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Brooklyn Immersionists

Map of immersive culture in Brooklyn 1990-2000

The Brooklyn Immersionists were a community of artists, musicians and writers that immersed themselves and their work among the ruins of an industrial area near the waterfront of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1990s. Rather than orient their creative life towards the specialized art establishments across the river, they began to cultivate a web of interpenetrating creativity in Williamsburg’s streets, rooftops, warehouses and weed-strewn waterfront. Local media such as The Curse, The Nose, The Outpost, Waterfront Week, Worm Magazine, and (718) Subwire, helped to build a discourse around participation, cultural networks, feedback systems and ecological sensitivity.

The international “artists colony,” as the German newspaper, Die Zeit referred to the interdisciplinary community near the waterfront, was comprised of immigrants from across the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Seeking affordable spaces to live and work, the experimental scene made a home in an abandoned area of Williamsburg that had been losing jobs overseas and was coping with a burgeoning drug trade. Responding to this distressed and toxic environment, groups and art collectives emerged that treated the world around them as a living medium, often referencing animals, ecosystems and healing in their names and manifestoes.

The artists’ devotion to creative immersion in a shared ecosystem eventually led to the umbrella label, “Immersionism,” but throughout the 1990s a variety of terms appeared in their zines and local press which explored different forms of sensual, social and ecological immersion. These included “omnisensorial” (Lalalandia), “close-to-the-pulse” (Genia Gould, Breukelen), “the blood of interconnection” and “web jam” (Ebon Fisher), “vibrate in one space”(Anna Hurwitz), “globs of desires” (Laurel Casey), “illbient” (DJ Olive), “everybody does everything” (Alejandra Giudici), “circuitous systems” (Jessica Nissen), “publishing network” (Kit Blake, Worm), “multidimensional convergence” (Lizard’s Tail), “environmental improv” (Yvette Helin), and “a very alive whole” (Kelly Webb, Thrust).

Melanie Hahn Roche and Dancers at the Flytrap warehouse immersion on the Williamsburg waterfront, 1991

According to the art historian, Jonathan Fineberg, Williamsburg’s creative community near the waterfront was moving beyond self-contained art forms to create “a richer, more dynamically interacting whole” and “returning to immediate experience, to the body, and to a neighborhood cultural interaction.” The emphasis on ecological awareness and year round environmental engagement distinguished Brooklyn Immersionism from more human-centric, temporary forms of interactive culture like Fluxus, the Happenings, Warhol’s multimedia shows, and the Burning Man Festival. Given that their home was on the edge of collapse, it required not just an aesthetic, but an ethic of continuous neighborhood nurturing. Expanding on this idea in Domus Magazine, the architect Suzanne Wines maintained that these creators of “immersive environments” were taking an ecological approach to the arts that offered a “vital antidote to the dogma of modernism.” In 1998, Wines invokes the Surrealist term exquisite corpse, which refers to a collective creation, and expands the circle of participation to include the environment:

“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.”

While creative districts in New York had emerged in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Manhattan's West Village in the 1950s, SoHo in the 1960s and 70s, and the East Village in the 1980s, Williamsburg's Immersionist community gave rise to the largest renaissance in New York to take root outside Manhattan. This was a significant shift celebrated as early as 1993 in the exhibition, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, curated by Jonathan Fineberg for the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois.

Corporate occupation

After a decade of creative immersion by artists, activists and their neighbors, a post-industrial economy of locally owned retail businesses and services began to emerge. According to a 2004 report in the Journal of the American Planning Association, after years of above average attrition stemming from lost industrial jobs, Williamsburg’s aspirational culture brought down the rate of attrition for Williamsburg’s disadvantaged populations in the 1990s. The authors of the report, Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi, maintained that a creative culture and a reviving economy are “appreciated as much by their disadvantaged residents as by their more affluent ones.”

In the new millennium, however, the rate of attrition for the disadvantaged began to rise again after the Bloomberg administration rezoned Williamsburg and subsidized a corporate occupation of the district. Large corporate high rises and chain stores marketed with labels like “luxury,” “hipster,” and even the misapplied term “gentrification,” took over both the economy and the culture of the area. Corporate monopoly pricing, not the DIY culture of artists and musicians, raised the cost of living and many in the renting population, which included most of the Immersionists, were forced out of the area they had helped to revive. Research like that of Freeman and Braconi have shown how corporate welfare or “third wave” occupation was brought about, not by free markets (gentrification), but by subsidized markets: rezoning and tax abatements for large developers. Even as early as 1990, the Immersionists warned of such leveraged corporate occupation in their announcement for the Sex Salon: “Bring your sensuous images, poems, sounds and self, not your speculation capital.”

In his book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, Cisco Bradley notes that despite the city green lighting a corporate takeover of Williamsburg’s village economy, the Immersionists helped to shift the center of New York's creativity towards Brooklyn. Although the Immersionist era only survived a decade, it provided a vivid alternative to both the modern and postmodern aesthetics of the late 20th century:

“In many ways, Immersionism was the next stage of evolution of the New York art scene, which had evolved from the rationalist works of figures like conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) or minimalist Donald Judd (1928-94) to the postmodern rebellion of the 1980s... As some of the early theorists of Immersionism stated, ‘[the movement] helped to shift cultural protocols away from cold, postmodern cynicism, towards something a whole lot warmer: immersive, mutual world construction.’”

Immersionist Philosophy

The beauty of a rewilding

Biological interconnection: Flytrap poster by Stavit Allweis, 1991

Not to be mistaken for immersive computer games or virtual reality, Immersionism in Williamsburg, Brooklyn emphasized deep participation in the world where the artists lived. Although the emerging digital technologies of the era were sometimes used, the technology was integrated into physical architectures and events in the neighborhood.

Immersionism, in a sense, grew out of its ecosystem. The distressed waterfront the Immersionists encountered in the late 1980s and 1990s played a key role in their orientation. The creative community that began to settle near the waterfront found the abandoned warehouses and desolate streets to have the preternatural stillness and the attraction of a wilderness. This was a condition the local cartoonist, Tony Millionaire characterized as an “urban pastoral” in a strip for the local artists’s zine, Waterfront Week. 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:

“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 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:

“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.”

Living in a district on the edge of economic and environmental collapse, active transformation of their social and physical environment seemed of greater importance to these creative urbanists than the positioning of isolated modules of art and music within an assumed “art world” across the river. Suzan Wines wrote in Domus Magazine of the Immersionists’ organic fusion of the arts, and their sense of “place as a web of convergent forces.” In his introduction to the exhibit, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, Professor Jonathan Fineberg described how some of the work reflected the toxic nature of their north Brooklyn home:

“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).”

Fineberg was also struck by the creative community’s “recourse to biological metaphors.” 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 healing, rebirth and animal vitality.

An Evocation of Nature in the Immersionist Nomenclature

The Brooklyn Immersionists often referenced living things, ecological systems and healing in their names. Although their aesthetic echoed earlier organic movements such as Art Nouveau and the Fauves, late 20th century advances in ecology introduced a systems element to some of the nomenclature.
Organisms
The Cat’s Head (I & II), Colored Greens, El Pitirre (The Bird), Fit the Beast, Flowers for an Hour, Flytrap, Human Fest (I & II), Miss Kitty, Mustard, Organism, Skinhorse, Society of Animals, Pluto Cat on the Earth, PoGo (a cartoon opossum), Worm
Living systems
Artemis (Ancient Greek goddess of nature), Comfort Zones, Gene Pool, Hungry March Band, The Sex Salon, Nerve Circle, Ocularis, The Nose, Earwax, El Sensorium, Medea de Vyse (Ancient Greek force of nature), Nomadic Balm, Salon of the Mating Spiders, Sens Production, Sex Salon, Sleep Patterns
Healing
El Puente (The Bridge), The Lizard’s Tail (a traditional medicine), Minor Injury, Tweeking the Human, Toxic Avengers
Environments
AlulA Dimension, Arcadia, The Bog, Floating Cinema, Galapagos, The Green Room, Lalalandia, Oasis, Ongolia, Waterfront Week
The outdoors
Open Window Theater, The Outdoor Museum, The Outpost
Bionic systems
Bionic Codes, Embryo Astronauts, Eyeball Scanning Party, Floating Point Unit (referencing fuzzy logic), Media Organisms, Pagan Industrialists, Squirmcast, Zoacodes

Interactivity and feedback, a fundamental property of living things, were also reoccurring themes in the neighborhood. Hit and Run Theater, while not explicitly referencing biology, invoked visceral interaction with the public. Other immersive theater companies actually referenced biofeedback systems in their names. Floating Point Unit (FPU) tapped into the mathematics behind feedback-driven “fuzzy logic.” Nerve Circle’s media rituals, such as the Eyeball Scanning Party in its loft on Grand Street, and a series of “Media Compressions” at Minor Injury Gallery up the street, explored the aesthetic dimensions of communal information synthesis. Frank Popper, an art historian at the University of Paris VIII, has noted in the book, Contemporary Artists, that the artist’s goal was to induce a local nervous system by cultivating “the living properties of information” and to nurture collective “media organisms.”

The “omnisensorial” collective, Lalalandia often used the term “techno-organic” to describe a variety of interactions the group had with their social and physical environment, including the recycling of materials scavenged from Williamsburg’s abandoned factories. Kit Blake named Worm Magazine after both a burrowing creature and a digital virus, both of which involve environmental penetration and feedback. In a 1989 editorial for Worm’s progenitor, Word of Mouth, Blake explicitly stressed that interaction with the larger community was a fundamental goal:

“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.”

In much the same spirit, Genia Gould launched Waterfront Week with the help of Ethan Pettit. The weekly format allowed for a constant stream of letters from the public, casual cut-and-paste advertising, a popular comic strip by Tony Millionaire, Medea’s Weekend, which explored an imaginary version of Williamsburg. Genia Gould later decided to move to a full magazine format with Breukelen Magazine, to get “close-to-the-pulse” of north Brooklyn's neighborhoods. Underscoring the interdisciplinary nature of a community, the opening editorial stated:

“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.”

