Brooklyn Immersionists

The Brooklyn Immersionists were a community of artists, musicians and writers that rejected the distancing aesthetics of postmodernism and immersed themselves and their audiences into the world where they lived. Coming to fruition in the 1990s, the experimental scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn created fully dimensional experiences in the streets and abandoned warehouses, and cultivated rich webs of connection with their surrounding world. The dynamic, ecologically engaged culture helped to transform Williamsburg’s deteriorating industrial waterfront and spread a wave of interdisciplinary creativity to Bushwick, DUMBO, and throughout Brooklyn. The post-postmodern movement catalyzed the largest New York renaissance to take root outside Manhattan.
In 1999, the City of New York began to leverage Williamsburg's creative revival for the benefit of corporate developers and wealthier apartment seekers. Zoning laws were changed on the waterfront to favor high rise construction and eventually billions of dollars in tax abatements were provided to developers. This was not only of concern to the residents of Williamsburg. Buettner and Rivera state in The New York Times in 2009 that “Comptroller William C. Thompson has said the mayor focuses too much on large developments that go to favored builders who receive wasteful subsidies." Often mislabeled as “gentrification,” which is a free market process initiated by individual home buyers, the City's privileging of large real estate enterprises is more accurately described as corporate welfare. Government support for high rises, chain stores and their wealthy customers led to a steep rise in the cost of living. Most of the members of the Immersionist community were low income renters and could not afford the subsidized corporate economy that was imposed on the neighborhood in the new millennium. Most became economic refugees from the neighborhood they had revived with over a decade of innovative creation.
According to the art historian Jonathan Fineberg, Williamsburg’s creative “paradigm” in the 1990s was characterized by "a richer, more dynamically interacting whole." The ecosocial movement explored new forms of interconnected and immersive art, technology and culture in the streets, warehouses, rooftops and local media networks. The Immersionist scene grew out of several groups and venues that began to gather in the late 1980s and early 1990s near the district's abandoned industrial waterfront. These included Epoché, the Green Room, Keep Refrigerated, The Lizard’s Tail, and Nerve Circle. Early publications associated with this scene included Waterfront Week and Worm Magazine. The Immersionists brought an experimental and often primal modality to an urban renewal process already underway in Williamsburg to the east and north. These activist neighbors and educational organizations included Los Sures, El Puente, The People's Firehouse and Minor Injury Gallery. The community's explorations in interdisciplinary communion, along with their environmental philosophies and biomorphic nomenclature were discovered by both the international press and museums. Their dynamic, environmentally engaged culture attracted thousands of artists to a district that had been losing jobs overseas and coping with a burgeoning drug trade.
Although most of the Immersionists came of age during the rebellious Punk and postmodern era of the 1980s, many also had childhoods during the civil rights and environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. A creative mix of the two sensibilities easily served the creative community that had moved into apartments and industrial spaces near Williamsburg's decaying waterfront. While finding a certain Punk romance with urban decay, a childhood exposure to more proactive strains of U.S. counterculture encouraged a search for healing, neighborhood communion and a more ecological sense of being. Despite exploitation by city-sponsored developers and Manhattan's commercial press in the new millennium, the Immersionists and their activist colleagues played a significant role in establishing Brooklyn as an international hub for creative activism, urban ecology and immersive, community-building events and venues. Their innovations in "submodern," "omnisensorial," and networked culture anticipated developments in social practices in the arts, ecopsychology, green themes in commerce, and queer ecology that came to fruition in the 21st century.
In 1991, before Manhattan's lifestyle media began to cover the neighborhood, The New York Press noted the waterfront community’s “esthetic activism” and by 1998, the Italian arts journal Domus was using the term "immersive" to describe the holistic culture of Williamsburg's creative community. Separated by the East River from Manhattan's arts establishments, the Immersionists rejected the neighboring borough’s removed, postmodern preoccupation with simulacra and issues of interpretation, and began to employ collective strategies of creation and a visceral relationship with their immediate world. In Domus, Suzanne Wines characterized Williamsburg's waterfront community as "New York's most vibrant art scene... constantly responding to new input.” Underscoring the ecological depth of the immersionist movement in his book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, Cisco Bradley states that the community not only shifted the center of New York's creativity towards Brooklyn, but significantly helped to change the discourse of the arts in New York.
