Williamsburg scene recently told me, ‘we’re not making art out here, we’re creating culture.’

”

This shift from creating art to cultivating a living culture often unsettled culture was brought about, was motivated, in part, by the circumstances this generation of artists found themselves in. Responding to a toxic environment and a neighborhood in economic decline, many of the Immersionists developed a genuine interest in their community, their environment, and primal sources of inspiration and rejuvenation. As noted, in connection with such corporeal and rejuvenating concerns, Fineberg writes that there was an apparent “recourse to biological metaphors.” Underscoring Fineberg’s observation, nearly all of the Immersionist groups, projects and venues referred to living things, animal passions and ecosystems.

A poignant example of such concerns can be found among the pages of a limited edition [is this necessary?] catalog created by participants of Organism. The graphic novelist and Immersionist performer, Stavit Alweiss stapled a small packet of mustard seeds into every one of the 300 books. The seeds had been found among the grain silos at the abandoned mustard factory where the event unfolded. Gene Pool, who humorously references the social biology of genetics in his adopted name, had a history of covering objects with living rye grass, including a car and a jacket to go with it. His involvement with environmental protest in Williamsburg suggests the depth of Pool’s complete immersion in living systems. In another example of actual cultivation, the New Yorker points out that Lalalandia installed a bar into its nightclub, El Sensorium that is “covered with topsoil in which lime-green weeds sprout nurtured by a waterfall.”

Local environments were among the key living systems the Immersionists celebrated. In Waterfront Week, As pointed out in the introduction, Medea classified many of the Immersionist warehouse gatherings on the waterfront as an “environmental event,” and Tony Millionaire titled one of his comic fantasies of Williamsburg “Urban Pastoral.” The exact location of the pastoral was as much in the minds of the community as it was in the broken sidewalks and weed-strewn waterfront.

In an essay she wrote for Fineberg's exhibit at the University of Illinois, Yvette Helin defined her company’s street performances in Williamsburg as “improvisational interaction with the given environment.” Recognizing that the “environment” is a negotiated space, Helin’s group, The Pedestrian Project, engaged both the physical urban landscape and the public mental landscape by emulating the iconography of street crossing signs. The vivid presence of jet black figures moving silently through the streets turned the entire neighborhood into a civic tableau. The subjective and public realms became one.

Williamsburg writers like Shelly Marlow and Carl Watson also explored hybrid realities which blurred the boundaries between interior and exterior ecosystems. In an interview in zingmagazine.com, Marlow even eroticizes the natural world:

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“Look Grandma, you have to take responsibility for your own sexual needs, you don't have to chase some young muscle-bound princess when you could make love with that river or waterfall as in the Javanese kunbum (water meditation) or get a nice fitting dildo for some g-spot multiple orgasms. Then move that orgasmic energy through your body, devoting the energy to peace or love---or who or whatever.”

”

Providing another example of Immersionist ecology, an art historian at the University of Paris VIII, Frank Popper notes that Ebon Fisher’s goal for Nerve Circle was to help induce a local nervous system by cultivating “the living properties of information” and to nurture collective “media organisms.” In the music anthology State of the Union from 1997, composer Elliot Sharp presented the artist’s song, Circulate All Sensation, a meditation on the shared sense of subjectivity that can be cultivated in such neighborhood networks.

As discussed in Domus, Lalalandia and Fakeshop shared Nerve Circle’s experimental approach to social-ecological space. They were even once drawn into a three-way mutual immersion inside a media-generating structure in Nerve Circle’s loft called the AlulA Dimension.

Robert Elmes, who even slept inside the AlulA Dimension for several weeks during a housing transition, had been deeply involved in numerous Immersionist projects and events, including Cat’s Head II and Flytrap. He has spoken of an “ecosystem of the senses” and the “cross-pollination” of ideas and forms that he wanted to cultivate at Galapagos Art Space. The club, which he opened in 1997, was named after the islands where Darwin formulated his theory of evolution. Galapagos became a haven for other artists and groups with biological names: the film collective Ocularis and Fisher’s discussion group, the Society of Animals.

The Immersionist infatuation with biology is also vividly demonstrated in Amy Shapiro’s alter ego, Artemis, and Ethan Pettit’s nom de plume, Medea de Vyse, both of which allude to ancient Greek forces of nature. Circulating these ancient “forces of nature” through Williamsburg’s toxic industrial landscape underscored a primary feature of the Immersionist world: the neighborhood and its creations were commingling in a living continuum.

And the references to nature were in evidence everywhere. Even the more classical and architectural names such as Open Window Theater, The Outdoor Museum and The Outpost suggest a turn towards the outdoors. Daisy Wake’s publication, The Curse, referenced an archaic name for women’s menstrual cycles. The rock band Thrust evoked biology in both their erotic name and their visceral performances. Karen Cormier, from the band Fric and Frac, turned up at Organism playing an electric guitar wearing a wolf costume.

It must be stressed that these nods to nature were more than a theoretical stance. Stavit Allweiss didn't just recycle mustard seeds for one of the community's book projects, she also organized periodic clothing swap parties in her loft. Tapping into primal bonding instincts, she and Robert Elmes invited over a dozen Immersionists to a slumber party. In another form of urban nature affiliation, the Outpost held gatherings in a rooftop garden which one of its founders, Ruth Kahn had created as a communal oasis. In addition to facilitating local video projects, Kahn experimented with cultivating living sculpture out of odd mixes of plants. Those, in turn inspired the organic forms in many of her paintings.

The Immersionists, in the end, approached their entire lives, along with their environment, as their work. Where Julian Beck’s and Judith Malina’s Living Theater proposed the possibilities for a theater of social change that dissolved the fourth wall between actors and audience, the Immersionists did the same, but included a third axis linking humans to their environment.

When the warehouse event Cat’s Head II had been temporarily disrupted by the police and fire departments, Marisa’s Peaches simply moved their performance outdoors, adapting to the shift in urban ecology. It wasn't simply a matter of convenience, but another opportunity for an immersive form of wabi sabi. Something sublime could emerge in the raw, living conditions that surrounded the Immersionists. As Helena Mulkerns states in the Village Voice:

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“With a stoic nod of its feline nose, [Cat’s Head II] simply prowled outside in the gracious form of the dance troupe, Marisa’s Peaches, which promptly began its proceedings on a windswept wasteland stage whose drop was the Manhattan skyline, whose illumination was a single spotlight, whose audience sat down in the weeds and bought beers which had been brought out from the bar. In the dimming twilight, alongside an abandoned car, swathed in gauze like a mummified auto-sarchophagus, the dancers began the party.”

”

In nearly every case, the work of the Immersionists did not just reference living things, but was focused on creating a vital system comprised of local participants, scavenged materials, and a shared environment. Helping to rejuvenate a neighborhood in decline and move it from an industrial to a post-industrial economy was an act of intuitive cultivation. This was a significant shift for the arts. The change wasn't instantaneous, nor proclaimed loudly in every event announcement, but over the years a transition from cultural production to cultivation had occurred. There was no better symbol for such an approach than the 300 packets of mustard seeds Stavit Allweis included with her entry for the event catalog for Organism. Wired Magazine picked up on this radical shift of thinking in 1995, quoting another Immersionist, Ebon Fisher:

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"I'm incubating structures in billions of neurons, various databases, and a slew of nightclubs and T-shirts. It's a weird undertaking. It's neither art nor science but a form of breeding."

”

The nature of the paradigm shift towards such an organic view of culture wasn’t always fully understood outside the scene. While some of the most popular features of Immersionism, such as multimedia dance gatherings, street culture, and neighborhood-focused zines, were an inspiration to the casual participant, the philosophy of neighborhood participation and cultivation was most deeply felt by those who lived and struggled in Williamsburg. In 1996, Neil Straus notes in the New York Times that Manhattan’s ambient club scene drew inspiration from the “pioneers” of the “early 1990's in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.” However, where the Immersionists cultivated immersive events to deepen a sense of connection with their local environment, many of Manhattan's clubs used immersive events to escape their surrounding world. Underscoring this critical difference, Strauss quotes Tim Sweet who states that his Manhattan club, Recreational Vehicle, was intended to “shut out the rest of the world... you can come in and forget about the city outside and hopefully gather some strength before you have to return.” Creating a refuge from Manhattan’s competitive and often alienating culture may have been consoling, even necessary, but it contrasted vividly with Williamsburg's neighborly and ecological framework for immersion. Accomplished sound artists like Sweet spoke of “context over content" in his Manhattan club, yet the context in question was limited to the inside of the club. The ambience was bounded.

This ecological perspective also distinguished the Immersionists' interactive culture from some important predecessors: Allen Kaprow's Happenings in the 1950s and 60s, San Francisco’s Trips Festival of 1966, and Andy Warhol's experimental sound and light shows, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966 and 1967, and the Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT).

In the case of San Francisco’s Trips Festival of 1966, the mixing of music, dance, and multimedia was largely limited to the Longshoreman's hall, not a neighborhood. Although a feedback loop emerged between performers, technology and audience, a feedback loop between the human domain and the non-human environment was was missing in the documentation associated with the event. Like much of late 20th century Western culture, the emphasis was on human freedom, rather than ecological well-being.

