Brooklyn Immersionists

Even as early as 1990, the Immersionists warned of such radical neighborhood exploitation in the announcement for their seminal event, the Sex Salon: "Bring your sensuous images, poems, sounds and self, not your speculation capital.”[18] In 1992, Waterfront Week took a formal stand against the city's plans to privilege developers over residents.

The interdisciplinary and ecological nature of the movement is noted by curator, Brainard Carey on the website for his arts 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.

[4] In 1998, she 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.”[4]One of the largest Immersionist gatherings in the early 1990s, Organism turned nearly all of the Old Dutch Mustard Factory into an experiment in organic interconnection.

"[46] A deliberate cultivation of an emergent biological system, the web jam incorporated over 2000[30] visitors into its formation and was characterized by Wines in Domus as “a symbolic climax to the renegade activity that had been stirring within the community since the late eighties.”[4] Underscoring the biological nature of the creation, she described it as “breathing and transforming for fifteen hours in an abandoned mustard factory.”[4] Citing the large "immersive environments"[4] in the abandoned warehouses, and an array of social-environmental experiments by Nerve Circle, Lalalandia, Fakeshop, Floating Point Unit, Ovni and Ongolia, Wines notes in Domus that an innovative sensibility had emerged in Williamsburg that involved the cultivation of living systems and experiences rather than solid works of art and architecture.

[63] 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 Verge.

Situated in a neutral, industrial space between Manhattan and the wider borough of Brooklyn, and between Polish, Latino and Hassidic neighborhoods, the youthful, international community had breathing room for a diverse set of ideas and values to come together in creative new forms.

"[73] 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 to the interior of performance venues: 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."

Williamsburg's extended mind was vividly illustrated in a poster Stavit Allweis made for the Flytrap warehouse event which featured writhing, biomorphic forms connecting a host of interdisciplinary offerings, including one that was even called "Endless Tissue."

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Visceral and biological references in the nomenclature included The Sex Salon, 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.

In the Village Voice, Helena Mulkerns described how the event easily became an extension of its postindustrial 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.

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 in 1985, 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.

In a similar role as cultural exporter, Caterina Verde, an artist who worked closely with The Outpost in Williamsburg, was invited to join The Kitchen in Manhattan as the Performance Art Curator where she initiated a series of evenings that explored immersive, techno-cultural fusions.

In another effort to honor the entire neighborhood, Ebon Fisher and Chris Lanier at El Centro Cultural de Williamsburg 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.

[113] 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.

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.

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".

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 their decade of activity.

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.

The media's fixation on glib, even pejorative 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".

The Times’ disinterest in what both historians and residents alike had to say about their own renaissance is most apparent in the timeline's omission of the creative education center, El Puente which played a major role in helping struggling youth in Williamsburg during a prolonged and violent recession.

It also quotes Robert Lanham, the publisher of The Brooklyn Paper on his displeasure with the aforementioned development: “What gets on my nerves, though, are the Wall Streeters who have come into the area to ‘get dirty with the artists’ and have brought their condominiums with them.” But the New York Times’ timeline displays no sense of irony for instigating a symbolic takeover that repeats the actual version.

Groups like the Institute for Aesthetic Modulation (IFAM), with roots in both the East Village of Manhattan and Williamsburg, went on to bring their intense form of environmental theater to Brooklyn locations like the Coney Island Mermaid Parade where they won best performance several years running in the new millennium.

He indicates that at the time of his talk in 2018, cognitive psychologists were just beginning to recognize the significance of immersion: 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",[60] Kit Blake was promoting a "publishing network",[55] and Lalalandia was recycling industrial detritus into an "omnisensorial sweepout".