While creative districts in New York had begun to emerge in Manhattan's West Village in 1900, Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, the East Village in the 1950s, SoHo in the 1960s and 70s, and reemerged in the East Village in the 1980s, Williamsburg's Immersionist community gave rise to a renaissance that not only took root outside Manhattan, but spread to an entire borough three times its size. 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.
After a decade of creative immersion in Williamsburg, the Immersionist community and its activist neighbors catalyzed a renaissance that revived the district and its local businesses. According to a 2004 report in the Journal of the American Planning Association, such positive changes brought down the rate of attrition for Williamsburg's disadvantaged populations in the 1990s. In 1999, however, New York City's Board of Standards and Appeals granted a zoning variance that allowed for an apartment complex to be built on Kent Avenue near the river. This was the first of dozens of high rises to be subsidized through both rezoning and billions of dollars in tax abatements. Marketed with labels like “luxury,” “hipster” and even “gentrification,” the high rises and large chain stores which moved in were anything but gentle and began to overwhelm the locally-rooted economy and the area’s neighborly culture. Corporate inflationary pricing, not the DIY culture of artists, activists and local businesses, severely raised the cost of living in the new millennium, and many of the Immersionists and their neighbors were forced out of the district they had collectively revived.
Williamsburg’s steep rise in the cost of living in the new millennium was not caused by gentrification, which is a free market process, but rather by its opposite: a form of leveraged business or corporate welfare. This repeated misuse of “gentrification” since it was coined in the 1960s has effectively masked neighborhood disruption by corporations. It has also lead some uninformed journalists to blame artists, activists, local businesses and first time home buyers for a city policy that favors corporations with a monopoly advantage. Mostly renters themselves, the creative and activist communities that helped to revive Williamsburg’s local economy were not in the business of buying and selling buildings (gentrification), let alone engage in the economics of monopoly takeover (corporate welfare).
Many politicians are so habituated to top-down governance favoring monopoly capital, they cannot picture any other kind of economy. In his inaugural address in 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stated that his administration, not the residents who had already established a vivid cultural and small business renaissance, would thenceforth "bring new life to our waterfront and stimulate new investment in housing." According to Freeman and Braconi, Bloomberg's corporate welfare policies caused the attrition rates for economically disadvantaged populations to rise again.
The New York Times vividly lays the blame for the steep, disruptive rise in Williamsburg's cost of living in the new millennium on the Bloomberg administration. As Buettner and Rivera describe the city-wide initiative: "His administration poured $16 billion into financing to foster commercial development." They then cite New York City's Comptroller on the wisdom of such corporate favoritism:
Given that the rate of attrition for the disadvantaged went down in the 1990s and up following rezoning and corporate subsidies, a more accurate picture of the problem presents itself: artists, activists and small businesses helped an industrial district to thrive again after industrial jobs were sent overseas, and the city exploited the revival to benefit monopolies. This “third wave” corporate socialism has increasingly sidelined neighborhood creativity, community formation, and small businesses across the United States. The loss of immersed, neighborhood-based culture and businesses has been shown in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization to increase levels of depression, poverty and crime. The Immersionist cartoonist, Tony Millionaire vividly predicted this process in "Bathos on the Beach," an episode of Medea’s Weekend in 1992. The panel on the top opens with a protest effort by artists on the waterfront. A potato depicting a psychology student from Williamsburg, Adil Qureshi, states “I will stand here forever to rebuff any insensitive lout who would exploit the vulnerable!!” The protestors are then depicted years later as tiny figures in a bottle while the proprietor of the popular Ship’s Mast Pub laments the takeover of Williamsburg by futuristic, but unaffordable high rises. In a second panel, an alcoholic is blamed for his drinking problems, not the depressing macroeconomic context presented in the first panel.
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.” In 1992, Waterfront Week took a formal stand against the city's plans to privilege developers over residents. According to Rolf Carle, a regular contributor to Waterfront Week and a member of the Green Room, the weekly endorsed "no new building on the waterfront" and asked that it "maintain its M3 heavy industrial zoning." M3 allowed for mixed uses of the waterfront area, but not the construction of high rises.
Waterfront Week also supported "ecologically correct" industrial zoning and took a stand against an array of potential polluting industries: "No incinerators, no garbage transfer stations, no sludge factories that the city would like to see and we as a community would not like to smell." True to the Immersionists' environmental ethic, Waterfront Week also called for existing buildings to be renovated and "recycling centers and alternative energy stations developed."