As Michael Kramer states:

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“Inspired by the Acid Test parties that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters had started putting on in 1965, The Trips Festival marked a moment when those anarchic, underground events got organized and went fully public.”

”

In 1966, humanism was a fully established form of species-centrism which even the counter culture managed to treat as a given. That new forms of technology were mixing things up a bit did not shift the underlying assumption that celebrating reality is a celebration of the human consumer to the exclusion of its ecological context. This species-centric orientation has come to be called the Anthropocene.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, however, there was a generational shift in sensibility. Just a few years after the 1960s Summer of Love came to a close, one of the producers of The Trips Festival, Stewart Brand launched The Whole Earth Catalogue, Earth Day was established, and the United States launched the Environmental Protection Agency. A significant shift from humanism to ecological thinking had begun. But it may not have been until the Sex Salon of 1990 that a new generation was prepared to birth a significant cultural form of environmentalism and neighborhood engagement. All of Williamsburg's immersive events, rooftop gatherings, street culture and networked zines shared a life world within a complex and shifting urban environment. As the writer and Immersionist choreographer, Melanie Hahn Roche has maintained, the purpose of Williamsburg’s immersive environments “goes beyond simply throwing a good party.”

Immersionism, in other words, was not just a singular event bounded by space and time. Nor was immersive culture an idealization of life put forth as a proposition. It was a living continuum of interconnected elements catalyzing an actual neighborhood’s rejuvenation. Given that environment’s crime-ridden and toxic nature, the Immersionists’ large, celebratory gatherings could no longer simply indulge freedom within the human domain, let alone privilege only a demographic subset of that domain. The entire social and ecological environment had to be reconnected in a “techno-organic” mesh (Lalalandia), congealed in a “multidimensional convergence” (Lizard’s Tail), and cultivated into a collective “media organism” (Nerve Circle). The Immersionists, in effect, were suspended in a common "Green Room" as the name of one of their gathering spots near the waterfront suggests.

Foreshadowing embodiment in psychology

Moving beyond the 20th century paradigm of the isolated artist and shifting to a concern for public life, public spaces, local networks, and shared well-being easily reflected a shift into ecological thinking for this generation of artists. "First Fridays" and other community-based cultural forms were also foreshadowed by the context-sensitive Immersionists.Their orientation also foreshadowed a radical change in fields beyond the arts such as social media, complex networks, and both embodied and extended cognition.

Embodied cognition, and its close cousin, extended cognition, suggests that the mind, and all its cognitive, emotional and aesthetic properties, is not isolated in the human brain, but is a function of an organism’s total interactions with the world. Interviewed in a guest blog for Scientific American in 2011, a psychologist at Barnard College, Joshua Davis opined that embodied cognition was just beginning to gel at that time as a new framework for cognitive psychology: “I see embodiment as a new paradigm that we are shifting towards,” he states.

In 2017, over a quarter century after the Immersionist movement blossomed in Brooklyn, Karl Friston, a professor of neurology at the University College London, also noted the emergence of a new paradigm emerging in cognitive psychology. His overview of embodied and extended cognition appears on The British Council’s video series Serious Science and reflects much of the philosophy of the Immersionists:

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“Everything is in the coupling of the body to the environment in which it is immersed… Is it all in the head? Or is it somehow a partnership with the world, a partnership with the physical situation that we find ourselves in, that we mediate and couple with through our body… You can't just look at the brain, again, as some glorified stimulus-response link, some bank of filters that's processing information.”

”

As Friston continues to echo the Immersionist ethos, he even equates embodied cognition with dancing and indicates that at the time of his talk, 2017, the field was just beginning to recognize the significance of immersion in cognition:

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“You really have to think about the action-perception cycle, the circulation causality induced by the notion that the environment is acting upon you, and you are acting upon the environment. And it's a dance, a dialogue. So that's certainly in the ascendancy in the past few years. I personally think it's a very useful and exciting development.”

”

In neuroscientific terms, both Davis and Friston were citing the emergence of a new environmental framework for the mind a quarter century after the Immersionist Anna Hurwitz opined about “participation” and “co-dependence,” Ebon Fisher was exulting in the “psycho-physical swirl,” Lalalandia was celebrating the “omnisensorial sweepout,” and Yvette Helin was attempting to “pull people into a collective consciousness… allowing us to stand back and see who we are and how we relate to the people and spaces around us.” Jessica Nissen, an Immersionist with a strong interest in biology and science fiction, presented as concise a foreshadowing of extended cognition as one could ask for in 1993: “internal/external, voluntary/involuntary, physical/psychological, experience/dream.” She sums this up with the phrase “circuitous systems.”

Of course, as artists the Immersionists were not simply interested in a new ecological theory of mind and culture, but were also applying these prescient ideas to their home, a struggling neighborhood where a deep and deliberate immersion might have a positive impact. A 2004 study showing a reduction of attrition rates among the disadvantaged in Williamsburg in the 1990s suggests that they did, in fact, have such an impact. Underscoring the emotional value Immersionism brought to Williamsburg in the 1990s, Brainard Carey stated on Yale Radio in 2016:

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“There was a warmth to it that was stunning. It was even warmer than the scenes of the 1960s because there didn't seem to be these hierarchies. The appearance to the audiences was of an unusual generosity.”

”

History

The early 1990s

The Sex Salon

Williamsburg's first major gathering of experimental artists in the 1990s adopted a name that effectively signaled a rite of spring: The Sex Salon. Opening on Valentine’s Day, 1990, the three day festival took place at Epoché, a warehouse space near the Williamsburg Bridge that doubled as Ladislav Czernek's studio. It was organized by a cross section of early Immersionist groups, including Brand Name Damages, Epoché, The Lizard's Tail, Minor Injury, Nerve Circle, Verge, Waterfront Week, and Word of Mouth. The poster by Nerve Circle stressed an interdisciplinary and participatory approach, inviting participants to “Hang your stuff. Read your stuff. Play your stuff. Project your stuff. GET INVOLVED.”

The Sex Salon’s playful title was an early indication of the Immersionists’ interest in visceral connection. It celebrated gender-bending performances, and evocative diagrams, sculptures and films depicting a range of sexual orientations. Writing in the local monthly, Word of Mouth, media theorist Sam Binkley spoke of the event’s intensity and its role in catalyzing a community:

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“The Sex Salon (based entirely on sex) brought together more people with more energy and more focus than any other event held here in the past five years. Not only did more people invest their energy in terms of time and creative input (an over 95 artist group exhibition and 3 packed evening events, all based entirely on sex), but people seemed to be actually inventing a new sense of community as they experienced it.”

”

The Utne Reader published an account of the Sex Salon’s democratic origins in a series of informal meetings:

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“It was the beginning of 1990. A bunch of creative tinkerers who met regularly at the Bog found ourselves shuffling over to Epoché, a tender little hole of a Brooklyn warehouse under the Williamsburg Bridge... Manhattan, sealed tight in its cellophane of avant-gardeness, high rent, and old-boy communications patterns wouldn't have us... After a few arguments pertaining to what was phenomenal, what was relevant, and whether or not media was a four-letter word, we finally came to an ancient conclusion: Let's put on a show! And a theme? Sex, of course, the great glue. The method? Total salon. All media.”

”

The Cat's Heads

Five months later on July 14, 1990 another large interdisciplinary experiment unfolded, this time in a cavernous warehouse in the Olde Dutch Mustard Factory on Metropolitan Avenue and N. 1st Street. Billed as a “multidimensional convergence” the Cat’s Head was launched by Terry Dineen, Jean Francois Poitier, Rube Fenwick and others associated with a small cabaret called the Lizard’s Tail near the Williamsburg Bridge. Working with over 50 volunteers, the group assembled installations around a large dance floor and gave almost as much attention to audience participation and the visual arts as to the bands on stage. This set the conditions for an unusual group experience where, as Mike Cohen describes it in WOM (Word of Mouth), all the stimuli was “easily flowing into the whole.” Cohen describes the same sense of intimacy that had emerged at the Sex Salon: “There’s a closeness, a touching, a communion of sorts.” Although the headliners were separated by a stage and originated from Manhattan, Cohen notes that the art and music around the periphery of the event were beginning to demonstrate a compelling degree of interdisciplinary integration:

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“The art: interactive and entertaining, easily flowing into the whole, the prime example being Keith Godbout’s Dingle Ballbath which everyone played with between acts. Also interesting was Kit Blake’s very industrial sensor activated Oil Curtain, and Craig Collins’ Light Attack room… Marisa’s Peaches: good music and a wild, flailing energy. One of them took off her clothes and walked around with a tree… [The band] Red Restaurant cooked when Ken Butler joined them, creating an eerie, evocative atmosphere that engulfed the space.”