In January, 1990, Ladislav Czernek responded to Word of Mouth’s entreaty by posting his own public invitation to “inject vitality” into the struggling neighborhood and “to create a meeting place in which an atmosphere of sharing and collaboration is nurtured.” Open meetings at Czernek’s experimental arts center, Epoché included many members of the fledgling Immersionist community: The Lizard’s Tail, Minor Injury, Nerve Circle, Waterfront Week, Word of Mouth and Versus. These meetings led to the launching of the seminal Immersionist event, The Sex Salon. Opening on Valentine’s Day 1990, the three day festival involved nearly a hundred artists from a range of disciplines and celebrated a fluid vision of sexuality. The playful title underscored the emerging community's desire to boldly engage the public. Finding sensuous satisfaction in connecting with their own living world, many Immersionists questioned late 20th century fixations on irony, subversion and deconstruction. Although such a postmodern orientation had emerged after WWII out of a useful critique of industrial society, by the 1980s it had become mired in a perpetual state of critical distance. Punk music and edgy fashion had even become a commercial style. Making a radical departure from such a Warholian ethos, Williamsburg’s creative community near the waterfront began to explore a more visceral and compassionate culture of connection, environmental healing and unique forms of subjective ecology. This ecological orientation was noted by Brainard Carey on the website for his interview program on Yale University Radio, WYBC (AM):

“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... [The artists were] immersing themselves in a 24 hour matrix of parties, printed matter, urban agriculture, music and gender fluid performances.”

Outdoor Museum: Children playing with the Amazing Gustav and recycled plastic bag sculptures (“Troubles”) created by Judy Thomas for the Outdoor Museum, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1993.

In an ardent embrace of everyday life in the neighborhood, creations were often drawn from their environment and completed by their environment. In a reference to women’s work traditions, Lauren Szold combined materials from her kitchen and poured them onto the floors of abandoned factories. Her flows of flour, milk, eggs and blood would eventually ferment on location. Exploring a form of social fermentation, Dennis del Zotto, aka AirZotto, inserted inflatable pods into various local environments. The room-sized structures were created by Del Zotto out of sheet plastic and fans from local hardware stores and installed within abandoned warehouses and clubs such as El Sensorium, Fake Shop and Galapagos Art Space. The large, crude bladders were completed by the presence of participants who often spent whole evenings inside them. Echoing the same, raw aesthetic as Szold and Del Zotto, Andrew Hampsas conducted sparse, visceral performances on rooftops, abandoned factory yards and even immersed himself half naked in the East River. As an exploration of animal presence, varying degrees of nudity were also in evidence at enterprises like Keep Refrigerated, Fake Shop, Mustard, Radioactive Bodega, El Sensorium, Galapagos and many of the large warehouse gatherings. In his introduction to the museum exhibit, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, the art historian Jonathan Fineberg spoke of the shift to a living, bodily process:

“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.’”

The cultivation of a culture, however, was not just a project for the human domain. Mutual cultivation between humans and other species was not uncommon. The New Yorker discussed Lalalandia’s night space, El Sensorium which featured a bar “covered with topsoil in which lime-green weeds sprout nurtured by a waterfall.” 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 cultivated living sculpture out of odd mixes of plants. Gene Pool, who humorously references social biology in his adopted name, had a history of covering objects such as cars and clothing with living rye grass. He joined other Immersionists such as communications artist, Robin Perl and musician and filmmaker, Sasha Sumner in local environmental protests, underscoring the depth of their commitment to local living systems. Pool would often attend these events riding a unicycle and wearing a suit made of salvaged cans which the New York Times described as a “rallying cry for recycling.” The author, Matthew Purdy, praised Pool’s public presence as an extraordinary “ripple in a vast sea of humdrum daily life.”

Beyond postmodern alienation

Ongolia performing above the audience’s heads at Mustard, an event space at the Olde Dutch Mustard Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1994.

Although the Immersionists were deeply enthralled by the decaying industrial world they were encountering in Brooklyn, many maintained jobs in Manhattan and kept at least one eye on that borough’s fixations. And what they saw was not enticing them back to endure the more expensive lodgings. The long arc of history was starting to suggest that the cultural scene across the East River was beginning to lose some steam as its philosophical play things, Modernism and Postmodernism, went on the wane.

While modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had given birth to a heroic search for technological miracles, and abstract truths and art forms, and postmodernism had come along to cast doubt on all truths and grand narratives, a sense of skepticism, irony and alienation began to set into western culture. When the Immersionist scene first began to emerge in the late 1980s, Manhattan's cultural establishment had settled around a deconstructive and critical approach to culture marked by edgy Punk Rock music, ironic New Wave music and subversive gallery art. In many ways alienation had become the official stance of critically informed culture, and subversion had become a style. It could be argued that a healthy critique of industrial society was in play, but a search for alternatives was being upstaged by the sheer momentum of the postmodern juggernaut.

Geographic separation from Manhattan, a major center of both modern and postmodern thought, and an immersion in a sparsely populated industrial section of Williamsburg, allowed the new creative community to benefit from what ecologists like Aldo Leopold have called edge effects. Situated between worlds, the youthful, emerging community could allow a diverse set of ideas and values to come together in creative new forms. There in Williamsburg’s collapsing industrial district, community organizations such as El Puente, Los Sures and the People’s Firehouse, and the eco-communitarian artist community, had room to evolve and grow. Moving beyond an increasingly stagnant postmodern orientation became a lot easier in a district with long stretches of empty industrial buildings and nature was reclaiming the shorelines.

As the new generation of artists began to absorb Brooklyn's more neighborly ethos, Manhattan’s postmodern template began to lose its charm for them. Connecting to the neighborhood, exploring its rewilding waterfront, and contributing to local vitality was simply more gratifying than maintaining a conversation with Manhattan and its cold and ironic postmodern discourse. Furthermore, the struggling artists who were adventurous enough to move to the more bleak and dangerous areas near the waterfront were simply more inclined by nature to explore their new home and seek out a new kind of relationship with it. As Laurel Casey states in The New York Press in 1991, “I craved to share the thrill and horror of it.”

Compelled by a district that was suffering from both toxic waste and job losses, the Immersionists’ fusion of cultural, political and environmental concerns not only separated it from many of the arts industries across the river, but also distinguished it from earlier forms of immersion that were limited in scope: 19th century gesamptkunstwerk, theater-in-the-round, and multimedia spectacles in the 1960s such as the Trips Festival and Andy Warhol’s “Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” Brooklyn Immersionism did not simply surround a group of humans with spectacle, but involved an extended ecosystem. In many ways, Immersionism anticipated the greening of US culture in the new millennium and the emergence of new, ecologically oriented branches of psychology known as embodied cognition and extended mind thesis.

The movement away from postmodern distance and towards a connection with the immediate world was not just a theoretical stance. In Word of Mouth as early as 1989, Ladislav Czernek invites the public to his cultural space, Epoché “to feed, and feed off a neighborhood, not just occupy it.” Likewise, the Lizard’s Tail’s philosophy of “multidimensional convergence,” Lalalandia’s “techno-organic” use of recycled materials, and Nerve Circle’s cultivation of “media organisms” were deliberate strategies for deep immersion in a living world. That Newsweek would report on the community’s terms “omnisensorial sweepout” and “web jam,” suggests that a new cultural think tank was beginning to influence the larger culture as early as 1993.

Reconnection with the world was not merely an academic exercise to replace the old postmodern agenda with good urban policy. It was a radical, submodern act of local enchantment. Turning Williamsburg’s streets and rooftops into settings for performances, groups such as Hit and Run Theater, Alien Action and the Pedestrian Project animated the world they lived in. Yvette Helin’s work in Williamsburg, and other locations like New York's Chinatown and London, moved beyond the hall of mirrors of postmodern pictorial space to draw the public more deeply into an awareness of their own streets. By working with live performers to emulate the jet black figures on pedestrian crossing signs, Helin’s Pedestrian Project was able to render the public’s immediate surroundings more meaningful, not less. The Pedestrians slow, silent movements created an arresting sense of urban reality.

In a similar fashion, by drawing local Williamsburg denizens and settings into his weekly comic strip, Medea’s Weekend, Tony Millionaire cast the neighborhood in a hallucinatory light. In her own form of neighborhood immersion, the namesake for the strip, Medea De Vyse often appeared in drag while covering warehouse parties, street theater and local council meetings alike. By appearing in the same black dress in both the real and cartoon version of Williamsburg, she occupied a charged, liminal space between the two.

With numerous interpenetrating art forms, protest actions and journalistic reflections occurring in the same neighborhood, an intensely layered form of neighborhood enchantment became the Immersionists’ collective creation, and their neighbors were often drawn into the spell.

Submodern immersion

According to the music historian, Cisco Bradley, one of the first references to an immersive aesthetic in the community’s literature appeared in a manifesto, You Sub Mod from 1988 written by Nerve Circle’s director, Ebon Fisher. In The Williamsburg Avant-Garde, Bradley notes that the artist ruminated on the possibilities for burrowing down to a submodern orientation that was waiting to be discovered below both modernism and postmodernism. Where Guy de Bord’s Society of the Spectacle and Warhol’s postmodern culture of surfaces seemed to lead to a state of paralysis, he suggests “integrating into the endless unfolding of spectacles” and burrowing, in effect, into whatever undefinable ecosystem we might encounter:

“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.”

Bradley follows that with another quote from the experimental theater director, and creator of communal “media organisms,” on the contrast between postmodern fragmentation and the Immersionist pursuit of living interconnection: “Postmodern deconstruction was over. Immersionism was about biological congealing and the vitality born from such convergence.”

Large, dynamic gatherings referencing biological forms in their names became almost annual focal points for such biomorphic congealing in the early 1990s: The Sex Salon, Cats Head I and II, Flytrap, Human Fest and Organism. As the choreographer, Melanie Hahn Roche says in The Drama Review, “The purpose of these shows goes beyond simply throwing a good party. Rather, this activity is necessary for the well-being of the community.” A few years later along a similar vein, the Lalalandia collective promoted its night space, El Sensorium as a “techno-organic center for cultural development.”