Corporate welfare policies eventually overwhelmed the artists, activists and their neighbors. Given the outsourcing of industrial jobs by corporations in the 1970s and 1980s, and how successful the creative revival had been in the 1990s with its lower attrition rates, the injustice of the corporate takeover that followed was all the more vivid and historical. However, such historical processes are not inevitable as the launch of the New Deal under Roosevelt in the U.S. has shown. A new generation of authors and activists is now beginning to articulate the deep economic imbalances both Roosevelt and the Immersionists confronted in books such as The Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard published in 2024.
The international “artists colony”, as the German newspaper, Die Zeit referred to the Immersionist scene, was composed of immigrants from across the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Seeking affordable spaces to live and work, the experimental artists found themselves in a distressed and toxic environment which they felt compelled to treat as a living medium worthy of caring and transformation. Rather than direct their creative life towards specialized and often disassociated art establishments in Manhattan, the Immersionists began to cultivate a web of interpenetrating creativity where they lived. They turned the streets, rooftops, warehouses and weed-strewn waterfront into both medium and source of inspiration. 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):
Much of Williamsburg’s industrial area near the waterfront was turned into a medium of expression, with increasingly large interdisciplinary events in the abandoned warehouses attracting attention from a wide variety of media. The multidisciplinary press helped to articulate the emerging Immersionist philosophy of intense collective creation, immersive event formation, and community engagement. It included The Village Voice, The New York Press, The Drama Review, Flash Art, Wired, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Utne Reader, Domus, The Guggenheim Museum CyberAtlas, Die Zeit, Newsweek, and Fuji Television. Art history books that have reflected on the movement include Jonathan Fineberg's Art since 1940: Strategies of Being, and Cisco Bradley's The Williamsburg Avant-Garde.
The Immersionists collectively began to move past the 20th century’s fixation on the solitary individual as the deepest source of art, and move it out into a shared environment. An environmental orientation was even evident in its nomenclature. Groups and art collectives emerged that often invoked animals, ecosystems and healing in their names and manifestoes. One of the earliest of Williamsburg's creative organizations, El Puente (The Bridge) opened in 1982 and referenced its commitment to deep, restorative connection to local youth. A student group formed at El Puente, the Toxic Avengers, even reference the notoriously toxic nature of their own industrial environment. Beginning in 1990 with The Sex Salon, a playful nod to animal sensuality, a series of large, community-building efforts in the streets and abandoned warehouses also signaled a devotion to the living world. That was followed by the Cat's Head (I & II), Flytrap, Human Fest (I & II), El Sensorium and Organism. Strategies for these events used equally biomorphic terms like “web jam,” “omnisensorial,” and “circuitous systems." Storefront venues and mobile enterprises began to emerge in parallel with the large, creative confluxes, and shared in the community-building philosophy: Minor Injury Gallery, The Bog, The Lizard's Tail, Nerve Circle, Keep Refrigerated, the Green Room, Fakeshop, Lalalandia, Bindlestiff Family Circus, Circus Amok, the Outpost, and Hit and Run Theater. Local media emerged that helped to build a discourse around participation, biological feedback systems, and ecological sensitivity. These included Breukelen, The Curse, The Nose, The Outpost, Waterfront Week, Worm Magazine and (718) Subwire.
In the mid 1990s, interdisciplinary establishments appeared that followed in both the biomorphic naming tradition and the locally rooted, interactive culture: Mustard, The AlulA Dimension, Floating Point Unit, Galapagos, Ocularis, Ovni 360° and Ongolia. Migration of artists and musicians between groups was extensive, leading to a rich weave of ideas and resources.
The Immersionist philosophy of environmental engagement had vivid consequences. Deep involvement with their neighborhood gradually grew into a wave of cultural change and small business growth that transformed the entire borough. According to Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the sense of hope that returned to the struggling industrial district helped to lower the attrition rates for the disadvantaged in the 1990s. As has been noted, a non-local philosophy of monopoly takeover supported by City Hall in Manhattan had the opposite result: attrition rates began to go up in the new millennium.
Where André Breton believed Surrealism could draw the unconscious into human affairs and begin to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality”, the Immersionists opened up a three way flow between consciousness, the subconscious and their environment. They treated their entire psycho-physical world as a living continuum of being, a formulation Ebon Fisher referred to in a 1988 Nerve Circle manifesto as a nonobjective fusion with the world or “burrow.”