”

Street events and Clubs

Projects in the streets, rooftops, and along the waterfront helped to extend the scene even further into the neighborhood. Working with El Centro Cultural de Williamsburg, the immersive systems group Nerve Circle installed a Weird Thing Zone inside a neighborhood festival on Grand Street. John Rubin’s Floating Cinema began screening movies on a barge in the East River. A number of bands, including Thrust and Colored Greens, opened an outdoor performance platform on an abandoned truck depot called Radioactive Bodega. Rob Hickman initiated an event on S. 11th Street, Glow Nighttime, which involved the ceremonial tossing of five televisions and two mock satellites off a 6-story building. Live drumming helped to transform the media sacrifice into a unifying tribal exercise. Months later, two interdisciplinary street festivals, Human Fest I and II also appeared on South 11th Street initiated by the composer and performer, Doc Israel (Doug Bennett).

Clubs emerged like the Green Room, Keep Refrigerated, Fake Shop, and El Sensorium which swallowed audiences in music and “360 degree visual jam sessions.” All of the clubs contributed to various kinds of tribal convergence with members often flowing between them.

In an early indication that the Immersionist scene had become a magnet to others in Brooklyn’s creative community, the non-profit gallery, Minor Injury moved its entire operation to Grand Street. Initially located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Mo Bahc’s politically engaged gallery had been one of the few venues in north Brooklyn for experimental art in the 1980s. As the Immersionist scene began to gain momentum, a new director, Kevin Pyle moved the space closer to the innovative culture near the waterfront. After launching the Weird Thing Zone on Grand Street, Nerve Circle staged six information-sharing rituals at Minor Injury, the “Media Compressions.” The communal events concluded with a media blackout and intimate discussions in darkness. Exploring other forms of social media, Nerve Circle also launched an “Eyeball Scanning Party,” a “Slurm in the AlulA Dimension” and a phone-in bulletin board, (718) Subwire, where callers shared rants, poetry, and announcements.

Flytrap

After working on two Cat’s Head events in Williamsburg, Anna Hurwitz, Myk Henry and several others folded the concept of biomorphic convergence into both the name and the aesthetic of another large event, Flytrap. This new interdisciplinary endeavor increased the emphasis on installation art and "floating phenomena" which occupied two adjacent warehouses on the Williamsburg waterfront at Kent Ave. and N. 10th Street. The event still featured bands at one end of the complex, including The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black and Fihi Ma Fihi, which performed on a 32 foot stage created by Myk Henry and Anna Hurwitz that folded around the performers like a huge Venus Flytrap. In another biomorphic gesture, Stavit Allweis’ poster for Flytrap depicted a conflux of writhing forms which illustrated some of the biomorphic creations of the event including "Endless Tissue" by Nerve Circle, "Embryo Astronauts" by Carol Long, "The 13th Fluid (Medea's First Period) by Lauren Szold, Jessica Nissen, Medea de Vyse and Stevie Allweiss, "Squirt It with Your Weenie" by Robert Hickman, "Marionette Fly System" by Yvette Helin, "Fetish object for Pagan Industrialists" by Richard Posch, and a milky, atmospheric installation by Frank Shiffren called "Plastic Fog."

Organism

One of the oldest industrial warehouses of Williamsburg, The Old Dutch Mustard Factory at 80 Metropolitan Avenue, became the site for four Immersionist enterprises: Cat's Head I, a studio for Lalalandia, Organism and the immersive theater and project space Mustard. Suzanne Wines states in Domus that the all night event Organism, which took over nearly the entire factory on June 12, 1993, “became a kind of symbolic climax to the renegade activity that had been stirring within the community since the late eighties” Drawing from the community's history of collaboration and Nerve Circle’s immersive systems experiments, Ebon Fisher teamed up with Anna Hurwitz, Robert Elmes, Jeff Gompertz, Jessica Nissen, Kevin Pyle, Megan Raddant, Richard Duckworth and others from the Immersionist community to launch what became the largest and most layered of the Immersionist warehouse gatherings. According to Fisher’s proposal for the event, the goal was to weave together both cultural and natural systems into a “web jam” and to “send roots and tendrils out to the neighborhood... a web of overlapping systems.” Attempting “to push the idea of linkage, collaboration and interaction to its mellifluous, weblike extreme” the web jam eliminated the central stage and decentralized the cultural systems. Groups were encouraged to lay out an extended web which would overlap, and even converge with, webs of phenomena generated by all the other contributors. 120 members of Williamsburg's creative community contributed to the event which drew in over 2,000 guests according to Newsweek. Robin Dann recounted even larger numbers in Waterfront Week:

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“People started showing up at 6 and there was still a line at the door at 3. I heard 4,500 people attended… And have you ever seen a larger group of perfectly adorable and friendly people? Invited to play and experience wonder… they responded to all the energy that had gone into the place with a generous outpouring of their own, and the resulting frequency was historic. I never learned about rapture, community, spirituality, or fun in art school! My Orgasm came at dawn, when I broke into dance – unhampered by my still-bashful thoughts and sensing that my core essence was visible for all to see.”

”

Spike Vrusho described Organism as “The Mother of All Bashes” in the same issue of Waterfront Week and Medea de Vyse zeroed in on two of the more provocative contributions: a rappelling exercise by the Hit and Run Theater and a large, crawl-in womb created by the band Thrust and the sculptor James Porter:

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“Rappelling down the sides of those 60 foot tanks at the legendary Organism, now almost a month away, but salient in the unconscious of the ‘burg. What in god’s name do you do for insurance I asked The Amazing Gustav. He laughs. ‘Americans always ask that question. In Argentina, where we’re from, it’s not a big problem… [But] we don’t want to scare people or shock them. This is a form of theater.’”...“Must I Org? Yes, I Orged! I Orged! I was devastated! …Really the most thoroughgoing environmental event in ‘burg history. It was integrated, witty, cool, and I fell asleep in a tangle of lovely bodies in 'the womb'...”

”

El Sensorium and Illbient music

Another significant Immersionist group, Lalalandia even dubbed itself an “entertainment research corporation,” emphasizing the experimental nature of their “omnisensorial” spaces and experiences. Lalalandia’s club, El Sensorium for example, introduced interactive works by numerous neighborhood artists and musicians in a rich hive of recycled materials extracted from Williamsburg’s abandoned factories. Water cascaded over the bar and merged with streams of water coming down through leaks in the building. It was a merger of design and natural urban decay that was quite intentional. Using a term coined by the composer Kit Krash (Karthik Swaminathan), the co-founder of Lalalandia, Mariano Airaldi described the group’s aesthetic as “techno-organic” The goal was to transform industrial debris and industrial systems back into raw material and animal connection.

Referring to the jarring, even toxic nature of industrial life, Lalalandia member DJ Olive (Greg Asch), coined the term “illbient” to describe the group’s churning ambient sound. Given the vital role that Lalalandia’s experimental clubs played in helping to form a creative community in Williamsburg, acerbic terms like techno-organic and illbient helped to reveal its complex nature. They added a critical dimension to a community built from the wreckage of a collapsing industrial order.

Immersionist writers and graphic novelists

Williamsburg writers like Carl Watson, Daisy Wake, David Brody, Ebon Fisher, Kit Blake, Laurel Casey, Medea de Vyse, Shelley Marlow, Suzy Kahlich and Tom Bass also demonstrated an acute awareness of the toxic, depressed and sometimes violent nature of the district they adored and called home. Their literary immersion in the neighborhood ranged from the closely observed (Casey), to the unnerved (Watson) to the Utopian (Fisher), but in many ways they shared a somewhat feverish, hallucinogenic and even “illbient” demeanor. The cartoonists and graphic novelists Tony Millionaire, Stavit Allweiss, Kevin Pyle and Dave Whitmer demonstrated a similar sensibility. A passage from Laurel Casey’s column in Waterfront Week under the pen name Dr. L. H. Casey explicitly references immersion as she embarks on a feverish journey into the streets:

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“More diverse than most urban centers, Williamsburg is a glob of individuals within globs of religious and racial groups with a vast array of orientations that are interwoven into class structures with globs of desires primarily remaining unfulfilled… [So] I went back into therapy and was encouraged to confront the problem head-on. I would participate in a psychological and sociological immersion that would divulge any subverted racist tendencies under the guise of a bogus consumer-research project. This involved sticking my fat head into all trash cans within the boundaries of N10th, S10th, the East River and the BQE. I was to explore Williamsburg's socio-economic culture via garbage, like famous artists and sociologists do. Dive into a pile of shit head first, take big bites of it and ask myself how I truly felt about minorities, majorities and majorettes.”

”

Casey then takes the fever deeper:

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“As a warm up, I took a good, long look at everything. I then went home, threw up, anointed my body with Avon lotion and made love to myself because no one else wants me. The next day, I began my research on S10th Street at 1 a.m. Disguised as a hologram, I moved from block to block and touched, sniffed, and tasted various heaps of garbage. I leafed through one swarmy looking pile that included a few heroin needles, used Pampers, a couple of sofas, beer cans, a broken microwave, several stuffed animals, a car roof, and vomit.”