Although artifacts of art, music, literature and even diagrams of immersive systems emerged within Williamsburg’s Immersionist community, the interdisciplinary artists turned the entire industrial area by the waterfront, and the subjective human realms within it, into their medium. Where some focused on immersive installations and clubs, others on collaborative warehouse events, and others immersed themselves in the streets, local media networks and educational efforts, what they shared in common was intimate local engagement. This was not simply an art of multimedia light shows, but a culture of deep, personal and ecological immersion. Every club, event, publisher and theater troupe was enthralled by life in the neighborhood and explored several realms of immersion at once.

As early as 1991, The New York Press established that an adventurous ethic of interaction with the neighborhood was in play, a process the author, Mark Rose called “aesthetic activism.” Anna Hurwitz, who had studied human ecology at the College of the Atlantic, is cited by Rose on her preference for a culture of participation. “I hate precious art,” she declared. “I measure the success of my installations by the degree to which people participate.” Rose discusses Hurwitz's displacement of furniture into a “Weird Thing Zone” on Grand Street that had been organized by Nerve Circle. Bringing artists out of their studios to interact with the public was one of the event’s objectives, along with replacing the term “art” with the more lively “weird thing” to render the event more approachable. The impulse behind the zone was to abandon the lofty realms of modernism, and the equally ethereal postmodernism, and return to a natural interaction with the world (submodernism). As Hurwitz intimated, the interaction was the goal. Rose quotes the local activist, Chris Lanier on how the Zone connected with people at the Waterfront Festival where it was immersed:

“‘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.”

Rose also quotes Kit Blake, another contributor to the Zone and publisher of Worm Magazine, on the emergence of a hands-on culture along the waterfront: “Everybody chips in and does what they can. Money as compensation is never part of the discussion.”  

Subjective ecology

In contrast to the online social networks that began to emerge in the 1980s such as The Well, EchoNYC and The Thing, the creative community in Williamsburg explored physical local networks that were rooted in a complex and often dangerous urban ecosystem. Importantly, this physical and deeply collaborative immersion was sustained 24 hours per day and seven days a week for a decade. Although some of Williamsburg's groups augmented their efforts with immersive and interactive media, they rooted the work in the body and where the artists' lived, establishing more intense and resonant ecologies of meaning. Underscoring how creative immersion in a shared environment had inspired these aesthetic activists, Mark Rose stated in The New York Press in 1991:

“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.”

A year earlier in Worm, Ebon Fisher had defined this hybrid space as a “psycho-physical swirl” and Rose quotes the passage in his article:

“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.”

For the Immersionists, to create was not an endeavor of a solitary artist, but a vital convergence of artists, media, community and habitat. In 1990, a description in the Village Voice by Sarah Ferguson captures such a confluence at Cat’s Head II, a large interdisciplinary convergence in a warehouse by the waterfront:

“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 Michael Zwicky’s “Scrap Metal Music,” a fusion of recycling, sculpture, music, communal experience and environmental context. 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, and the experience of interconnection, was the point.

Zwicky’s blurring of boundaries between artists, musicians, their environment and their audiences brought to life what Fisher described as an extended “subjective ecosystem” in an essay for the British journal, Digital Creativity in 1998. Williamsburg’s subjective ecosystem was essentially what psychologists would embrace as a form of extended cognition, an em bodied, networked, and exploratory thought process which lasted years and penetrated deep into Brooklyn. Even while augmented by technology, the Immersionists’ persistent relationship with their shared ecosystem offered what former EchoNYC member, Malcolm Gladwell, would define as “strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger.” In contrast to the “weak-tie connections” of the internet, those strong ties have resulted in an institutional memory that has lasted decades after Williamsburg's village life gave way to corporate welfare in the new millennium.

Given the unstable nature of a district that had been outsourcing jobs overseas when the Immersionists arrived, suffering from a violent drug trade, and coping with toxic industrial waste, local creativity was not a spectacle providing an object of reflection from a removed perspective. The DIY acts of creation were bound up with survival. A regular writer for Waterfront Week and later Breukelen, Laurel Casey often described her sense of immersion in Williamsburg's toxic environment. She extolled the virtues of plunging through “city mishmash” and entering “the bottomless potholes on Kent Avenue.” This intense sense of connection to her urban wilderness were spiritual notions for Casey. “Somehow I’ll get down there,” she wrote.

Immersionism, in effect, was not an abstract discourse, but a process of deep connection to a local world. It was an embodied web of activity. Williamsburg’s decaying factories and warehouses, along with the surrounding residential areas, became both elements of the work and contributors with agency. To witness the Pedestrian Project, for example, moving silently through the streets of Williamsburg was not to simply delight in walking sculptures that emulated figures on street signs, but to become aware of the surrounding sounds, imagery and dynamics of Williamsburg’s unique industrial setting. The audience was not framed as passive voyeurs, but participants in an unusual situation. Dancing in the streets with the Hungry March Band, or interacting with the Bindlestiff Family Circus or Circus Amok drew audiences into a highly personal and unpretentious sense of communal being. The same pertained to Lalalandia's fusion of music, food and bodies at Comfort Zones; or the throbbing convergences of phenomena in the warehouse events. Worm and Waterfront Week were as much windows into Williamsburg's creativity as they were deliberate exercises in the formation of community networks, and an attempt to connect the neighborhood discourse to larger planetary concerns. El Puente's Toxic Avengers were not just an after school program that kept youth out of trouble. The troupe staged creative environmental actions throughout Brooklyn that not only helped to raise awareness of environmental issues, but also cultivated community. The whole artistic, social and environmental system was greater than the sum of its parts.

The Flytrap, an interdisciplinary event spread across two warehouses, was quite explicit in its convergence of bodies and environment. It included a stage created by Cat's Head alums, Myk Henry and Anna Hurwitz, in which performers were enveloped by a huge Venus Flytrap, complete with fog that was pumped through its tubular needles. One performance at the Flytrap, “Medea’s First Period” involved immersing Waterfront Week’s columnist, Medea de Vyse into a large, oozing installation by Lauren Szold. Szold and Medea were accompanied by Stavit Allweis and Melanie Hahn as medical assistants. The biological referencing was extensive, from Medea’s name evoking an Ancient Greek force of nature, to the liquid organic environment and lugubrious movements.

The ethos of biomorphic interconnection also appeared in “360 degree visual jam sessions” at popular clubs like Keep Refrigerated, El Sensorium, Fake Shop and a complex media and performance event by OVNI called 360° which was conducted at the Grand Street Ballroom. The catalog for the last warehouse event of the decade, Organism, states that it was deliberately grown “out of the creative loam of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.” 120 members of the creative community spread overlapping cultural and electronic webs across the site and the event was attended by over 2,000 guests who completed the massive creature. As stated in the program notes, organic interconnection was a fundamental mission of the event: “The Organism is an attempt to push the idea of linkage, collaboration and interaction to its mellifluous, weblike extreme.”

Suzanne Wines discussed this lifelike quality in Domus:

“Conceived by Ebon Fisher, Organism became a kind of symbolic climax to the renegade activity that had been stirring within the community since the late eighties. It exploited the notion of architecture as living event, breathing and transforming for fifteen hours in an abandoned mustard factory. Unlike a traditional gallery exhibit where each object only engages the cube of space that it occupies, the collaborators in a ‘web jam’ create work that engages the entire space, the body and mind of the audience and through this process ultimately integrates with the community at large. A layering of system upon system...”

Dan McKereghan rapelling down a grain silo in the Old Dutch Mustard Factory in 1993. Three members of McKereghan's street theater group, Hit and Run Theater, repeated the performance on three of the silos at Organism in 1993.

Demonstrative of the web of connections being explored at Organism was a large, crawl-in womb created by the rock band Thrust and the sculptor James Porter. The group staged a theatrical “orgasm” at midnight. Hit and Run Theater’s stand-out contribution to the event involved three performers rappelling down grain silos on the site and criss-crossing through the factory yard among the revellers. One of the performers eventually immersed himself in a translucent cistern of water with scuba gear and read the New York Times.

Demonstrating that historical information could be treated as a subjective phenomenon with ecological properties, the documentarist Pegi Vail used spot lighting on artifacts found on the event’s factory site to draw attention to industrial labor practices going back decades. Accompanied by the works of dozens of other artists and performers, and an audience that danced among the artifacts, the neighborhood’s industrial past was brought back to life. In a similar fusion of modalities at Organism, Genia Gould turned the circulation of a medical emergency kit into a nightlong nursing performance.

Suzanne Wines investigated other weblike, organic forms of architecture in Williamsburg, including body-machine complexes at Fake Shop, Nerve Circle’s AlulA Dimension, and Ovni and Lalalandia’s richly woven environments of recycled materials and media. As a devotee of holistic architectural practice in her own work, Wines spoke sympathetically of the Immersionists' fixation on hybrid systems that folded together subjective and objective realities:

“The experience of a space is more important than the material which creates it. This kind of organic flexibility and environmental efficiency is a refreshing perspective with which to approach architecture and urban design, particularly now, when the creative energy of the digital revolution is still relatively untainted by social and political restrictions. It is a perfect time to revitalize an architectural practice that has become so culturally alienated from its context… The [immersive environments] described above propose spatial systems which evolve with and establish new relationships between the rich complexity of existing cultural and environmental forces. Nowhere in the world is the concentration of these forces as intense.”

Deep convulsive immersion

Deep immersion in a district the city of New York had largely abandoned was not for the light-hearted. An aesthetic attuned to an environment marked by factory waste, lost jobs and a dangerous drug trade could sometimes be more “illbient” than ambient, as Gregor Asch (DJ Olive) of Lalalandia often put it. Nevertheless, the night space in which illbient music emerged, Lalalandia’s El Sensorium, took a regenerative approach to Williamsburg's industrial detritus by recycling it into rich, “omnisensorial” interior spaces embellished by music, water and live performances. One of the cultural systems at Organism involved a machine created by Sasha Noë and Bradford Reed that turned the recycling of beer bottles into what historian Cisco Bradley called a “sonic environment.” The rhythmic smashing of bottles could be heard throughout the Old Dutch Mustard Factory, giving voice to a painful truth about consumer waste. Williamsburg writers like Laurel Casey shared her own complex balance between the ill and the inspired. In 1991 Casey writes in the New York Press:

“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.”