In a similar spirit of deep ecological immersion, the arts space, Epoché published an editorial in Word of Mouth in 1989 that encouraged the creative community to “inject vitality” into their distressed, industrial world. This gave rise to a three day convergence of poets, artists, filmmakers and musicians at Epoché called The Sex Salon that launched on Valentine's Day, 1990. Five months later the Lizard's Tail Cabaret convened another large interdisciplinary gathering in the Old Dutch Mustard Factory, The Cat's Head, which was promoted as a “multidimensional convergence.”
In another form of convergence with their environment a couple years later, Lalalandia integrated recycled materials from the local factories into a richly woven, “omnisensorial” night space called El Sensorium. Yvette Helin, who explored relationships between her street performers, The Pedestrian Project and their environment, opened up a performance space with Rube Fenwick whose very name, the Green Room, evoked a relationship with nature. Some of the solo performers who made the entire neighborhood their stage – including local community meetings and protest marches – would make the Green Room one of their bases. These ubiquitous performers included Andrew Hampsas, Dan McKereghan, Gene Pool, Medea de Vyse and Miss Kitty. Given that their industrial world was coping with toxic waste and economic decline, more astringent terms for extended being also emerged. These included “illbient”, coined by Lalalandia member, Gregor Asch, and Laurel Casey's phrase, “sacred dump”. Echoing Asch and Casey, the cartoonist Tony Millionaire brought a wry sense of humor to the discourse, using the title “Urban Pastoral” on one of his treatments on the industrial neighborhood.
As a philosophy of extended being, creative immersion in their environment was not limited to the streets and crumbling waterfront. Prescient social media projects emerged in the 1990s that immersed audiences in a hybrid of media, environment and sensual, physical activity. These included Fake Shop, Nerve Circle and Lalalandia's richly embodied and interactive media confluxes, The Outpost media collective’s rooftop garden gatherings, Floating Cinema’s family-friendly film screenings from a barge on the East River, and the Ocularis film collective’s screenings on the roof of Galapagos Art Space.
It is important to emphasize that the Brooklyn Immersionists were not only immersing audiences in sensuous environments. As their extensive commentary in local zines like Worm and Waterfront Week indicate, sharing their creations, events and media with their neighbors and other artists helped to nurture ecological relationships between the audience, the artists’ imaginative unconscious, and their shared urban ecosystem. These ecological relationships are also far richer and more fluid than simple social networks, and described as a "venture into the waters" by Stavit Allweis and Lauren Szold in a 1991 Worm editorial. Other terms for ecological immersion appeared in the neighborhood literature like Jessica Nissen’s “circuitous systems” and Nerve Circle's “web jam.” Lalalandia's house band, MultiPolyOmni even encoded extensive ecological being into its name. A more traditional theater like Open Window Theater was not immune to the neighborhood modality, drawing its audiences both onto and into its sets. One such production, Franz Kafka's The Hunger Artist, involved a structure built by the artist and writer, David Brody who later oversaw immersive video systems for Organism with Carlton Bright.
Most of the Immersionist creations involved participatory strategies, setting them in stark contrast to a traditional delivery of the arts to passive viewers. Corporate media, a form of centralized media production delivered to passive consumers, was vividly eschewed by Rob Hickman and Kit Blake in an early Immersionist street action, Glow Nighttime. Their event involved the tossing of five televisions and two mock satellites off a six story building on South 11th Street in 1991. Large street crowds witnessed the event to the sound of live drums and slides projected on the side of the building by Ilene Zori Magaras and Richard Posch. A video of Glow Nighttime shows neighbors watching the plummeting televisions from their balconies and a police cruiser slowing down to check out the crowds. Despite the clear evidence of broken televisions on the sidewalk, they moved on without getting out of their vehicle.
In Domus Magazine, the architect Suzan Wines maintained that Williamsburg's creators of “immersive environments” were challenging 20th century existentialism's fixation on the isolated psyche, and offered a “vital antidote to the dogma of modernism”. 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:
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. Conceived by Ebon Fisher as an ecological “web jam,” the 15 hour event involved a weave of systems cultivated by 120 artists, musicians and architects in collaboration with their environment. As stated in the program notes, “The Organism is an attempt to push the idea of linkage, collaboration and interaction to its mellifluous, weblike extreme.” Many of Williamsburg's prominent Immersionist groups came together to launch the event, including veterans of Minor Injury Gallery, the Cat's Head and Flytrap gatherings, Nerve Circle, Epoché, Keep Refrigerated, the Green Room. Several bands also brought musical webs to the project, including Thrust, Fric and Frac, FBI and the Hungry March Band. Students from the immersive educational group, El Puente, also joined in the creation of the event. Organism ultimately drew in over 2000 visitors 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.” Underscoring the biological nature of the creation, she described it as “breathing and transforming for fifteen hours in an abandoned mustard factory.”