”

While much of the Immersionist writing involved a heady confrontation with the decaying nature of a district that had been abandoned by industry, city and even science, it also showed signs of ecstatic connection with what was effectively a new kind of urban wilderness. Laurel Casey writes in the New York Press in 1991:

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“Having landed in the sacred dump of Williamsburg from Nowheresville, Vermont, I was experiencing such a peculiar bliss in the midst of toxic fumes and crack whore street dancing, that I craved to share the thrill and horror of it, and therefore the opportunity to do so was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. Before that, I had never written a word.”

”

Adaptive culture

Immersionist gatherings like the Sex Salon, the two Cats Heads, the Weird Thing Zones, Flytrap, Organism and El Sensorium easily adapted to their environments, often with an intense and lively quality. Other experiments in adaptation ranged from the displacement of furniture throughout the neighborhood by Anna Hurwitz to Miss Kitty’s (Keith Godbout’s) mock wedding to Nina Machina (Nina von Svetlick). That torchlit excursion involved a ride on a jitney across the Williamsburg Bridge and through the streets of Williamsburg. On other occasions Machina lead the all-women band Nina Machina and Locomotive Love, which often used materials from the waterfront as percussion instruments. In various combinations Stavit Allweiss, Melanie Hahn Roche, Genia Gould, Jessica Nissen, Rosa Valado, Lauren Szold and Keita Whitten participated in adaptive movement projects. They crawled across the Williamsburg Bridge, squirmed among the mustard seeds of the Old Dutch Mustard Factory and commandeered the top of a bar at the 612 Club on Metropolitan Avenue.

Immersion sometimes was taken to extremes of both adaptation and endurance. David Henry Brown Jr. initiated a cross species entanglement at a Floating Point Unit event. Tied down in a shallow vat filled with mice, he lay there for hours with his fellow mammals. Others, like Andrew Hampsas, Robert Elmes and Dan McKereghan, literally immersed themselves in the East River. Robert Elmes staged a performance at Cat’s Head II involving an interrogation of guests at mock gunpoint in the warehouse's public bathroom. The piece, “Fear, Racism and Intimidation in Stereotype Stereo Sound” subjected visitors to a litany of grievances against structural racism and white indifference. In an equally confrontational performance event, The NYPD Show, Amy Shapiro brought a dozen members of the Immersionist community to Manhattan in a staging of aggressive police incarceration practices.

Some of the work was more gentle, although no less penetrating. While still interested in connecting artists and audiences with their world, Megan Raddant concerned herself with a reconnection with the realm of childhood and its close affinity to the natural world. At Organism she installed an “Elvin Napping System,” inviting participants to take a meandering journey from one cocoon to the next. In another childlike invocation of nature, Raddant invited a dozen Immersionists to occupy El Sensorium dressed as “Flowers for an Hour.” The flower costumes mixed oddly with the house band We’s “illbient” music. The strange juxtaposition underscored the diversity of Williamsburg’s interpenetrating creations.

In another example of a more tender immersion, Judy Thomas released hundreds of balls fashioned out of recycled plastic bags onto Bedford Avenue. Named after the quickly breeding “Tribbles” of Star Trek, Thomas’ recycled “Troubles” were animated by both the wind and neighborhood children. The recycled bundles were joined by The Amazing Gustav on stilts. The sprawling spectacle was a highlight of Chita Contreras and Greg Steinberg’s Outdoor Museum in Williamsburg which drew in nearly 100 neighborhood-friendly artists and musicians and engaged thousands of neighbors. Steinberg explained to John Korduba in The Greenline how the Outdoor Museum followed the principle that “Everything in the world is a medium for artists.”

Humor, warmth and community outreach

The humor and warmth displayed by Judy Thomas’ Troubles at the Outdoor Musuem permeated many of the scene’s outdoor creations, helping to draw in the community. In another humorous effort, Amy Shapiro arranged rocks and bricks from the waterfront into the shape of a dinosaur. The oblique ode to extinction outside the Flytrap warehouse event was another elegant example of art emerging from Williamsburg’s ruins. A peak of reverie came in the form of The Waterfront Follies which emerged in an abandoned meat packing warehouse known as Keep Refrigerated. Launched by Earwax Records and Waterfront Week, the mock fashion show featured clothing designs by Kanai & Onyx, Zoe Collins, Cielito Pascual, Mariano Airaldi, Virginia Hoge, Tania and Patty Butter. Modeling was performed by Patty Butter, Rob Hickman, Heather Wagner, Keith Godbout, Luisa Caldwell, Stavit Allweiss, Medea De Vyse and Ilene Zori Magaras. The event was hosted by Kay-e-ta the Mermaid (Keita Whitten) and Ebonovitch (Ebon Fisher) and there were performances by David O’Kelly, Ian Brody, Mariano Airaldi, Svava and Medea. Tom Schmitt performed as DJ and was joined by the bands Thaw, Because Because Because and Mike Lattimore of the Shorty Jackson Band.

Performance artists such as Miss Kitty, Jennifer Miller, Medea and Andrew Hampsas, and groups like the Hungry March Band and Hit and Run Theater threaded their work into the neighborhood in both casual and formal forms. Gene Pool and Robin Perl integrated their work into local protest activity, the former while wearing a suit made of recycled beer cans and the latter through the creation of large dynamic street posters. El Puente, an early contributor to neighborhood revival, provided after school programs for children with a focus on the arts and neighborhood engagement. They explored creative protest forms such as sponsoring a student environmental group called The Toxic Avengers.

Publishing networks

The dynamism of Williamsburg's street actions in the 1990s went a long way towards connecting with people outside the arts and stimulating both a discourse on the environment and a heightened sense of physical involvement with the neighborhood. Such neighborhood participation also characterized a cluster of neighborhood-focused zines and other DIY media. Kit Blake likened his monthly Worm Magazine to a “publishing network” and Genia Gould, founder of Waterfront Week and Breukelen Magazine, spoke of a “legacy of artists and activists” that shared a principle of community involvement. Deepening Waterfront Week’s penetration into neighborhood life, a local pub, The Ship’s Mast became an informal hub for the zine’s operations. Daisy Wake’s monthly publication, The Curse, helped to thread a vivid feminist discourse into the neighborhood.

Demonstrating a generational affinity for ecological thinking, the Immersionists often made no distinction between product, process and environment, and between personal experience and collective experience. To be “tangled in life.” was the goal according to Ethan Pettit whose alter ego, Medea De Vyse circulated through Williamsburg as a performer, a journalist, and an attender of district community meetings. Medea, whose positions in Waterfront Week sometimes reached a cartoonish level of hyperbole, became the namesake for an actual cartoon strip by Tony Millionaire, Medea’s Weekend which appeared in Waterfront Week in the early 1990s.

Tony Millionaire also blurred boundaries between himself, his art and the neighborhood. In addition to appearing as an exaggerated millionaire in his cartoon strip, he performed as the same character at Minor Injury Gallery and at parties he hosted in his red lounge-like apartment. He wears a top hat in all three realms. Other neighborhood characters were represented in Medea’s weekend, including the writer, Suzie Kahlich in her signature black boots, a bewildered WWII Veteran, Arthur Friedel, and the psychologist, Adil Kureshi who appears as a celestial potato.

Another comic strip, The Bondorous Baby, by Kevin Pyle and David Whitmer appeared regularly in Worm. Like Millionaire’s strip, it explored a dreamlike version of Williamsburg. The artists often incorporated photographs within their drawings, intensifying an already odd sense of local reality. Many Immersionists, in effect, did not explore collective experience just to end up in a predictable neighborhood. They aimed for something transformative and intensely alive. A Lalalandia manifesto from 1992 even declares they had been “Conspiring against Normalandia since 2077.”

Bands and East Village affiliations

A number of East Village bands collaborated with Brooklyn’s Immersionists, including the Reverb Mother Fuckers, King Missile and the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Arts collectives from the East Village also built relations with Williamsburg's scene, including Generator, the Gas Station, Gargoyle Mechanique, the Collective:Unconscious, and the Institute for Aesthetic Modulation (IFAM). IFAM later crossed into Williamsburg and developed a series of performances for the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island. The troupe, directed by Dan Green, won best performance at the Mermaid Parade for nine years. IFAM’s work involved the recycling of industrial materials into dark robotic costumes and the staging of vivid battles between oppressors and the oppressed.

Bands that were based in Williamsburg not only contributed to the large interdisciplinary gatherings, but also set up impromptu performances at parties and on the waterfront. These included Thrust, Fihi Ma Fihi, Wild Child Productions, Colored Greens, Fric and Frac, and Skinhorse. This last group became the de facto house band for Minor Injury, taking on a key role in a raucous puppet show about surfers called The Hodaddy. One notable music event on an abandoned loading platform, Radioactive Bodega, referenced both Brooklyn’s corner store traditions and the industrial waste depot, Radiac on Grand Street. Other music immersions included Jeff Gompertz and Dávid Dienes’ “Music for Prepared Building” in the Old Dutch Mustard Factory and The Hungry March Band which appeared at numerous street events, backyard parties, rooftops and protest marches. Two of their members, Sasha Sumner and Theresa Westerdahl, helped to launch other groups such as the Female Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Thrust.