In its Web Jam Manifesto of 1993, Nerve Circle celebrated the convulsive, ecstatic nature of the neighborhood’s creativity as “one really strange continuum”:

“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?”

Fric n Frac playing at Radioactive Bodega. The outdoor concert took place in a repurposed warehouse depot in 1992. Graffiti of a womb behind them is by the band Thrust who also played at the event along with the Colored Greens and Medea de Vyse.

Several musicians did attempt to dance within Williamsburg's Organism as wandering performers, including members of the band Thrust, the singer and guitarist Tim Robert, Karen Cormier from the band Fric n Frac dressed as a wolf, and the “roving rapper” Doc Israel who improvised lyrics in response to the writhing event. With dozens of cultural and technological systems overlapping in an unpredictable mesh, the web jam expressed the convulsive nature of animals and plants adapting to a distressed environment. Writing about the web jam for the event’s catalogue, the artist David Brody spoke of a broiling 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.” Brody worked with Carlton Bright, Bozidar Kemperle and his brother Daniel Brody to install a web of video cameras and monitors at Organism, providing a kind of raw electronic circulation. This was echoed by WFMU's live audio broadcast via a phone line. This was emphatically not network television, but reflected the vinelike, trial-and-error strategies of neighborhood auto mechanics. David Brody’s own animation research involving fractal growth patterns has reflected these sensibilities.

In a street ritual called Glow Nighttime in 1991, a dramatic rejection of television led by Rob Hickman vividly demonstrated convulsive adaptation in Williamsburg. With the help of Kit Blake, Ilene Zori Magaras, Richard Posch and the Aldus-Jiminez Gallery, Hickman gathered a large crowd on South 11th Street to witness five televisions and two mock satellites 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, the adaptive, human animal and ritual street life were celebrated. Underscoring the event's turbulent nature, video documentation of Glow Nighttime shows a police cruiser slowly moving through an uneasy crowd in the vicinity of smashed television sets and apartment dwellers a block away looking on.

Dennis Del Zotto’s walk-in “Black Pod." Often working with Lalalandia, Fake Shop and other groups in Williamsburg in the 1990s, Del Zotto built structures for inducing communal connection in unusual industrial spaces from both black and translucent hardware store plastic.

Unlike the disembodied immersions of computer games, or the removed skepticism that had become routine in Manhattan at the time, the Brooklyn Immersionists explored deep, urban, corporeal processes that impacted both themselves and the distressed world they lived in. Where Andy Warhol had produced grids of public figures like Marilyn Monroe and Mao Zedong to drain the images of meaning, Williamsburg’s creative community near the waterfront largely did the opposite: it abandoned the grid of galleries and maps entirely and invested everything around them with meaning. Whatever umbrella term they may have used to describe the aesthetic, and numerous terms were in play, many in Williamsburg’s creative community withdrew from flat, pictorial space to bring meaning back into 360 degrees of local reality. This strategy was explicitly celebrated in the name of the immersive event “360°” which the group, Ovni produced in the Brooklyn Ballroom on Grand Street. Ovni is a Spanish acronym for UFO and underscores the uncanny nature of participatory creations that arise in one’s own neighborhood.

Immersionism rejected both modernist objectivity and postmodern distrust in all systems of belief. It gave birth to an immersion in what might be likened to a natural, adaptive, feedback-driven collective being. This was both a vital and turbulent presence emerging in the neighborhood’s “neuroelectronic brew” as The Outpost video collective put it in an essay for Jonathan Fineberg’s exhibit, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm. Whether their creations involved warehouse events named after plants and animals, performers interacting with the neighborhood, illbient music that reflects the district's toxic industries, or manifestoes invoking submodern burrows and vinelike systems, Williamsburg’s artists abandoned the entire discourse pitting impressions against objective truths, and operated in a visceral ecosystem of neighborhood resonances.

Conceptual origins

Religious roots

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. Moses’ parting of the Red Sea and bringing his people into a passage between two massive mountains of water shares many of the themes of Christian immersion in water, evoking spiritual cleansing, a loss of control, death, and renewal.

Literary roots

Reflections on immersion, death and renewal in film, literature and the arts are also extensive, often invoking the religious antecedents. Classic examples include Alice's transformation in the pool of tears in Lewis Carroll’s 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 largely secular, but their urban explorations echoed both the traditional and literary themes of immersion and renewal, albeit involving a transformation in the streets, abandoned warehouses, and in the very concept of a neighborhood. Reconceptualizing both art and neighborhood as a living ecosystem, and bringing about their own environment’s transformation, may be one of the Brooklyn Immersionists’ most significant contributions to culture. That the City of New York exploited Williamsburg’s creative renewal to benefit corporate developers only makes the achievement more vivid in contrast.

Ecological roots

Andrew Hampsas immersed in a tank of water at the event space, Mustard, Williamsburg, 1994. Photo: PoGo

While ecological thinking can be observed in all ancient and indigenous cultures, the first major reflections on ecology in the West after the Renaissance appeared in the work of Alexander Humboldt and Charles Darwin. As industrialization expanded in the 19th and early 20th centuries, an effort to integrate natural forms and rhythms back into life was vividly represented in the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau and Jazz. African, Asian and Indigenous cultures played important roles in these new creative cultures, along with a stream of imagery pouring in from the biological sciences. Ernst Haeckel's drawings of writhing microscopic lifeforms, for instance, fed easily into Art Nouveau creations.

Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, and the launch of the Whole Earth Catalogue in 1968 began to encourage environmental awareness outside academic and bohemian circles. The sensibility spread further through the establishment of Earth Day in 1970, and the wide circulation of songs by Joni Mitchell (Big Yellow Taxi), Neil Young (After the Gold Rush), and George Clinton (Biological Speculation, Atomic Dog). Photos of the Earth taken from space by the Apollo Mission in 1972 helped millions of people to visualize how small and interconnected the planet was. Although the Earthworks movement of the 1970s began to situate art installations in outdoor settings, these were usually contextualized by a distant museum or gallery rather than the rural community where they were built. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and his site/nonsite projects are vivid examples of such remote contextualization. Although most Immersionists were children during the emergence of The Living Theater in New York and Europe, its radical principle of bringing art into the streets to foment social change was in circulation within the arts to influence Punk music luminaries and Immersionists alike.

Coming of age during the flowering of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, and absorbing some urban Punk sensibilities in the late 1970s and 1980s, the Brooklyn Immersionists were primed to apply ecological thinking to the entire urban environment where they lived. Their pursuit of affordable apartments and studios led them to Williamsburg’s decaying industrial landscape where a creative mix of Punk and environmentalist cultures found a natural home. In contrast to the Earthworks movement, they didn’t just make references to nature or situate works of art within a remote wilderness, but actually began to nurture an entire living world in an urban setting.

their pursuit of affordable apartments and studios led them to Williamsburg’s decaying industrial landscape where a creative mix of Punk and environmentalist cultures found a natural home.

Neighborhood discourse

References in the Williamsburg community's writings on immersion, participation and renewal were extensive. As early as 1982, El Puente (“The Bridge”) evoked a healing connection to neighborhood youth. Nerve Circle's manifesto from 1988, You Sub Mod, suggested an immersion in a habitat or “burrow” which took on the properties of a fluid, dreamlike world: “To immerse yourself was the thing, sensing that objectivity was only another dream.” In 1992, Laurel Casey references immersion in Waterfront Week as she draws the reader into a chimerical ride through the neighborhood:

“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...”

Writing for Worm Magazine in 1991, Lauren Szold and Stavit Allweis referred to creative participation in their own neighborhood ecosystem as a “venture into the waters.” In 1993, members of the Outpost spoke of their media practice in Williamsburg as entering another kind of liquid, a “neuroelectronic brew.” Other references to immersive, participatory culture include Worm Magazine’s “publishing network,” Breukelen Magazine’s “close-to-the-pulse” Alejandra Giudici’s “everybody does everything,” and Robert Elmes’ description of Galapagos as an “ecosystem of the senses.”

VISIONS of IMMERSION

In the 1980s and 1990s, the creative community that made a home near the waterfront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, began using a variety of terms for personal, social, ecological and cosmic immersion. Reflecting an industrial district in decay, the terms were of both a dystopian and healing nature.
Terms/Concepts	Source
(alphabetical)
the bridge	El Puente
circuitous systems	Jessica Nissen
close-to-the-pulse	Genia Gould, Breukelen
ecosystem of the senses	Robert Elmes, Galapagos
endless tissue, web jam, media organism	Ebon Fisher, Nerve Circle
environmental event	Medea de Vyse
environmental improv	Yvette Helin, Green Room
everybody does everything	Alejandra Giudici, Lalalandia
globs of desires	Laurel Casey
illbient	DJ Olive, Lalalandia
immersive environments	Suzanne Wines, Domus
multidimensional convergence	Lizard’s Tail, Cat’s Heads I and II
participation, co-dependence	Anna Hurwitz
publishing network	Kit Blake, Worm
recycled Troubles	Judy Thomas
techno-organic, omnisensorial sweepout	Lalalandia
neuro-electronic brew	Outpost
urban pastoral	Tony Millionaire, Medea’s Weekend
venture into the waters	Stavit Allweis, Lauren Szold
very alive whole	Kelly Webb, Thrust
well-being before efficiency	Melanie Hahn Roche
wondrous netherworld atmosphere	Gabrielle Latessa Ortiz, Lalalandia

Although an umbrella term for Williamsburg’s Immersionist movement emerged over time, a common thread was a treatment of the arts as a living continuum, a “more dynamically interacting whole” as art historian Jonathan Fineberg described it. Kelly Webb of the band, Thrust spoke of a “very alive whole.” Suzanne Wines echoes Fineberg and Webb in Domus, noting the community’s weave of “immersive environments.” The emphasis on a dynamic whole is evident in both the biological names and the community-building nature of the largest events of the era: The Sex Salon, Cat’s Head (I & II), Flytrap, Human Fest (I & II), and Organism.

