Ebon Fisher

[5] In Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1990s the artist directed an experimental theater company, Nerve Circle which conducted live media sharing rituals in an effort to cultivate vital channels of communication in an economically depressed district.

Other early environmentally engaged groups included El Puente, Minor Injury Gallery, the Lizard’s Tail Cabaret, Epoché, the Green Room, The Pedestrian Project, Lalalandia, Fake Shop, Ongolia, Hit and Run Theater, Mustard and neighborhood media operations like Waterfront Week, Worm Magazine and The Outpost.

Nerve Circle's experimental arrangements of bodies, information and living context were designed to induce a shared presence that Fisher likened to a "media organism.

"[3] These immersive creations included information-sharing events at Minor Injury Gallery, Media Compressions; a large interactive installation at the Flytrap warehouse gathering called Endless Tissue; a phone-in community bulletin board, (718) SUBWIRE; a creative space situated in a traditional street festival, The Weird Thing Zone;[7] and The Eyeball Scanning Party which partnered with Kit Blake’s Worm Magazine to publish images of participants' eyeballs from the party along with their commentary about being scanned.

Suzan Wines described Organism’s strategy in Domus Magazine as engaging “the entire space, the body and mind of the audience and through this process ultimately integrates with the community at large.”[8] She notes the event’s prominence in Williamsburg’s creative emergence: In the book, Contemporary Artists, University of Paris historian, Frank Popper states that Fisher's works in Williamsburg embodied "a de-centered authorship where one creates with the community, with the medium, and with nature.

"[3] The rituals were sometimes accompanied by other innovations such as Fisher’s “bionic codes,” a system of network ethics which Popper describes as "artificial lifeforms cultivated in the plasma of popular culture.

[4] As the art historian, Jonathan Fineberg wrote of the creative community that came to be known as the Brooklyn Immersionists: According to a 2004 report in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the emergence of such a dynamic culture in the early 1990s helped Williamsburg to revive its economy and to stem the rate of attrition for its disadvantaged population.

[9] Ever since he spray-painted a series of neurons in the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as an art student, Ebon Fisher sought to move his creative operations out of the ivory tower and immerse it in a public arena.

Immersionism was about biological congealing and the vitality born from such convergence.”[1] According to Bradley the aesthetic philosophy Fisher helped to launch was pivotal in transitioning away from the cynicism of postmodern theories of art and culture: Inspired by both the living community networks in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and an increasingly collaborative internet culture, Ebon Fisher posted the first draft of his Wigglism Manifesto on the internet in 1996.

[3] In Williamsburg, Brooklyn Fisher helped to revive a struggling area of New York which had been losing industrial jobs to outsourcing and suffering from a growing drug trade.

In 1981 he spray-painted a series of neurons under a bridge and along the train tracks in Pittsburgh's Panther Hollow area, eventually being introduced to another Pennsylvania graffiti artist, Keith Haring by one of his professors, the painter Jim Denny.

Informed by his exposure to cybernetics and feedback systems at the MIT Media Lab in the mid-1980s, Fisher began to approach his work as an evolving collaboration with the world.

A series of diagrams Fisher created that charted the flows of information within each ritual, in turn, evolved into a nervelike system of ethics, the Bionic Codes.

Drawn to both the formal and functional properties of nerves and networks, Fisher's work has followed a trajectory from neuron graffiti to his weblike media creation, Zoapool.

In 2006, Fisher became a full time affiliate associate professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, where he and a colleague in the computer science department, Prof. Quynh Dinh, co-authored and received a National Science Foundation grant for a "Transmedia Search Engine.”[22][23] He was interviewed extensively in the documentary Brooklyn DIY, by Marcin Ramocki which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009.

After weathering the occupation of Williamsburg by corporate developers, an exodus from New York induced by the attack on the World Trade Center and its financial destabilization of Hunter College, abnormal teaching conditions at the Stevens Institute of Technology that led to the removal of the institute's president,[24] the Great Recession and the Coronavirus Pandemic, Ebon Fisher has returned to cultivating The Nervepool and its nerve-like ethics, the Zoacodes.