Mustard

In 1993, soon after Organism completed its 15 hour web jam in the Old Dutch Mustard Factory, two of the interior rooms became a more permanent project space for Immersionist theater and installations. Named after the factory’s primary commodity, Mustard hosted a series of elaborate immersive installations and interactive theater experiments. Organizers of Mustard’s events were veterans of the Sex Salon, Cat’s Head I and II, Flytrap and Organism. These included Robert Elmes, Jeff Gompertz, Anna Hurwitz, Jessica Nissen, Megan Raddant and Fred Valentine. Although not a core member, Dan McKereghan was another significant contributor.

Undertow reported that after almost a year of “continuous spectacle” a fire turned the all-volunteer space into “a badly blistered and fragile idea.” The letter, signed “Mr. and Mrs. Mustard” went on to state, “We might need legal assistance, we might need ideas for alternative funding.”

An editorial in the same issue of Undertow lead to speculation about the origins of the fire:

“On Sunday, May 1 the ‘lounge’ and a section of the ceiling in the main performance space of Mustard were damaged by fire, which the fire department reports was probably started by a smoldering cigarette. Apparently, the building manager had forgotten to turn back on the sprinkler system a few weeks before the accident when he had been doing some repairs, which is why the fire spread as far as it did. Fortunately no one was injured. Mustard had been in the process of getting its Certificate of Occupancy.”

Unable to regroup without outside support, Mustard eventually closed its doors. Although the fire at Mustard led to a brief pause in the neighborhood's immersive culture, the first five years of intense creative activity in the neighborhood since the Sex Salon had made a mark.

The late 1990s

By 1995, other groups began to emerge, along with new projects by some of the pioneers. In 1997 Robert Elmes opened Galapagos Art Space on North 6th Street. The experimental theater director had worked on Flytrap and Organism and was prepared to open one of the first creative venues to operate with an actual liquor license and proper fire safety measures. Galapagos continued to explore an Immersionist sensibility with its recycled industrial features, a pool of water near the entrance that evoked the watery environment of its namesake, interdisciplinary programming, and its partnership with the film collective Ocularis which screened movies on the roof.

Other Immersionist enterprises continued into the late 1990s, including the experimental theater and installation space Fake Shop, Nerve Circle’s live-in media world The AlulA Dimension, Lalalandia’s Translounge, and Ongolia. Gene Pool launched an annual event where Williamsburg artists immersed sculptural objects within the Crest Hardware Store on Metropolitan Avenue. New immersive groups emerged such as Alien Action which turned Williamsburg's streets into extraterrestrial stage sets, and Sens Production which transformed the McCarren Park Pool into a large performance venue. That effort helped to bring city funding back into its care.

The vitality of a community that embraced its entire neighborhood as a creative medium, and the intense interdisciplinary gatherings and venues that grew out of that culture, drew increasing numbers of people to north Brooklyn. National and international media interest in the immersive scene proliferated and by 1997 Fuji Television broadcast a live interview with several Immersionists at Galapagos Art Space to 10 million viewers in Japan. Williamsburg's neighborhood-focused activists, artists, writers and performers, along with the media attention they garnered, helped to attract a large influx of creative people to Williamsburg. A creative, post-industrial economy began to appear on the waterfront marked by slow growth and small, locally owned businesses.

In the new millenium, however, the administration of mayor Michael L. Bloomberg ushered in a very different kind of development. A wave of high rise construction rapidly replaced Williamsburg's intimate village life. Bloomberg's initiative was neither gentle nor a form of house-by-house gentrification. It was a sudden injection of corporate development enabled by deliberate rezoning and tax policies that favored developers. The result of this leveraged development was an exodus from Williamsburg by many in the Immersionist community, along with many of their neighbors. The steep rise in the cost of living which followed the city’s investment in corporate welfare made continued immersion impossible.

Although the Immersionist community had become a diaspora, an online discussion in 2011 brought many in the community back together to discuss the nature of their experiences together. The installation artist and musician, Dennis Del Zotto broached the perennial topic of a name for Williamsburg's immersive scene along the waterfront. The Facebook forum was shared by members of some of the principal groups operating in Williamsburg at the time: The Bog, Floating Point Unit, The Flytrap, The Green Room, Hit and Run Theater, Keep Refrigerated, Lalalandia, The Lizard’s Tail, Mustard, Nerve Circle, Verge, Waterfront Week and Worm Magazine. A consensus emerged to use the terms “Immersionism” and “Immersionist” for the movement.

While these groups represented a major cross section of the creative community near Williamsburg’s waterfront, not every artist, musician or writer was in attendance. An agreement was reached in the forum, therefore, to embrace a very open definition of immersion. It was agreed that a range of phenomena could be deemed Immersionist, including installations, events and extended systems in the streets and local media. It was also agreed to let the full definition emerge through a continuous process of mutual immersion. This established Immersionism as a living, self-organizing philosophy and one of the earliest examples of a generative art form in which both the work and its conceptual framework were emerging together.

Immersionist groups

Immigrating from across the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, The first members of the creative community associated with Immersionism in Williamsburg represented a diverse array of nationalities and art forms. Groups began to form in the late 1980s and early 1990s with participants flowing easily between them. A rhizomatic rather than hierarchical network of activity emerged .

From the late 1980s onward, Grand Street near the waterfront became a magnet for the emerging scene. The street became home to The Bog, The Cave, Lalalandia and Comfort Zones, Minor Injury, Nerve Circle and the Weird Thing Zone, Tony Millionaire’s red lounge, and Worm Magazine. Just a few blocks away was Mr. Chung’s Studio, Epoché, The Green Room, El Puente, the Lizard’s Tail, El Centro Cultural de Williamsburg, El Sensorium, Open Window Theater, the Ship’s Mast Pub, The Right Bank, and the Old Dutch Mustard Factory where Cat’s Head I, Organism and Mustard took root.

In alphabetical order the first major groups to explore an immersive cultural approach in Williamsburg included the following:

Epoché 1989-1991 An experimental “meeting house” and interdisciplinary exhibition space which doubled as Ladislav Czernek’s studio. Greek for “suspension of judgment,” Epoché was promoted by Czernek as a laboratory where artists could “transcend the preconceived formula of a gallery.” A meeting held at Epoché by members of some of the earliest Immersionist groups – Brand Name Damages, Epoché, The Lizard's Tail, Minor Injury, Nerve Circle, Verge, Waterfront Week, and Word of Mouth – gave rise to the Sex Salon, Williamsburg's first large gathering of interdisciplinary artists. The three day festival opened at Epoché on Valentines Day weekend in 1990.

Floating Cinema 1980-2007 Years before Jon Rubin, the director of Floating Cinema, moved to Williamsburg, his water-based media experiments appeared in numerous ponds, rivers and seaside locations across the United States. According to the Floating Cinema website his immersive projects “emerged out of his interest in the effect that presentation context has on our response to media.” In the early 1990s Rubin began to screen films from a barge on the Williamsburg side of the East River. The family-friendly films brought local community members together on an otherwise inhospitable waterfront. In another outdoor experiment, Rubin projected films that conformed to the curvature of three large grain silos at the Old Dutch Mustard Factory — a contribution to the Immersionist event Organism.

Flytrap 1991 Several of the co-creators of Cat’s Head I and II went on to organize Flytrap, an even larger immersive event in two large warehouses on the Williamsburg waterfront. Among the organizers were Anna Hurwitz, Myk Henry and Melanie Roche Hahn. Henry built a 32 foot stage for the all-night gathering which was designed to suggest a huge Venus Flytrap swallowing the performers. The poster for Flytrap was created by the Immersionist performer and graphic novelist Stavit Allweiss. Dozens of other installation artists, musicians and performers participated in the event. Hahn later wrote an article for The Drama Review which investigated the highly collaborative, community-building nature of the event.

Galapagos Art Space, Williamsburg 1997-2005 Long before he opened Galapagos Art Space, Robert Elmes helped to launch several of Williamsburg’s warehouse productions in the early 1990s, including Flytrap, Organism and Mustard. Elmes also created some of the more intense immersive theater and installation pieces of the early warehouse scene and even held a birthday party in a semi-submerged boat on the waterfront for his wife Stavit Allweiss. After receiving input from members of the Immersionist community, a proposal for Galapagos Art Space was completed by Robert Elmes in 1996 and the club eventually opened in an old mayonnaise factory on N. 6th Street in 1997. Following in the Immersionist tradition, Elmes designed Galapagos to encourage dialogue between strangers and across disciplines. The pool of water near the entrance and the prominence given to the industrial features of the site, underscored a commitment to immersing the audience in a vital historical and physical ecosystem. Ebon Fisher, one of the early consultants on the project along with Stavit Allweiss, Willis Baxter, Fred Valentine, Elle Burchill and Donal O’Ceilleachair, quotes Elmes in FYI, a publication for the New York Foundation for the Arts: “This summer, a longtime Williamsburg artist, Robert Elmes, will open a multi-disciplinary art space, Galapagos, which will add much fuel to [Williamsburg’s] green flame. Galapagos, complete with its own water ecosystem, is named after the islands where Darwin first immersed himself in the full sensuality of an island ecology. Robert has expressed a keen interest in an ‘ecosystem of the senses.’” Partnering with artists from many disciplines, including an emerging burlesque theater scene and the film group Ocularis directed by O’Ceilleachair, Galapagos maintained its goal of providing a resource for Brooklyn’s creative community, and encouraging a “cross-pollination” of ideas and forms. The club was forced to move to Dumbo, Brooklyn after its ten year lease expired and city-sponsored development drove rents up in Williamsburg. The innovative arts club was forced to move again eight years later, this time to Detroit. Once again, real estate pressures had made staying in Dumbo impossible, a situation ensured by the same government policies that had favored monopolistic corporate development in Williamsburg.