Other groups in the Immersionist community evoked philosophies of healing, interconnection and immersion in their names, including El Puente (The Bridge), Minor Injury, Worm, Nerve Circle, El Sensorium and the Green Room. A large number of enterprises suggested biomes and ecosystems: Waterfront Week, Oasis, The Bog, Weird Thing Zone, Lalalandia, Ongolia, 360°, Arcadia, The Outpost, Los Sures, Galapagos, and Pluto Cat on the Earth. Visceral and biological references in the nomenclature included Ocularis, The Society of Animals, Thrust, Hungry March Band, the Colored Greens, The Lizard’s Tail, Gene Pool, PoGo (a cartoon opossum), Miss Kitty, Fit the Beast and Skinhorse. Two Ancient Greek forces of nature also appeared on the scene: Medea de Vyse and Artemis. Some of the more traditional establishments were not immune to the Immersionist sensibility. Coyote Studios referenced animals, The Right Bank pub alluded to a river ecosystem, and Pierogi Gallery embraced local connection by referencing a popular Polish food in its name and maintaining flat files of drawings by hundreds of artists in the community.

Children visiting Lalalandia, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1995

Performance groups like the Pedestrian Project, Hit and Run Theater, the Hungry March Band and Alien Action activated the desolate streets in between warehouse enterprises and have spoken of their own philosophies of environmental sensitivity. In an essay she wrote for Fineberg's exhibit at the Krannert Art Museum, Yvette Helin defined her Pedestrian Project in Williamsburg as “improvisational interaction with the given environment.” She also spoke of reaching out to both physical and mental public spaces in an effort 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:

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

Individual acts such as Artemis, Medea de Vyse, Miss Kitty and Gene Pool criss-crossed both between and within events, sometimes even appearing in character at local community meetings and protest marches. To draw in the wider community into protest marches against the city’s incinerator proposal, Pool often wore a suit of recycled cans while riding a unicycle. In 1993 the transmedia artist spoke of “working across ego boundaries” at the all night community event Organism. In 1996 Pool convinced the Crest Hardware store in Williamsburg to allow dozens of artists to immerse their works among the merchandise and to offer it for sale.

While a variety of synonyms for the social-ecological aesthetic were explored in the 1990s, it wasn't until 2011 that a consensus emerged among several dozen members of the creative community to settle on the umbrella term Immersionism. By that time, corporate welfare had accelerated the cost of living in Williamsburg and driven out most of the Williamsburg avant-garde. The community that once lived near the Williamsburg Bridge had to reconvene in an online discussion on social media. Initiated by Dennis Del Zotto in a Facebook group, the discussion included members of some of the most active Immersionist groups of the 1990s: Waterfront Week, Worm Magazine, Minor Injury, Epoché, Nerve Circle, The Lizard’s Tail, The Green Room, Lalalandia, Ongolia, Fake Shop, Floating Point Unit and Ovni.

History

In many ways, Immersionism was an outgrowth of the post-industrial era. After losing hundreds of industrial jobs to outsourcing overseas in the latter half of the 20th century, Williamsburg went into severe economic decline. Its revitalization began with the formation of activist groups like Los Sures and the The People’s Firehouse in the 1970s, and the establishment of the creative educational program, El Puente in 1982. The first major arts establishment to concern itself with North Brooklyn, Minor Injury, was established in Greenpoint, but with a growing hive of creative activity emerging along the waterfront near the Williamsburg Bridge, Minor Injury's new director, Kevin Pyle, eventually moved the politically informed gallery to Grand Street to be closer to the scene.

Sex Salon Poster by Nerve Circle, 1990

In January, 1990, just prior to Minor Injury’s relocation, members of the fledgling Immersionist community joined Ladislav Czernek at his experimental arts center, Epoché, to discuss creative possibilities for for their neighborhood. This early cross-section of Immersionists included members of the Lizard’s Tail, Minor Injury, Nerve Circle, Waterfront Week, Word of Mouth, and Versus. The meetings led to the launching of the seminal Immersionist event, The Sex Salon which opened on Valentine’s Day 1990. The three day festival involved a wide range of disciplines and celebrated a fluid vision of sexuality. The playful title was an early indication of the Immersionists’ interest in visceral connection with the public. Nearly a hundred artists signed up to explore a fusion of “performance, live music, jam, dancing,” and featured gender-bending performances, evocative images, anatomical diagrams of sexual intercourse, and films depicting a range of romantic 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:

“[The Sex Salon] brought together more people with more energy and more focus than any other event held here in the past five years... people seemed to be actually inventing a new sense of community as they experienced it.”

Five months after the Sex Salon on July 14, 1990, a small community associated with the Lizard’s Tail cabaret launched the Cat’s Head, a “multidimensional convergence” that occupied a warehouse at the Old Dutch Mustard Factory on N. 1st Street. Led by Terry Dineen, Jean Francois Poitier and Rube Fenwick, 50 volunteers encircled the guests with live music and installations, inspiring dancing that lasted the entire night. As Mike Cohen described the interdisciplinary event for Word of Mouth, the art and music was “easily flowing into the whole.” He observed the same sense of intimacy that had emerged at the Sex Salon: “There’s a closeness, a touching, a communion of sorts.” Other immersive gatherings and spaces soon emerged in the early 1990s, including Hit and Run Theater’s street productions, the Pedestrian Project which grew out of Yvette Helin’s performance space, The Green Room, and Nerve Circle’s immersive information-sharing experiments along Grand Street: The Weird Thing Zone, an Eyeball Scanning Party, and Media Compressions at Minor Injury. A second, larger Cat’s Head also appeared. As discussed by Helena Mulkerns in the Village Voice, Cat’s Head II emerged in another large abandoned warehouse by the waterfront and celebrated convergences of artists and audience with their crumbling industrial environment:

“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.”

Poster for Keep Refrigerated. The recycling of a milk carton for the ad echoed the repurposing of a refrigerated meat packing plant into an immersive, interdisciplinary club on N. 6th Street.

Street, warehouse, and rooftop events began to spread to the rest of Williamsburg, and a network of local media emerged. By 1993 five large interdisciplinary gatherings had taken over some of the largest warehouses in the neighborhood, growing larger and more layered with each iteration: The Sex Salon at Epoché, The Lizard Tail’s Cats Head gatherings, Flytrap, which was organized by Anna Hurwitz and Myk Henry, and Organism which was launched by the systems theater company Nerve Circle and involved many of the veterans of the warehouse scene.

Another influential space to emerge in the early 1990s was the night club Keep Refrigerated on N. 6th Street. Members of that club went on to help establish several other venues: Room Temperature launched by Jeff Gompertz, Lalalandia formulated by a collective of architects, designers and musicians, and the second hand music shop, Earwax which was opened by Tom Schmitz on Bedford Avenue. Room Temperature gave birth to Floating Point Unit and Fake Shop and Lalalandia created a series of social-environmental experiments: Game Room, Translounge, Comfort Zones and the experimental nightclub, El Sensorium.

The enterprises emerging in Williamsburg in the early 1990s were not casual experiments. In Domus Magazine, Suzanne Wines dedicated a long article to a cluster of Immersionists who were devoted to exploring bio-technological themes in their work. She was drawn to the rich interplay of bodies and technology at Fake Shop and Ovni, and likened elements of Lalalandia’s subterranean, “techno-organic” night space, El Sensorium to the Alhambra in Spain:

“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.”

Wines also explored the weblike nature of the massive community event, Organism and a climbable structure, AlulA, which Ebon Fisher built into his loft as an infrastructure for a variety of media experiments:

As a “living media organism” the AlulA Dimension has a completely symbiotic relationship with its environment and inhabitants. Inspired by similarities between the flexible structures of ecological systems and the internet, Ebon Fisher began breeding the AlulA Dimension as an "organic matrix" for social interaction.

These Immersionist groups sought to address the alienating effects of technology by drawing the new media technologies of the 1990s into Williamsburg’s creative ecosystem. Jeff Gompertz, who organized complex media-augmented events with Fake Shop and Floating Point Unit in Williamsburg, and Fisher, who had taught at MIT's Media Lab at its inception, were invited to join other prominent New York artists at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1999 for a conference on experimental fusions of art and technology. Other invited artists included the musician and bicycle advocate David Byrne, the performance artist Bill Irwin, and the experimental architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. Echoing Robert Rauschenberg's Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) of the 1960s, the artists were teamed up with research scientists from Lucent Technology (formerly Bell Labs).

In a similar role as cultural exporter, Caterina Verde, an artist associated with the Outpost in Williamsburg, was invited to join The Kitchen as a curator in Manhattan where she began to lead a series of evenings that explored immersive, techno-cultural fusions. Her project, Hybrid Nights, became one of the most popular events of that experimental arts center and Verde eventually invited her fellow video artist from the Outpost, Anney Bonney, to help her produce Hybrid Nights from 1994-1999. The announcement for the very first event touches on many Immersionist themes: “Body & language, sound & form, earth & air, interruptions & concentration...”

Planning circle for Organism, 1993: Ebon Fisher (sitting in black hat) initiated the ecological “web jam” in the Old Dutch Mustard Factory with the help of Anna Hurwitz (standing opposite) and to her right, Robert Elmes, Fred Valentine, David Brody, Pegi Vail, Matty Jankowski, Yvette Helin, Vernon Bigman, Volcano, Dávid Dienes. Other key organizers with their backs to the camera include Karen Cormier, Megan Raddant and Cliff Crepeau. 120 artists and musicians eventually cultivated overlapping cultural systems for Organism, and over 2,000 guests danced and mingled among the webs for over 12 hours.