Citing the large "immersive environments" in the abandoned warehouses, and an array of social-environmental experiments by Lalalandia, Fakeshop, Floating Point Unit, Ovni, Ongolia and Nerve Circle, 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. While the notion of nurturing into existence a collective being that extended out into its physical and social environment was fairly radical for its time, such a continuum of mind, culture and ecosystem is firmly rooted in indigenous cultures, in particular the embrace of the web of life by Native Americans. The Immersionists' experiment in extended environmental being may have been the largest such practice within an industrial context. After the Immersionist era, such ideas began to be embraced by art theorists using terms such as social practices and relational aesthetics. In a similar shift, psychologists began using the terms embodied cognition and extended cognition as a new framework for understanding the interplay between the mind and the surrounding world. A discourse on environmental poetics continued to emerge as late as 2023 in books such as The Environmental Unconscious by Steven Swarbrick. By 2024, sociologists had begun to speak of emotional and "connective labor" to address the loss of personal human contact within industrialized social systems. In an interview on PublicBooks.org, the sociologist Allison Pugh discusses how the context in which connective labor takes place determines the quality of personal connections:
Although theorists in the arts and social sciences became increasingly interested in the emotional value of living social networks after the Brooklyn Immersionists transformed Williamsburg, Immersionism remains a gold standard due to the ecological depth of its theory and culture, and the transformative impact it had on a struggling neighborhood in New York City. Indeed, a timeline of events in Williamsburg by Ward Shelley that has been exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum and discussed in the New York Times, refers to the Immersionist upwelling in the early 1990s as "The Golden Era." of Williamsburg’s cultural emergence.
Although the waterfront community's fusion of mental, social and physical realms eventually led to a consensus online to use the umbrella label, "Immersionism," the interdisciplinary community spoke of many different forms of immersion. Their terms included "circuitous systems" (Jessica Nissen), "close-to-the-pulse" (Genia Gould, Breukelen), "endless tissue" (Ebon Fisher, Nerve Circle), "environmental improv" (Yvette Helin, Green Room), "everybody does everything" (Alejandra Giudici, Lalalandia), "to gain a sensitivity" (Jeff Gompertz, Fake Shop), "globs of desires" (Laurel Casey, Waterfront Week), "publishing network" (Kit Blake, Worm), "a very alive whole" (Kelly Webb, Thrust), "omnisensorial" (Lalalandia), and "vibrate" (Anna Hurwitz, co-producer of the Cats Heads, Flytrap, Organism and Mustard).
Not to be mistaken for immersive computer games or virtual reality, Immersionism in Williamsburg, Brooklyn emphasized deep participation in the actual neighborhood where the artists lived. According to the art historian, Jonathan Fineberg, Williamsburg's creative community was "returning to immediate experience, to the body, and to a neighborhood cultural interaction". Although the personal computers of the era were used, the technology was largely applied to print publications and integrated into immersive physical architectures and events in the neighborhood.
The emphasis on year round environmental engagement also distinguished Brooklyn Immersionism from more temporary forms of interactive culture like Fluxus, the Happenings 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.