The Green Room 1991-1994 After helping to run the Lizard’s Tail, Rube Fenwick teamed up with costume designer and performance artist, Yvette Helin to create an informal gathering spot and performance space in Williamsburg called The Green Room. Doubling as Helin’s studio, the club was situated at 258 Wythe Avenue a block north of Grand Street. Events at the Green Room were hosted by Helin, Fenwick, and the environmentalist and performance artist, Gene Pool. Guest hosts included Michael Anderson and Glen Santiago. Conversations could be held the next morning over brunches orchestrated by Helin and the artist Rolf Carl. The Green Room served as a base for Helin’s multi-year performance piece “The Pedestrian Project,” which involved street performers choreographed and costumed by Helin to depict the black graphic silhouettes of pedestrians on street crossing signs. The Green Room’s Master of Ceremonies, Gene Pool, was known for his botanical experiments in the early 1980s. He seeded both a suit and a car with rye grass and completed the work by driving in art car festivals while wearing the suit. In the June issue of Word of Mouth Susan Burek wrote that Pool was known to cultivate “articles of well-seeded clothing. One of these, an overcoat, had a healthy layer of grass which made it a veritable eco-fur.” Pool’s Can Man, involving a unicycle and a suit of recycled cans, often turned up at protest marches organized by Neighbors Against Garbage (NAG). The protests successfully helped to block a New York City effort to add a garbage incinerator to Williamsburg’s toxic industrial waterfront.

Hit & Run Theater 1991-1996 The street theater company Hit & Run was founded and directed by Dan McKereghan. McKereghan studied under the theater director Anne Bogart and was often inspired by the primal theater works of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. Like Grotowski, McKereghan placed audiences among the performers and, in his own immersionist fashion, situated the entire production in the streets. Like his predecessors, Mckereghan drew upon ancient sources for some of his text. He also mixed these with contemporary language and themes. Hit & Run’s first performance in Williamsburg, The Humorous Man, was presented at Comfort Zones in 1991. That experimental Immersionist club, hosted by Lalalandia, would become Hit and Run’s primary location through 1994. Performances included Rappellent Virii, involving performers rapelling down the silos at Organism and scuba-diving in a tank of water; In The Red City, a reimagining of Dante’s Inferno set on the streets of Williamsburg; and Without a Clue, an immersive retelling of the Minotaur myth presented at Mustard. Hit & Run Theater presented nine events in Williamsburg in collaboration with a evolving troupe. Over time nearly one hundred performers, artists, and musicians worked with the company.

Institute for Aesthetic Modulation (IFAM) 1993-2021 Founded by Daniel Green, IFAM specializes in visual theater and installation art involving recycled industrial materials and mythic dramas. The troupe originated at Collective: Unconscious, a theater and art space in the East Village, but its operations moved to Brooklyn after being invited to create one of the cultural webs at Organism. Other venues in Brooklyn have included Mustard and the Coney Island Mermaid Parade where the experimental troupe won Best Performance nine times. Often staging the work in outdoor and public environments, IFAM has aimed to evoke large expanses of space and time, drawing the public into a relationship with a much larger universe than the secular world usually contemplates. Within this cosmic milieu IFAM has recast, and rendered strange, a variety of classic themes: sex, violence, worship, sadness, and death. The performance troupe has also explored what has become a new classic theme of popular culture: alien life forms. Drawing from a range of myths and realities, the Institute for Aesthetic Modulation has aimed to make the action at once foreign and intelligible. Influences have included Jewish and Asian liturgy and mythology, Japanese toys, Japanese and Silent Cinema, and the television fantasy worlds of The Muppet Puppets and Sid and Marty Krofft. IFAM’s ongoing and past collaborators have included Yab Yum (sound/music composition and mechanical design), Jamie Mereness (sound/mechanical design), Corinna Vosse (design), Leslie Samuels (lighting), Paul Bargetto and Pat Daniels (co-direction).

Keep Refrigerated 1991-1992 A highly participatory, DIY nightclub in an old meatpacking factory, Keep Refrigerated was launched by Mariano Airaldi, Jeff Gompertz and Ignacio Platas, and featured musical direction from Tom Schmitz and Karen Yamauchi. Schmitz, who had opened the record store Earwax on Bedford Avenue, also performed as a DJ and brought in other DJs such as Fabio who was on rotation at the radio station WFMU in New Jersey. Numerous other Immersionists performed and created installations for the club. It was shut down when the police began to close unlicensed clubs in response to the Happy Land fire in the Bronx that killed 87 people on March 25, 1990. Keep Refrigerated was located at 110 N. 6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, establishing that street as a creative destination that was eventually followed by Galapagos Art Space and numerous creative restaurants and music venues.

Lalalandia 1992-1997 Formed initially by Mariano Airaldi and Alexandra Giuidici from Buenos Aires, Ignacio Platas (Nacho Once) from Panama, and Gabrielle Latessa Ortiz from the United States, this experimental event and installation company was completed by Greg Asch (DJ Olive) and Kurt Przybilla from the US. The group humorously branded itself an “entertainment research corporation,” but it did in fact approach immersive cultural spaces with an eye to innovation. Among other projects, Lalalandia created the immersive restaurant, Comfortzones, the nightclub El Sensorium, a futuristic tour bus, and a travelling club called Translounge. El Sensorium, a popular nightclub located in a storage basement near the Williamsburg Bridge, featured a series of cavelike environments built almost entirely out of recycled materials and animated with aquatic light. DJ Olive (aka Gregor Asch), who teamed up with Ignacio Platas in Lalalandia’s house band We, coined the term “illbient” to reflect the style of music that was featured at the club. This was an agitated sound that reflected societal ills in general and the physical toxins of Williamsburg’s industrial waterfront in particular. A small bus was purchased by the group and painted silver to transport people between their experimental “enterprises,” turning all of Williamsburg, in effect, into a Lalalandia theme park. The group often welcomed other neighborhood artists and performers into their social and cultural experiments. A critical feature of Lalalandia’s work was the extraction of industrial materials found along Williamsburg’s waterfront, returning the materials to organic forms, and adapting both the mood of their music and their interior architecture to the decaying industrial locations.

The Lizard’s Tail 1989-1991 Launched by Terry Dineen from Ireland and Jean Francois Poitier from Belgium, this experimental cabaret was situated down a long hall in an old building hidden in the shadows of the Williamsburg Bridge. The club was distinguished by an old world ambience featuring small candle lit tables, homemade benches, and a small stage outfitted with a recycled theater curtain. Dineen and Poitier were joined by the impresario Rube Fenwick, the musician Billy Syndrome, and artists Anna Hurwitz, Myk Henry and Jordan Pfister among many others. In addition to hosting experimental evenings of music and performance, the cabaret became a gathering spot for a group of artists and musicians who collaborated on two of the largest warehouse events in Williamsburg, Cat’s Head I and II. A third Cat’s Head was attempted in Ireland, although the cultural and legal climate was not quite as hospitable to extreme creative immersion as Williamsburg was in the early 1990s. As recounted by Melanie Hahn in The Drama Review, the police shut the event down before it could fully launch.

Minor Injury 1985-1996 Launched initially in Greenpoint, Brooklyn by Mo Bahc in 1985, this non-profit gallery presented a range of politically engaged events and exhibitions. It was continued in various phases by Sam Binkley, Virginia Hoge, Dave Horner, Ethan Pettit and others. The gallery moved to Grand Street in 1990 under a new director, Kevin Pyle. Situated closer to the emerging Immersionist scene near the Williamsburg Bridge, the gallery hosted numerous collaborative projects and often opened its shows with keg parties. These included the Shredded Money Show organized by Luisa Caldwell and Judy Thomas, Nerve Circle’s Media Compressions, and a fundraiser featuring surfing marionettes and the houseband, Skinhorse. Kit Blake and Roxy Middqendorf curated an interactive sculpture and installation exhibition, Tweaking the Human which was co-hosted by another non-profit gallery Brand Name Damages. The exhibition featured an opening night where the audience wandered the streets between the two spaces. Minor Injury also hosted a variety of immersive theater projects by Russell Christian and Tony Millionaire. In 1992 Kevin Pyle transitioned to becoming a graphic novelist and Minor Injury was taken over by two recent graduates of the Pratt Institute of Art. The new directors did not share the gallery’s ethic of neighborhood participation and proceeded to disengage the space from a relationship with the community. Realigning the gallery with Manhattan’s postmodern paradigm, they began to promote Minor Injury through street graphics that attempted an ironic reference to fascism. The prank ended up disturbing both the artists of the neighborhood and a number of Polish and Hassidic citizens of north Brooklyn with traumatic memories of WWII. The inability to grasp that they were operating in a living neighborhood and not just an art world, led to the dissolution of Minor Injury. An apology was eventually issued in Waterfront Week.