By the end of the 1990s, the Immersionists had brought a new creative vitality to the rest of the city and moved the epicenter of New York’s cultural innovation to Brooklyn. In 1996, Neill Strauss of the New York Times referred to Williamsburg’s creative community as “pioneers” of an ambient culture that had begun to spread around the globe. He notes that “The visual and tactile aspects of today’s ambient clubs” came from “a series of parties that took place in the early 1990’s in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.” Referring to the last of those events, Nerve Circle's “Organism,” the German newspaper Die Zeit declared that “Events like these finally established Williamsburg as an artists’ colony.” An article by Melissa Rossi in Newsweek, “The Gathering of the Art Tribes” zeroed in on Myk Henry's exploding watermelons at Organism and touched on a performance by Hit and Run Theater on three of the silos at the Old Dutch Mustard Factory where the layered event unfolded:

“Call it the sequel to the rave... 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.”

A sustained process of creative engagement eventually revived the struggling neighborhood, helping to take it from an industrial area that was losing jobs overseas, to a vibrant, post-industrial economy of small, creative businesses and non-profit cultural enterprises. Older establishments that managed to survive the economic recession of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Teddy’s Bar and Grill and Kashia's Restaurant, were able to thrive again. As stated in the introduction, a partnership between real estate financiers and The Bloomberg administration, neither of which lived in the creative district, resulted in rezoning and tax abatement measures that favored corporate development. A steep rise in the cost of living followed, undermining Williamsburg’s village culture and the ability of many of its artists and musicians to remain in the neighborhood they had helped to revive.

Medea’s Weekend by Tony Millionaire, Waterfront Week, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1992

Mainstream recognition

By the turn of the 21st century, Williamsburg's creative upwelling was being reported in a wide range of media around the world, including The New York Press, Wired, Die Zeit, Domus, The Drama Review, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guggenheim Museum CyberAtlas, Flash Art, The Village Voice, Newsweek, WFMU, and Fuji Television.

Some of the earliest media coverage of north Brooklyn’s creative community appeared in the 1980s in reference to the educational center, El Puente near the eastern entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge. A few years later coverage of the non-profit gallery, Minor Injury in Greenpoint began to appear. It wasn't until an article by Mark Rose in The New York Press in 1991, “Brooklyn Unbound,” that the mainstream press began to discover a large creative community emerging in a third zone along the waterfront near the bridge.

BRIC Arts, Brooklyn in 2016. Joe Amrhein, director of Pierogi Gallery, presents Stavit Allweis’ poster for Flytrap, 1991, at a panel discussion on creative neighborhoods in New York City.

A year after Rose’s article came out, New York Magazine covered Williamsburg's creative upwelling in a cover story, “The New Bohemia.” Other articles on the scene began to appear in the Village Voice and the Drama Review in the United States, and the European art journal, Flash Art, which noted that the neighborhood’s immersive “tradition” had made its way to to Williamsburg's first large commercial gallery, Test-Site. Initiated by Ebon Fisher, The Salon of the Mating Spiders attracted the works of six hundred artists who lined up around the block to install work of every kind in every conceivable space. By eliminating size restrictions, the entire gallery was turned into an experiment in emergent, communal design. The salon was announced with a poster by Minor Injury’s director, Kevin Pyle, and included music performances on a scaffold by the Immersionist musicians Dina Emerson and Ken Butler. In another effort to honor the entire neighborhood, the Immersionists encouraged Test-Site’s director, Annie Herron, to make her large space available for a fundraiser in support of Nydia Velázquez who went on to become the first Puerto Rican woman to serve in the United States Congress.

Test-Site exhibited works by several of the early Immersionists, including musical instruments by Ken Butler that involved the recycling of locally sourced materials, extensive spills of kitchen ingredients by Lauren Szold, and works by Rosa Volado, an artist who went on to establish the Greenpoint Film Festival. Fisher’s solo show for Test-Site, “Heat-Seeking Psycho-Suctions” (1992) involved interactive digital projections on the floor of the darkened gallery, providing an early commentary on the hazards of social media.

Inspired by Williamsburg's emerging presence in the press, the art historian Jonathan Fineberg flew out from the University of Illinois to investigate the dynamic community. In 1993 he presented a large exhibition of works by 23 members of Williamsburg’s “vibrant community of artists” at the university’s Krannert Art Museum in Urbana-Champaign. More than half of the exhibitors in the exhibit, “Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm” were associated with the Immersionist movement near the waterfront. Within months of Fineberg's exhibition, WFMU was presenting a live audio broadcast of the warehouse event, Organism, and Melissa Rossi was discussing the large interdisciplinary web jam in Newsweek.

In 1996, The New York Times finally took note of Brooklyn's creative emergence, referring to Williamsburg’s artists and musicians as “pioneers” of a new ambient aesthetic. A year later, Fuji Television set up a satellite truck outside Robert Elmes’ interdisciplinary arts center, Galapagos for a live broadcast of Immersionist creations to ten million viewers in Tokyo. The host, Tetsuo Suda, interviewed the Immersionist artists Dennis del Zotto, Ebon Fisher, and Fred Valentine and presented some of the immersive work they had installed in the club.

By the end of the 1990s, Williamsburg's creative systems were being reported in the mainstream media and around the world. Robert Elmes was invited to curate Williamsburg works for MoMA PS1 in Queens in 2000, and in 2003, Galapagos became a setting for Jim Jarmusch’s film Coffee and Cigarettes. The scene featured a conversation between the actors Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan sitting next to the dark reflecting pool at Galapagos.

Immersionist creations have also 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. In 1995, Jonathan Fineberg included works by Kit Blake and Ebon Fisher in his book, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, published in 1995. In his 1997 music anthology, State of the Union, the composer, Elliott Sharp included music by the Immersionists DJ Olive, Fisher, and Karthik Swaminathan (Kit Krash).

Numerous articles and films have investigated the takeover of Williamsburg in the new millennium by corporate developers and have questioned the city’s pivotal role in subsidizing the process. The economics of corporate welfare has been examined by ProPublica.org and illuminated in the films, Gut Renovation by Su Friedrich and Battle for Brooklyn by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley. Despite losing their community, many of the Immersionists continued to employ immersive strategies in their work around the world and have reflected on their formative years in such films as Marcin Ramocki’s Brooklyn DIY which premiered with a sold-out screening at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009.

The most salient measure of Immersionism's significance, however, was 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.” Abby Ellin’s 2014 article in The New York Times, “The Brooklyn Brand Goes Global” gave a nod to the radical sentiments at the roots of Brooklyn’s transformations in the 1990s, while mocking some of the lifestyle clichés projected on the borough by outsiders:

“It was inevitable that the New York City borough most known for its citizens’ desire to be counterculture... would be co-opted by entrepreneurs looking to sell the ‘Brooklyn brand’ abroad.”

In 2016, Brainard Carey notes on his website for Yale University Radio (WYBCX) that “Brooklyn’s reinvention was a lot deeper than the rote gentrification that is so often associated with urban art scenes.” Carey concludes:

“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.”

A Brooklyn renaissance

The Immersionist community’s sensuous, inclusive and 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 and economic renaissance that spread through much of Brooklyn.

Combined with other neighborhood-centered arts movements, such as the Jazz and film scenes in neighboring Fort Greene, Immersionism played a significant role in helping to move New York’s cultural cutting edge eastward. In 2019, two decades after the creative transformation of Williamsburg, Joseph Giovanni acknowledged the shift in the Architectural Record:

“[Brooklyn has] 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.”

Giovanni's sentiment is reflected in the data. According to the Office of the New York State Comptroller, Brooklyn's population grew by 19% between 1980 and 2018. The first major job gains since the collapse of Brooklyn's industrial economy occurred in the Immersionist era, tripling between the 1980s and the end of the 1990s. Jobs temporarily decreased during the Bloomberg era when high rise development disrupted the growth of small businesses. According to the Congressional Research Service Report, 2022, small businesses have generally produced most new jobs in the United States. After a period of adjustment, the number of jobs tripled again between 2008 and 2017. According to the New York State Comptroller, the second largest category of jobs after healthcare were in the arts and hospitality sector and Williamsburg was among the districts with the greatest growth.

Long before Brooklyn had established itself as a renaissance 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, this distinction was obtained through labor practices that included slavery and non-living wages. 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. 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 eventually emerged to help families in the 1970s and early 1980s, led by groups such as El Puente, Los Sures and the People's Firehouse.

In the late 1970s, 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 generation willing to set down roots in one of the most distressed areas of New York in order to create.

While community organizations 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 and vice versa. What immediately distinguished the Immersionist community from the artists living further to the north near the Bedford Avenue subway stop, was its abandonment of Manhattan as both a cultural forum and an exhibition space. Brooklyn itself became 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:

“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.”

Other creative clubs near the waterfront began to emerge that also cultivated a local community. These included the Lizard’s Tail, the Bog, The Green Room, Keep Refrigerated, 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 the modern and postmodern systems of thought that characterized much of the 20th century. That culture stressed art for the art market, a division of the arts into separate disciplines, and the paradigm of the solo artist separated from 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 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 like the Cat’s Heads – 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 The Greenline along the same lines, one of Lalalandia’s members, Gabrielle Latessa Ortiz stated that the group’s 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.” The video artist, Al Arthur described Williamsburg’s neighborhood ethos no less poignantly in just three words: “It’s a gift.”

Less than a decade after the Sex Salon invited the public to “GET INVOLVED” in all capitals, and to “Bring your sensuous images, poems, sounds and self, not your speculation capital,” the scene attracted an influx of other artists, extensive national and international media attention, and a swarm of real estate speculation. All of the large immersive events and clubs near Williamsburg’s waterfront – The Sex Salon, Cats Head I, Cats Head II, Flytrap, El Sensorium and Organism – were presented as the highlights of Williamsburg's “Golden Age” according to a chart released in 2000 by the artist Ward Shelly. The elaborate serigraph, “The Williamsburg Timeline,” was exhibited in the Brooklyn Art Museum, discussed in The New York Times and Flash Art, and is held in the collection of the Brooklyn Art Museum and The Museum of Modern Art. By the late 1990s, museums, music anthologies and history books around the world began to share artifacts of art and music from Williamsburg's Immersionist scene.