In many ways Immersionism and its environmental ethic grew out of its ecosystem. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the dilapidated waterfront, abandoned warehouses and desolate streets often had the preternatural attraction of a wilderness. It was a condition the local cartoonist, Tony Millionaire humorously characterized as an "urban pastoral" in his comic strip for Williamsburg's popular 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 from such conditions:
In Waterfront Week, Laurel Casey not only aestheticizes her immersion in Williamsburg's streets, she even characterizes the district's decrepit condition as sacred. The traditional rite of immersion, virtual death, and rebirth are played out in a new secular form:
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 different art forms, and their sense of “place as a web of convergent forces”. In his introduction to the exhibit, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, Fineberg described how some of the work reflected the toxic nature of their north Brooklyn home:
In connection with the district's toxic conditions, the art historian 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 installations in Williamsburg's abandoned warehouses and streets employed a language of healing, rebirth and animal vitality. Interactivity and feedback, a fundamental property of living things, were popular strategies in the neighborhood, rising to the level of a primary aesthetic. Hit and Run Theater, while not explicitly referencing biology in its name, emphasized visceral interaction with the public. Other immersive theater companies like Floating Point Unit, Nerve Circle and the Institute for Aesthetic Modulation (IFAM) actually referenced biofeedback systems in their names. Floating Point Unit (FPU) echoed the mathematics behind feedback-driven "fuzzy logic,” and its director, Jeff Gompertz explored live video feeds in a mesh of interactions on the company’s sets. Nerve Circle's immersive media rituals, such as the Perpetual Eyeball Scanning Party at its loft on Grand Street, and communal "Media Compressions" at Minor Injury Gallery, explored the nurturing properties of communal information synthesis. Like many theater companies, Nerve Circle was composed of a director, Ebon Fisher and an evolving set of participants – a circle of nerves in effect. The French art historian, Frank Popper has noted in the book, Contemporary Artists, that Fisher's goal was to induce a local nervous system by cultivating "the living properties of information" and to nurture collective "media organisms.” In a similar fashion the "omnisensorial" collective, Lalalandia often used the term "techno-organic" to describe a variety of interactions the group had with their social, electronic and physical environment. Their interactions were not limited to the boundaries of the club, but included the recycling of materials scavenged from Williamsburg's abandoned factories, and creating a network of projects in the neighborhood. They even maintained an old bus to drive their audiences from one industrial location to another. It was painted silver in keeping with the factories and refrigerated warehouses where their creations emerged. 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 established that interaction with the larger community was a fundamental goal:
Genia Gould, with the help of Ethan Pettit, launched Waterfront Week in much the same spirit. The weekly format allowed for a constant stream of letters from the public, casual cut-and-paste advertising, and a comic strip, Medea's Weekend by Tony Millionaire which explored an imaginary version of Williamsburg. In 1992 Gould 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 the community, she stated in the opening editorial:
As early as January 1990, Ladislav Czernek posted 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 Verge. These meetings led to the launching of the seminal Immersionist event, The Sex Salon. Opening on Valentine's Day 1990, the three-day festival presented works by nearly a hundred artists from a range of disciplines. Celebrating a fluid vision of sexuality, the event attracted hundreds of viewers. As music historian, Cisco Bradley points out, the evocative event was generated through discussion and consensus and "...set the tone for future events, queered the social expectations, and sparked much of the community which followed."
The Sex Salon's playful title underscored the emerging community's desire to engage a public outside academic and specialized art circles. Bradley quotes Ebon Fisher who states that the title was “an early indication of the Immersionist’s interest in corporeal connection.” Finding sensuous satisfaction in connecting with their own living world, many Immersionists questioned the late 20th century academic fixation 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 that had emerged out of the postmodern milieu had 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. In an interview by Brainard Carey with Ebon Fisher on Yale University Radio, WYBC (AM) in 2016, connections were discussed between ecology and cultural concerns. The website for Carey's program states:
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. After studying under the conceptual artist Vito Acconci at SUNY Purchase, Dennis Del Zotto began to explore a form of social fermentation by inserting inflatable pods into various environments. The large, abandoned warehouses in Williamsburg allowed Del Zotto, AKA AirZotto, to create a parallel architecture out of sheet plastic and fans from local hardware stores. Locations also included clubs such as El Sensorium, Fake Shop, Ongolia and Galapagos Art Space. The large, organically elegant 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:
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".
Many of the Immersionists commuted to Manhattan for work and were familiar with that neighboring borough's deeply rooted arts institutions. What they experienced, however, was not enticing them to endure its more expensive living conditions. Manhattan's cultural paradigms, modernism and postmodernism, seemed to be on the wane and a sense of passion and wide open innovation was missing from the culture. In many ways their decaying industrial world in Brooklyn was more coherent, personal and moving. The geographical separation from Manhattan's arts establishment allowed a warmer, more primal sense of connection to their local environment to emerge. Although Williamsburg's impoverished streets were more bleak in the 1980s and 1990s, the creative community and its DIY culture of participation was less alienating.
Furthermore, while 19th and 20th century modernism had given birth to a heroic search for technological miracles and abstract truths and art forms, a sense of skepticism, irony and alienation began to set into western culture towards the end of the 20th century. As modern technology and culture began to severely pollute the skies, soil and social bonds alike, postmodernism emerged to cast doubt on all modernist truths and grand narratives. When the Immersionist scene first began to appear in the late 1980s, Manhattan's cultural establishment had settled around a deconstructive and critical approach to culture marked by ironic Punk and New Wave music, disorienting architecture, 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 critical postmodern theory and practice.