Mustard 1993-1994 Mustard was an immersive theater and installation space that occupied a portion of the Old Dutch Mustard Factory where Organism and the first Cat’s Head had taken place. Core members and event directors of Mustard included Anna Hurwitz, Dan McKereghan, Fred Valentine, Jeff Gompertz, Jessica Nissen, Megan Raddant and Robert Elmes. Buttressed by a one year lease and several years of event creation, this group was able to develop some of the most elaborate immersive theater and installation works of the era. The presence of the decaying factory, right down to its leaky roof and weed-strewn floor, was a distinctive element in many of its productions. An installation called Water by Jeff Gompertz and Fred Valentine featured massive translucent water containers from the site. These were suspended off the floor and lit to cast rippling light across the factory. Megan Raddant directed another atmospheric and ambient piece, Nomadic Balm, and Dan McKereghan produced a Hit and Run play, Labyrinth, which moved the audience from set to set. Location: 60 Metropolitan Ave., Williamsburg Brooklyn.

Nerve Circle 1987-1998 This immersive theater company grew out of Ebon Fisher’s street and rooftop creations in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s. These early immersions included street theater, graffiti depicting neurons and a moon ritual on writer Michael Chabon’s roof. To prove that digital media had made immersive culture a necessary antidote, Fisher wrote computer code called Book.dat in 1984 that could randomly produce an infinite number of images. That led to an invitation to study at MIT and teach at The Media Lab at its inception in 1985.

In 1987 Fisher launched the immersive rock theater company Nerve Circle which performed at The Channel nightclub and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. In 1988 the police shut down a raucous loft event by Nerve Circle which included the audience in the production. Losing his lease a week later, Fisher regrouped in Williamsburg where he began to devote the company to immersive, community-building rituals. These included Weird Thing Zones on Grand Street, a Suction/Reflection System ("Endless Tissue") at Flytrap, Media Compressions at Minor Injury, an Eyeball Scanning Party, a web jam for over 2,000 people called Organism, and "slurms" and “flesh-links” in a structure in Fisher's loft called The AlulA Dimension. Key collaborators included Scott Grande, Anna Hurwitz, Kit Blake, Arlena Torres, Kevin Pyle, Sasha Sumner, Stavit Allweiss, Megan Raddant, Jessica Nissen, Yvette Helin, Amy Shapiro, Jeff Gompertz, Mariano Airaldi, Robert Elmes, and Richard Duckworth.

Fisher codified Nerve Circle’s systems in nervelike symbols called Bionic Codes and Zoacodes which earned him the title “Mr. Meme” in Wired in 1995 followed in 1996 by the acclamation "breathtaking biology."His works have been presented in various media by PS1/MoMA, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, Galapagos Art Space, Fuji Television, and by the New York and Venice Guggenheim Museums. Fisher was featured as one of the “Visionaries of the New Millenium” by David Pescovitz in Java Magazine.

The Outpost, 1991 to the present A video collective and independent production center launched by Al Arthur, Ruth Kahn and Carlton Bright. The Outpost collaborated on a variety of documentary projects that included coverage of events in Williamsburg’s large warehouses in the early 1990s and supported video projects by dozens of independent artists. The Outpost studio hosted brunches in the kitchen, and Ruth Kahn maintained a garden on the Outpost’s roof which became a site for gatherings that contributed to the formation of Williamsburg’s experimental arts community. In 2009 Ruth Kahn moved the Outpost to a larger space in Ridgewood, Queens where it has held a variety of interdisciplinary events, supports the production of independent media, and continued a tradition of reaching out to the surrounding community. This outreach has included both local educational projects and Ridgewood Radio which is produced at the Outpost by David Weinstein and broadcast on WFMU.

El Puente 1982-present This innovative educational center was established by Luis Garden Acosta in 1982. Although it operated further from the Williamsburg waterfront, it shared with the creative community to the west a deep interest in interdisciplinary work in a local environment. Acosta launched the center after a year of gang violence between 1979 and 1980 had left nearly one adolescent dead per week in Williamsburg. El Puente eventually became a school that merged the arts and education with social and environmental justice concerns.

Room Temperature, Floating Point Unit, Fake Shop and Ongolia 1991-1999 After Keep Refrigerated closed, Mariano Airaldi moved on to form Lalalandia with several friends, and Jeff Gompertz, Tom Schmitz and DJ Fabio formulated the club Room Temperature. A couple of years later Gompertz created the experimental media arts group Floating Point Unit (FPU) with Vlasta Mikic, Prema Murthy and Bruno Ricard (1993-1996). A large project space grew out of this group’s work called Fake Shop (90 North 11th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1997-1999). Complex theatrical spectacles and installations were presented at Fake Shop, many involving human bodies immersed in, and contorted by, a variety of media technologies. Participants in this creative community included V Owen Bush, Ricardo Dominguez, Diane Ludin, Vlasta ‘Volcano’ Mikic, Prema Murthy, Ignacio ‘Once 11’ Platas, Tomek Rabalski, Bruno Ricard, Eugene Thacker, and Dennis Del Zotto who installed a number of his inflated communing pods at Fake Shop. Another Immersionist project group, The Federation of Ongolia spun off of Fake Shop on the same site in 1998 and produced immersive works until 1999. The group, sometimes referred to simply as “Ongolia,” included Gabriela Lastessa Ortiz, Gregor Asch, Ignacio Platas, Jeff Gompertz, V Owen Bush, Dennis Delzotto, Lindsay Stefans, Daniel Smith.

Waterfront Week 1991-1993 This weekly zine was produced out of a suitcase and editors often used the Ship’s Mast Pub as an informal office. It featured short accounts of neighborhood events intermingled with local advertising. Waterfront Week was initiated by Genia Gould with the help of Ethan Pettit who wrote a regular column under the pen name Medea De Vyse. The zine also included writing by Rolf Carl, Kate Yourke, Suzie Kahlich, and Chris Lanier of El Centro Cultural de Williamsburg. Tony Millionaire published his first comic strip in Waterfront Week based upon Petit’s character Medea De Vyse. The strip, Medea’s Weekend, featured whimsical versions of many of Williamsburg's creative personalities.

Worm Magazine 1989-1993 Launched at Minor Injury Gallery as Word of Mouth in the late 1980s, this monthly magazine was taken up by the kinetic sculptor Kit Blake in 1990. After briefly using the abbreviation WOM, Blake transitioned the publication’s name to Worm Magazine, reflecting the emerging Immersionist tendency to reference living things and systems. Sometimes working with guest editors Ilene Zori Magaras and Richard Posch, Blake took full advantage of the desktop publishing tools that were emerging at the time and explored a range of text and graphics combinations. Long form essays were published about art, culture, politics, ecology and the new world of digital systems. Contributors to Worm included Sam Binkley, David Brody, Suzie Kahlich, Ebon Fisher, Richard Posch and the artists Kevin Pyle and David Whitmer who rendered a monthly cartoon, The Bondurous Baby. In an early editorial Blake invited the public to treat Worm as a neighborhood resource and included a monthly calendar of neighborhood events. As both a sculptor and curator Blake often contributed to neighborhood events himself, helping to define the immersive, interdisciplinary and networked nature of the innovative community.

Post immersion

Immersive vs leveraged development

Although the Immersionists’ culture was communal and locally focused, the warmth and vitality of the results drew in live audiences in the thousands, and television and film coverage reaching millions. They eventually attracted to Brooklyn one of the largest migrations of artists and performers in the world. Joining this migration in the mid-1990s, a wave of new commercial enterprises began to set up shop, many of them near the Bedford Avenue stop on the L Train. These were small, creative businesses such as the record store Earwax, the offbeat thrift shop Ugly Luggage that harbored a gallery in its basement, and several new galleries including Momenta and Pierogi 2000. Pierogi made its own contribution to the neighborhood-friendly community by maintaining flat files featuring Brooklyn artists. Restaurants opened up featuring cuisine from around the world, including the Turkish restaurant Oznot’s Dish, Vera Cruz featuring Mexican cuisine, and Plan Eat Thailand, all of which paid close attention to their environments. These did not replace, but rather complemented the older Polish and British cuisines offered by Kasia’s Restaurant, La Villita Bakery and Teddy’s Bar and Grill.

The Immersionists of the 1990s, and the small creative businesses they inspired, represented a distinctly different approach to urban development than the corporate ventures that followed them in the 21st century. The first was personal, emerged from neighborhood dialogue, and locally owned. The second was driven by city policy and favored corporate developers from Manhattan. The default umbrella term for urban transformation, “gentrification,” does not adequately define either era and there are numerous calls for a change in language to clarify how city governments that largely serve corporations have abandoned small business models of development.