Williamsburg’s rebirth after a long economic decline, however, was not only indicated in timelines and international exhibitions, but in the revival of the neighborhood itself. Misconceptions about gentrification to the contrary, a 2004 study actually showed a reduction of attrition rates among the disadvantaged in Williamsburg in the 1990s. According to the New York Department of Labor, it wasn’t until after the City of New York rezoned Williamsburg in the new millennium, and began to subsidize corporate development, that attrition rates among underpaid populations increased again.

As noted on the website for Brainard Carey's radio program for Yale University, WYBC (AM), subsidizing corporate developers is a monopolistic practice that stifles competition, raises the cost of living, and reduces innovation:

“Wholesale multi-story and multi-unit housing development ...actually impedes creativity, grass-roots innovation and lasting community development. 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.”

Immersionist writers and graphic novelists

Williamsburg writers demonstrated an acute awareness of the toxic, dysfunctional and sometimes violent nature of the district they adored and called home. Their literary immersion in the neighborhood ranged from the imaginative (Laurel Casey, Tom Bass, Medea de Vyse), to the unnerved (Carl Watson, Susie Kahlich), to the Utopian (Ebon Fisher), to the personal (Shelley Marlow, Daisy Wake), to the scholarly (Kit Blake, David Brody), but at times they all shared a somewhat feverish and hallucinogenic demeanor that was, in a sense, the toxic environment speaking through them. The cartoonists and graphic novelists Tony Millionaire, Stavit Allweis, Kevin Pyle, Michael Rex and Dave Whitmer demonstrated a similar sensibility. In the new millennium, Allweis drew from her Immersionist performance work and dreamlike drawings of bodies during wartime, to explore photographic story-telling through staged scenes. That work lead to a career as a filmmaker. Her stories were no less feverish for the transition. Kevin Pyle, who joined the World War III comics collective from the East Village in the 1990s, continued to explore political and environmental themes in a series of graphic novels.

The writer Carl Watson, who lived in Williamsburg during the emergence of the movement and often contributed to the local zines, treated Manhattan as a character foil to Williamsburg. In the following sample of his writing, Watson references Manhattan's bifurcation into industrial specialties. Reflecting an Immersionist sensibility, he brings biological metaphors to this passage about a lonely Manhattan urbanite in Sensitive Skin Magazine:

“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.”

In 1992, 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 of Williamsburg:

“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...”

Casey then takes the fever deeper:

“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 both industry and city, it also showed signs of ecstatic connection with what was effectively a new kind of urban wilderness.

Immersionism in the 21st century

Radiant vs bounded immersion

In 1996, Neil Straus noted 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 Brooklyn Immersionists held interdisciplinary gatherings that radiated out to their local environment, many of Manhattan's clubs created more isolated spaces to escape their surrounding world. Underscoring this critical difference, Strauss quotes Tim Sweet who states that his Manhattan club, Recreational Vehicle (The RV), was intended to “shut out the rest of the world.” Sweet continues: “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, but it contrasted vividly with Williamsburg's radiant form of Immersionism. Sound artists like Sweet did speak of how “context over content” informed the design of his Manhattan space, but the context in question was clearly limited to the inside of the club.

A neighborly and more ecological form of immersion also distinguished the Immersionists' culture from some important predecessors. Both experimental and classical forms of theater and opera in the 20th century have tended to take place in bounded spaces, whether of the proscenium arch or black box variety. Even Allen Kaprow's Happenings (1950s and 1960s), San Francisco’s Trips Festival (1966), and Andy Warhol's sound and light shows (1966-1967) were bounded affairs with no larger ecosystems to engage. The Immersionists' emphasis on living systems also diverged from other multimedia forms which made high technology a feature rather than an interesting new means to connect to nature. Such techno-worship was exemplified by names like Warhol's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable." 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 the surrounding neighborhood. Although a feedback loop at the Trips Festival emerged between performers, technology and audience, feedback between the human domain and the non-human environment was rare. Like much of late 20th century Western culture, the emphasis was on individual pleasuring rather than the well-being of the larger ecosystem.

In 1966, at the time of the Trips Festival and Warhol’s sound and light shows, humanism was a fully established form of species-centrism which even the counter culture treated 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 humanity to the exclusion of the ecological context, not to mention the rest of the universe. The fact that scientists have come to label the current stage of natural history the Anthropocene reflects some awareness of the problem, but it may also be reinforcing our species-centric orientation.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s a popular shift in sensibility began to question the human-centric world. Books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Ian L. McHarg’s Design with Nature had begun to spread ecological thinking to a wider public. In 1970 Earth Day was established and the United States launched the Environmental Protection Agency. That same year one of the producers of the Trips Festival, Stewart Brand began to publish The Whole Earth Catalog. A significant shift from humanism to ecological thinking had begun. It may not have been until the Sex Salon of 1990 that a new generation in New York City was prepared to fully abandon the show business of human-centric existentialism and redirect attention to an actual neighborhood ecology. As the writer and Immersionist choreographer, Melanie Hahn Roche has maintained in the Drama Review, Williamsburg’s immersive culture “goes beyond simply throwing a good party.” Williamsburg's immersive events, rooftop gatherings, street culture and networked zines shared a life world within a complex and shifting urban environment.

Immersionism, in other words, was not just a singular event bounded by space and time. Nor was Immersionist culture an idealization of life put forth as a proposition. It was a living continuum of 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 a clique of humans. The entire social and ecological environment was reconnected in a “techno-organic” mesh (Lalalandia), congealed in a “multidimensional convergence” (Lizard’s Tail), and cultivated into “media organisms” (Nerve Circle). The Immersionists, in effect, were suspended in a common “green room” (The Green Room).

Since the Immersionist movement emerged in Williamsburg, ambient environments have appeared in galleries, corporate settings, and in digital simulations which often ignore the social and ecological context. Such commercial environments, whether real or virtual, often separate participants from the larger environment and are sometimes even promoted as an escape. Bounded and precisely controlled experiences do not reflect the depth of sensual, political and ecological involvement that the Brooklyn Immersionists were exploring. Social networks in the neighborhood were rooted in the environment and reflected a much richer matrix of physical interactions. Immersionist practices involved, in effect, what Susan Wines described in Domus as “place as a web of convergent forces.”

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, for example, Kara Swisher even suggests that the only kind of social networking possible was the online variety she was covering as a journalist in the new millennium: “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...”

Social networks, of course, have been around for as long as there have been animal and human migration routes, interwoven tree roots and mycelium. In Williamsburg in the early 1990s, a conscious and deliberate use of networking emerged in both physical events and in what Kit Blake described as “publishing networks.” 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” and she insisted that the “activity is necessary for the well-being of the community.”

In contrast to bounded forms of Immersion in commercial nightclubs and computer games, Williamsburg's neighborhood-based forms of immersion, networking and participation were fully civic and expansive. To live a creative life seven days a week inside such an environment was fundamentally different from the operations of the culture industries, even when those industries use the label “immersive.” Where the Brooklyn Immersionists embraced a rich, ecological and civic paradigm, bounded immersion removes a sense of political and ecological agency from participants, often with intention. Likewise, where the deep culture of neighborhood immersion in Williamsburg helped to nurture a larger world and catalyze a borough-wide renaissance, the bounded variant was limited to selling products and services, often with a mind to hoarding personal wealth, not sharing life with a community.

Corporate occupation

Due to the City of New York’s support for corporate developers in Williamsburg in the new millennium, the cost of living accelerated and turned many of the Immersionists and their neighbors into economic refugees from the district they had rejuvenated, experimentally, from the ground up. As the filmmaker, Su Friedrich showed in her film, Gut Renovation, a completely different, and demonstrably less gentle culture moved in, along with a financing system that had nothing to do with individual renters and home buyers. Friedrich was even forced out of her own loft by a developer while making her film.

Often confused with free markets and “gentrification,” Williamsburg’s takeover by city-subsidized outside developers was a form of leveraged development or corporate welfare that had begun to increase across the United States since the 1980s. Jason Hackworth and Neil Smith have called this "third wave gentrification,” but there was nothing gentle or gradual about the shift and a separate term like corporate welfare or radical corporatization more closely fits the circumstances in Williamsburg and many other neighborhoods where city-corporate alliances replace democratic governance. The third wave also merits a new, singular label as it was led by a completely different set of people and financing operations and it reflects a larger process taking over democracies and majority interests around the world.

Writing for the New York Times in 2009, Russ Buettner and Ray Rivera point out that beginning in 2001, it wasn’t the creative community or even middle and working class entrepreneurs, but rather the billionaire, Mayor Michael Bloomberg who “loosened the reins on development across the boroughs.”  He deliberately “pushed more than 100 rezoning measures through a City Council that stamped them into law.” A community that had struggled to find its bearings after the loss of industrial jobs, was often prevented from financing its own revival through corporate banks, yet nevertheless began a slow creative revival through cultural, educational, and small business initiatives, and in the end was overwhelmed by City-sponsored developers.

Although artists and even some activists are blamed for the corporate takeover simply for bringing a positive outlook and creativity back to a district, beneficiaries of the sales of property to the developers were not the creative classes, who were largely renters. Much of the land sold to the corporate developers was owned by a small subset of longstanding local property owners. However, in the New York Times, Buettner and Rivera lay the blame for a steep, disruptive rise in the cost of living in the new millennium squarely on Bloomberg’s administration: “His administration poured $16 billion into financing [across the boroughs] to foster commercial development.” They then cite New York City’s Comptroller on the wisdom of such corporate favoritism:

“Comptroller William C. Thompson has said the mayor focuses too much on large developments that go to favored builders who receive wasteful subsidies. When the new Yankee Stadium came up in Tuesday night’s debate, he said: “This is just another example of a giveaway, of the mayor's giveaway to another one of his developer friends in the city.”