Geographic separation from Manhattan and an immersion in a sparsely populated section of Williamsburg, allowed the new creative community to benefit from what ecologists like Aldo Leopold have called edge effects. 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. 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 an ironic, postmodern discourse with a highly institutionalized “art world” that seemed to shut this new generation out. 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 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." Brooklyn Immersionism did not simply surround a group of humans with spectacle, but involved an extended ecosystem that reached deep into the neighborhood. 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 invited 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 immersion in a living world. That national and international media outlets such as Newsweek, The Drama Review, Flash Art, Wired, Die Zeit, Domus and Fuji Television would report on the community's new theories of eco-cultural immersion suggests that a new urban think tank was beginning to bypass Manhattan’s cultural industry to influence the larger culture. In his book, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, the art historian Jonathan Fineberg notes the community’s early embrace of the internet and other technologies, a sensibility that seemed to grow naturally out of an abandoned industrial neighborhood. Fineberg discusses the “disconcerting expressionism of the set of human harnesses in Mary Traynor's Horror of Human Need [which] rely on a body empathy.” The historian also makes a note of Kit Blake’s concern with corporate welfare and contrasts it with the more local social innovations of Williamsburg that were emerging out of the new media technologies of the 1990s:
In the 2000 edition, Fineberg discusses the work of Blake’s occasional collaborator, Ebon Fisher who lived half a block away on Grand Street. The historian moves from the invisible threads of community to the immateriality of the internet, leaving behind an impression that echoes Blakes and Traynor’s concerns about human need and social change:
The Immersionists’ reconnection with the world, however, was not just an academic exercise to replace postmodernism and critical theory with new urban policies. To use Fisher’s term, it was a “submodern” and visceral form of local enchantment. Turning Williamsburg's streets, rooftops, dance clubs and media systems into settings for such enchantment was a 24 hour enterprise in the neighborhood. Ocularis’ rooftop screenings and performance groups such as Hit and Run Theater, Alien Action and the Pedestrian Project were critical contributors to this process. Moving their work out of the galleries and formal theaters, the artists and musicians animated the entire world where they lived. Yvette Helin's Pedestrian Project 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 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 that invited participation. In a similar fashion, by drawing local Williamsburg personalities and settings into his weekly comic strip, Medea's Weekend, Tony Millionaire cast the neighborhood in a warm, 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 and Millionaire immersed Williamsburg’s community in a charged, liminal space between the two. By humorously modeling local public engagement they encouraged more of it.
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. As one resident, Tawana McNeil is quoted saying in Jonathan Fineberg’s exhibition catalogue for Out of Town: the Williamsburg Paradigm: "There's too much shooting, too much drugs. But I like the jams, the block parties."
According to the music historian, Cisco Bradley, one of the first references to an immersive aesthetic in the community's literature appeared in Fisher’s manifesto, You Sub Mod, which is signed by the artist's production nom de plume, Nerve Circle. In The Williamsburg Avant-Garde, Bradley notes that the 1988 manifesto celebrated a “submodern” orientation hovering below established belief systems. Where Guy de Bord's Society of the Spectacle and Warhol's postmodern culture of surfaces seemed to lead to a state of paralysis, You Sub Mod suggests "integrating into the endless unfolding of spectacles" and burrowing, in effect, into whatever undefinable reality one might encounter:
Bradley follows that with another quote from Fisher 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." Cultivating communal "media organisms" was another way the artist and writer described the process, a term picked up by Frank Popper in the art history book, Contemporary Artists, and by Jennifer Dalton for The Performing Arts Journal.
In the early 1990s, large social confluences referencing biological forms in their names became almost annual focal points for such congealing: The Sex Salon, Cats Head I and II, Flytrap, Human Fest and Organism. As the choreographer, Melanie Hahn Roche writes 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 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 “esthetic 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 was set up by the immersive theater company, Nerve Circle. Using tape and traffic cones to set aside a space for interactive installations, the goal was to build relationships between studio artists, their neighbors and their shared environment. The term “weird thing zone” was used as a substitute for “art” and “gallery” to keep the focus on living systems and the mystery of creative interaction within an undefined public realm. As with many of the projects and events the Immersionists initiated, a dynamic was in play to move beyond the lofty realms of modernism, and the equally ethereal, but often alienating postmodernism, and return to a natural and even affectionate relationship with the immediate world (submodernism). As Hurwitz intimated, the interaction was the goal. Rose quotes the local activist, Chris Lanier on how the Weird Thing Zone connected with people at the Grand Street Waterfront Festival where it was immersed:
Submodern immersion and participation were neighborly endeavors that in many ways bypassed one of the deepest mechanisms of the modern/postmodern world: commercialism. In "Brooklyn Unbound" Rose quotes another contributor to the Weird Thing Zone, Worm Magazine's publisher Kit Blake, 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."