A 2004 study of displacement patterns in New York in the 1990s bears this out. It showed that influxes of activists, artists and the middle class did not in fact increase attrition, but reduced it from earlier rates. This was especially so in areas like Williamsburg where housing was underutilized. In a discussion of their report, “Gentrification and Displacement New York City in the 1990s,” Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi state:

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“The study described in this article [examines] residential mobility among disadvantaged households in New York City during the 1990s. We found that rather than rapid displacement, gentrification was associated with slower residential turnover among these households. In New York City, during the 1990s at least, normal succession appears to be responsible for changes in gentrifying neighborhoods.”

”

The results even surprised the researchers. As Freeman states to The Atlantic: “Much to my surprise, our research findings did not show evidence of a causal relationship between gentrification and displacement.”

A review of the study in The Atlantic claims that the term gentrification, at least in reference to the middle class aspirational culture of the 1990s, may have lost its usefulness:

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“They came close to debunking the very idea of gentrification. Looking at seven “gentrifying neighborhoods” (Chelsea, Harlem, the Lower East Side, Morningside Heights, Fort Greene, Park Slope, and Williamsburg), they found that ‘poor households’ in those places were ‘19% less likely to move than poor households residing elsewhere.’”

”

The Atlantic was not alone in calling for new terms. In 2019 Henry Grabar placed the problem squarely in the title of an article for Slate Magazine: “What Do We Call It When the Rich Displace the Middle Class? It’s not gentrification!” Instead of masking the problem with vague notions of class evolution, references to deliberate forms of leveraged corporate development may be needed to actually address that which actually did displace disadvantaged populations in the new millennium. Writing for the New York Times in 2009, Russ Buettner and Ray Rivera point out that beginning in 2001, Mayor Michael L. Bloomberg deliberately “loosened the reins on development across the boroughs and pushed more than 100 rezoning measures through a City Council that stamped them into law. His administration poured $16 billion into financing to foster commercial development."

The term “gentrification” can also have the effect of actually neutralizing resistance to aggressive, city-sponsored corporate development. It imparts a false sense of inevitability and provides a veneer of gentle sophistication to the takeover of village life. As early as 1961 Jane Jacobs compared the effect of large concentrations of money on a city to a severe change in weather:

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“This money shapes cataclysmic changes in cities. Relatively little of it shapes gradual change. Cataclysmic money pours into an area in concentrated form, producing drastic changes… [It is] not like irrigation systems, bringing life-giving streams to feed steady, continual growth. Instead, it behaves like manifestations of malevolent climates.”

”

Terms like leveraged development and even “development dumping” more accurately describe the kind of city-corporate partnerships and stacked corporate housing that disrupted Williamsburg’s community after 2001. The economics behind leveraged development has been examined by researchers such as ProPublica.org and vividly illuminated in the films Battle for Brooklyn directed by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley, and Gut Renovation by the documentarist Su Friedrich of Princeton University. Like many of the residents she interviewed, Friedrich herself was forced out of her own loft by a developer in Williamsburg while making the film.

While the intimate, regenerative culture of the Immersionist and activist communities in Williamsburg received virtually no support from City Hall in the late 20th century, it nevertheless succeeded in reviving one of the most blighted areas of New York City. Only after the revival had been firmly established did the city begin to contribute significantly to the area – but largely to support the interests of a few corporations. Furthermore, infrastructure expansion to accommodate the new high rises had to be shouldered by Williamsburg’s non-corporate citizens. After receiving a tax abatement, the developer's share was transferred to the poor and middle class.

As leveraged development in the new millennium drove up the cost of living, many of the Immersionists and their neighbors were shut out of the home they had creatively transformed.

As many of the Immersionists and their neighbors became economic refugees of Williamsburg, a very different culture grew out of the more monied population that took their place. As illustrated by Bradley Spinelli in his novel, Killing Williamsburg (2013), this new scene was marked more by consumerism and marketing terms like “hipster” than deep neighborhood participation. In the very first page Spinelli reflects on these changes:

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“I thought everyone was looking to score…Even Veracruz, on Bedford, was changing. I never went there. I wasn't cool or tattooed enough for the mobbing slew of hipsters lining up to slurp frozen ‘ritas at happy hour, peeking out the open French doors with glances of undeserved superiority.”

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Nevertheless, the holistic culture of the Immersionists was not entirely extinguished. When the ten year lease for Galapagos Art Space expired in 2008, an exorbitant new rent forced Robert Elmes to move the popular, immersive club to DUMBO, four miles to the south.Other artists, writers and musicians flowed into other parts of Brooklyn like Bushwick and Park Slope. The Outpost pushed further into Ridgewood, Queens. Although many were forced to move out of the city entirely, a cultural seed was planted that continued to impact the Brooklyn area and even spread overseas. Although she tended to conflate culture with style, Abby Ellin’s article in the New York Times, “The Brooklyn Brand Goes Global” acknowledges the countercultural sentiments at the roots of Brooklyn’s transformations in the 1990s, and its profound impact on culture and commerce beyond Brooklyn’s shores:

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“It was inevitable that the New York City borough most known for its citizens’ desire to be counterculture, right down to their ubiquitous facial hair and food trucks, would be co-opted by entrepreneurs looking to sell the ‘Brooklyn brand’ abroad.”

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A creative community that had immigrated to Williamsburg from nearly every continent on Earth sparked a renaissance in the borough most known for its immigrant dynamism. As Brainard Carey of Yale Radio puts it:

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“It is despite the intrusions of deep pockets and tax abatements – and clichés like 'luxury' and 'hipster' – that there is still a generous, innovative, and risk-taking culture in Brooklyn today. That culture has deep roots in Brooklyn’s industrial past, in the Jazz-informed music scene in Fort Greene, and in the Immersionist subculture that took root near Williamsburg’s waterfront.”

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Carey also quotes Ethan Pettit (Medea de Vyse) in an introduction to Carey’s Yale Radio program in 2016:

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“Immersionism is the jewel in the crown of the 90s New York underground. It is the de facto subculture of that time and place and helped give rise to Brooklyn’s current creativity ...a perfect storm was born.”

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Countering leveraged development

Many of Williamsburg’s artists had made efforts in the 1990s to address corporate development before it could disrupt the neighborhood. Some joined forces with political organizations such as Neighbors Against Garbage (NAG) and Williamsburg Organized for an Open Process (WOOP) to petition the city for protection from unwelcome incinerators and developers alike.

As early as 1990, developers were looked upon suspiciously by the creative community near the industrial waterfront. Nerve Circle’s poster for the seminal Immersionist festival, The Sex Salon, stated unambiguously: “Bring your sensuous images, poems, sounds and self, not your speculation capital.” In 1992 Liz Kaine announced an anti-developer Scare Day in Waterfront Week. Participants were invited to create scarecrows on the waterfront to ward off developers coming in from Manhattan. Each scarecrow would help “to keep the waterfront sacred” as Horatio Alchemist described the exercise in Waterfront Week. A week later in Waterfront Week the cartoonist Tony Millionaire reimagined the scarecrows as figurines inside a ship’s bottle that sits on a shelf at the Ship’s Mast Pub. In the last frame the pub is dwarfed by huge futuristic buildings along the waterfront, a vision that become reality due to Mayor Bloomberg’s policies in the new millennium.

In 1993, Kit Blake addressed the problem of corporate development in an essay he wrote for the exhibit, OUT OF TOWN: The Williamsburg Paradigm at the Krannert Art Museum:

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“Over the last decade a transformation has taken place in alternative arts communities which is fundamentally affecting the artistic product... One, real estate development, is a local economic factor, a problem endemic to urban life and the evolution of cultural centers.”

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Acknowledging the creative community's concerns, Jonathan Fineberg included an anti-developer wall sculpture of Blake’s in the first edition of his book, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. The interactive wall piece, “Title on Newspaper,” involved a printed copy of the real estate section of the New York Times. As the viewer comes closer to the work, the newspaper’s ads for luxury housing are set on fire by a spark triggered by the viewer’s presence. The work had only one public viewing. Like much of the Immersionist renaissance, it is only preserved in photographs.

See also

• BioArt
• City as architecture
• Contextual urbanism
• Ecological art
• Embodied cognition
• Generative art
• Holism
• Interdisciplinarity
• Performative Urbanism
• Relational Aesthetics
• Social sculpture
• Structural Functionalism
• Systems art
• Systems theory

External links

Articles

• Immersionism on Yale University Radio
• Toxic Spills in Brooklyn
• Netlingo definition of a “web jam”
• "In Brooklyn, Pushing Back Against a Redevelopment Plan" by Neil Genzlinger, New York Times, June 16, 2011
• “What Do We Call It When the Rich Displace the Middle Class? It’s not gentrification!” by Henry Grabar, Slate, May 10, 2019
• “Gentrification vs Devdumping” by Democracy Mouse, Democratic Underground, Feb. 13, 2018
• “How NYC’s decade of rezoning changed the City of Industry” by Eli Rosenberg, Curbed New York, Jan. 16, 2014
• “The Vote that Made New York City Rents So High” by Marcelo Rochabrun and Cezary Podkul, ProPublica.org, Dec. 15, 2016