Many have assumed that the creative community, despite moving into unwanted industrial areas, had displaced local residents. However, not only were most of the large property clusters sold to corporations by longstanding local residents, the positive emotional impact of the Immersionists, and the slow nature of Williamsburg’s economic growth in the 1990s, was such that the rate of attrition for the disadvantaged actually went down during that decade. According to a 2004 report in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi point out that creative neighborhoods like Williamsburg “improve in many ways that may be appreciated as much by their disadvantaged residents as by their more affluent ones.” In a discussion of their report for the Journal of the American Planning Association, “Gentrification and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s,” Freeman and Braconi state:

“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 counterintuitive results even surprised the researchers. As Lance Freeman states in The Atlantic: “Much to my surprise, our research findings did not show evidence of a causal relationship between gentrification and displacement.” The review of the study in The Atlantic claims that the term gentrification, at least in reference to an aspirational culture that encourages the arts and education, may have lost its usefulness: “They came close to debunking the very idea of gentrification” Freeman states.

Corporate welfare, however, remains a very apt term. The Atlantic was not alone in calling for a new understanding of urban upheaval, and a distinction being made between the natural benefits of village scale creativity, and corporate welfare sponsored by the city. By focusing on matters of style, class and consumer culture, the terms “gentrification” and even “hipster” not only deflect from the beneficial contributions of innovative communities like the Immersionists, it obscures the actual city-corporate partnerships that lead to a far more damaging rise in the cost of living. From an aesthetic standpoint, it also diverts attention from recognizing the differences between small scale village life and an alienating corporate lifestyle introduced by high rises and other crude mechanisms of a highly pyramidal economy. The media’s fixation on glib, even abusive terms like “hipster,” obscures the real problem: city rezoning measures, tax abatements for high rise construction, and what Jane Jacobs defined decades earlier as large concentrations of “cataclysmic money.”

Terms like “gentrification” have tended to lump artists and small, local businesses, and even the pre-existing population attempting to open up a restaurant or grocery store, in with subsidized corporations. The problem is not a free market process playing out among smaller businesses and homebuyers, but rather its opposite: a leveraged market enabled by rezoning and tax abatements that only benefit large developers. By extension, another problem rooted in corporate welfare is the leverage attained by a small class of citizens who have benefitted from their investments in such a system. Such a class can more easily buy into a desirable neighborhood due to their own leveraged advantages. Like that of corporate developers, their impact on local economies is leveraged and does not reflect a truly free market. The term gentrification, unfortunately, does not make distinctions between renting artists, average citizens, corporate developers, and beneficiaries of corporate welfare. It just deflects from the economics of corporate welfare.

The term “gentrification” can also impart a false sense of inevitability to neighborhood disruption and deflect attention away from the democratic infrastructure that could be used to block corporate welfare the next time it exploits a neighborhood. “Gentrification” can even make the actual problem worse by providing a veneer of “gentle” sophistication to an aggressive intrusion of high rises. Gentrification, in effect, is an advertisement for the developers.

In 2019 Henry Grabar placed the labelling 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!” Alanna Schubach seems to agree and places the blame on city policy. In her article, “Stop blaming the hipsters: Here's how gentrification really happens,” she states that “The roots of the phenomenon reach way back through history and public policy.” In the case of Williamsburg, rezoning by the city and billions of dollars worth of “development dumping” as some have called the process, easily disrupted the neighborhood and its more gentle, philosophically inspired, and immersive approach to life.

Immersionism as a paradigm

Although the Immersionist revival of Williamsburg was exploited in the new millennium by corporate developers with support from the City, and many in the creative community along with their neighbors, were priced out of the neighborhood they had revived, the creative upwelling it inspired has still had a longstanding impact on Brooklyn and beyond. Breaking free from a 20th century paradigm of the alienated artist, and embracing a vivid sense of shared environmental being was spreading through journals and mass media alike. Immersionist cultural innovations and theories had a chance to spread on their merits, but the neighborhood’s narrative helped to carry the message: A dying industrial district was transformed into a vibrant urban destination and provided a model for a new interdisciplinary and ecological paradigm for the arts, journalism, psychology and urban renewal.

Interdisciplinary culture

In many ways, the Immersionists anticipated an embrace of interdisciplinary culture and the emerging fields of biological co-regulation, embodied cognition, and extended mind thesis. Three decades after The Sex Salon celebrated a communal, interdisciplinary mix of “love letters, performance, live music, jam, dancing” and inspired “multidimensional convergences,” “omnisensorial” environments and an all night “web jam” along the Williamsburg waterfront, a professor at Yale University, Nicholas Wolterstorff noticed a shift toward embracing context and a wider definition of art among his own colleagues. As he states in a PBS interview in 2020:

“A number of [my colleagues] are beginning to come along with me and say: let's not just expand our understanding of concert hall music and museum visual art, but let's go beyond the museums and let's go beyond the concert halls...”

Embodiment in psychology

Psychologists have also begun to explore a broader, more ecological framework for studying the mind. The new fields of embodied and extended cognition stress that the cognitive, emotional and aesthetic properties of the mind cannot be fully understood by studying an individual's brain, but must be seen as a function of an organism’s total interactions with the world. Quoted in a guest blog for Scientific American in 2011, over two decades after the Immersionists first began to cultivate a networked and immersive arts culture in Williamsburg, the psychologist Joshua Davis from Barnard College opined that embodied cognition was just beginning to gel as a new framework for cognitive psychology, stating: “I see embodiment as a new paradigm that we are shifting towards.”

As late as 2018, a professor of neurology at the University College London, Karl Friston also noted the emergence of a new paradigm on The British Council’s video series, Serious Science and reflects much of the philosophy of the Immersionists:

“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?”

Friston even equates embodied cognition with dancing, a fundamental communal element in many of the Immersionist creations. He indicates that at the time of his talk in 2018, cognitive psychologists were just beginning to recognize the significance of immersion:

“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.”

Both Davis and Friston were citing the emergence of a new environmental framework for the mind a quarter century after the Immersionist Anna Hurwitz was moving furniture around Williamsburg to increase “the degree to which people participate,” Ebon Fisher was celebrating the “psycho-physical swirl,” and organizing “web jams” and “squirmcasts,” Kit Blake was promoting a “publishing network,” and Lalalandia was recycling industrial detritus into an “omnisensorial sweepout.” This was not just a change in perspective and approach, but a fully engaged ethic. Yvette Helin was immersing The Pedestrian Project in the streets to “pull people into a collective consciousness, [allowing us to] see who we are and how we relate to the people and spaces around us.”

Jessica Nissen, a veteran of the Cat’s Head, Flytrap and Organism gatherings, and a painter with a strong interest in biology and science fiction, presented a very concise foreshadowing of extended cognition as early as 1993. In the catalog for Jonathan Fineberg’s exhibit, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, she wrote: “internal/external, voluntary/involuntary, physical/psychological, experience/dream” and sums this up in two words that cover the gamut from the neighborly to the biological: “circuitous systems.”

David Pescovitz, a frequent writer for Wired Magazine and a co-editor of BoingBoing.net, could have been referencing any of the Immersionists when he commends Ebon Fisher's early paradigmatic shift in a catalog for the artist’s 2006 museum retrospective, “Transformations in the Nervepool”:

“Long before Friendster, locative media, and emergent everything, [the artists cultivated] cultural and social experimentation and connection. His art is a delightful reminder that communication is really about communality.”

Grassroots urban renewal

For the Immersionists, of course, a new social-ecological theory of mind and culture was just the beginning. In applying these prescient ideas to their own struggling neighborhood they helped to revive one of the most blighted areas of the United States. And contrary to vague and misapplied labels like “gentrification,” attrition rates among the disadvantaged in Williamsburg actually went down in the 1990s as Freeman and Braconi showed. When city-subsidized high rises moved in, attrition rates increased.

Immersionism not only proved to be a fruitful and equitable model for the transformation of local economies, it has anticipated new theories in psychology, and predates by decades conferences dedicated to grassroots local development such as the Economics of Happiness which opened in Berkeley, California in 2012, and the launch of World Localization Day in 2020 by the group Local Futures.[1]

Theories of a living universe

In a larger sense, Immersionism moved beyond the postmodern vision of the world as a Warholian hall of mirrors with no meaning or agency, and rejected the world as an administrative machine, where urban renewal can only manifest through top down mechanisms. In a profound economic paradigm shift it began to explore a vision of bottom up, emergent culture driven by collective dreaming. With their biomorphic nomenclature, Submodern tribal ethics, and events with names like “Organism,” “El Sensorium” and “Toxic Avengers,” the Immersionists anticipated the shift to an ecological vision of reality in the new millennium. And they embraced such a paradigm at a time when digital technology was beginning to grab the headlines and corporate systems were in the ascendency. Since then, as both the corporate and digital worlds came under increasing scrutiny, many philosophers and physicists have begun to echo the Immersionist's organismic paradigm.

In his book, Origins of Consciousness, published in 2015, Adrian David Nelson suggests that the universe may be, not unlike an Immersionist web jam or multidimensional convergence, an "evolving, vital and creative" process, and may be thought of more as an organism than a machine. In addition, like the Immersionists’ references to “subjective ecology” and constructs that embrace hybrid forms of “internal/external” and “physical/psychological” presence, the physical world according to Nelson may even be “suffused with sentience.” Such an “intrinsic consciousness movement” in cosmology points to a “reenchantment of the cosmos.”

In the documentary, The Living Universe: Cosmos as Organism (2019), Nelson furthers this line of thought:

“We appear to see further and with greater understanding through an organismic lens than through any other concept available to us. Understanding the rise of the organismic paradigm requires that we understand some of the historical forces that have shaped the outlook of Western Science, as well as their resulting influence on the modern mind.”

Brainard Carey recognized on Yale Radio in 2016, that Immersionism had become both a model for creative urbanism and a philosophy of ecological being. Having witnessed the movement personally he stated on the air:

“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.”

Chief Seattle on the web of life

Just as the European Renaissance, and later the machinic worldview, was a rebirth of Ancient Greek philosophy, ecological Immersionism can be seen as a rebirth of an even earlier worldview shared by many indigenous cultures. A statement by Chief Seattle (Si'ahl) in 1854 is a vivid foreshadowing of the Immersionist sensibility:

“All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Humanity did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”

See also

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

External links

Articles

• Immersionism discussed on Yale University Radio
• Toxic Spills in Brooklyn on JillHubley.com
• Definition of a “web jam” on Netlingo
• “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