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:
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:
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:
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, raw materials, music, audiences and their environment 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 begin to embrace later as a form of extended mind, an embodied, networked, and exploratory thought process which lasted years and penetrated deep into Brooklyn. 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."
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 across the Brooklyn Bridge and 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 the city. 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 all night warehouse events on Williamsburg’s waterfront. Immersive performances at Mustard such as Water and IFAM’s Bosch Food Chain, alluded to ecological systems while immersing audiences in a writhing, atmospheric garden of humans, plants and machines. 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 large 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:
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:
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.
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:
In its Web Jam Manifesto of 1993, Nerve Circle celebrated the convulsive, ecstatic nature of the neighborhood's creativity as "one really strange continuum":
Several musicians did attempt to dance within Williamsburg's Organism as wandering performers, including members of the band Thrust in blue body makeup, the singer and guitarist Tim Robert from Dream Prescription, 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.
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 often did the opposite: it 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.
Just as the European Renaissance and 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:
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 through a loss of control, death, and renewal.
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 a rewilding industrial waterfront. Conceptualizing 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.
It is important to underscore that the Brooklyn Immersionists' physical immersion in a local ecosystem, like the original Greek immersio and the Hindu notion of a "Holy Bath" was transformative for both participant and ecosystem alike. In contrast, the shallow forms of "immersive media" in VR headsets and digital games usually isolates the individual consumer from its living environment. Connecting with others who may be participating from a distance only forms a temporary community devoid of any common environment.
In many ways, Brooklyn's ecological Immersionism had more in common with the ecstatic nature communion of the ancients than the consumer technologies of the 21st century.
While ecological thinking can be observed in all ancient and indigenous cultures, the first academic reflections on ecology in the West 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 movements, along with a stream of imagery pouring in from the biological sciences. Ernst Haeckel's drawings of writhing microscopic lifeforms, for instance, contributed to 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 of the Brooklyn Immersionists were children during the emergence of The Living Theater in New York and Europe, the experimental company's radical principle of bringing art into the streets to catalyze social change helped to influence Punk music luminaries and Immersionists alike.
Coming of age during the flowering of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, while also absorbing 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 the world where they lived.
References in the Williamsburg community's writings to immersion, participation and renewal were extensive. As early as 1982, El Puente's very name, "The Bridge," evoked a healing connection to neighborhood youth. Ebon Fisher's Nerve Circle 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 uses the term immersion in Waterfront Week as she draws the reader into a chimerical ride through the neighborhood:
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, Ruth Kahn and other members of the Outpost spoke of their media practice in Williamsburg as entering another kind of liquid, a "neuroelectronic brew". Other references to immersive 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".
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 the aesthetic. 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 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 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. 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.
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 maintained that involving the public was intended to be transformative:
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 help attract the wider community to protests 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. The project was repeated every other year for a decade, becoming a popular community event for artists and neighbors alike.
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 many members 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.
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 and disinvestment by the City of New York, Williamsburg went into severe economic decline. Its revitalization began with the formation of activist groups like Los Sures and The People's Firehouse in the 1970s, and the establishment of the creative educational program, El Puente in 1982. In the late 1980s, open mic nights at the Bog and the Lizard’s Tail Cabaret, and events at Ladislav Czernek's repurposed warehouse space, Epoché began to seed a creative network. There were early signs of an Immersionist aesthetic at Epoché in June 1989 where the biologically informed exhibit, Emergent Forms took place featuring references to neuronets in an “interactive environment” by Kit Blake. That same year, Nerve Circle staged a performance at Epoché with Ebon Fisher on mic, Scott Grande on drums and Theresa Podlesney aggressively scanning the audience with a video camera and projecting it live on a screen. Blake and Nerve Circle's creations suggest that technological developments like artificial intelligence and surveillance systems were as critical to the formation of an Immersionist discourse as the communal formations at the clubs and cabarets.
Another early arts establishment in North Brooklyn, Minor Injury, initially opened in Greenpoint, but when its founder, Mo Bahc retired, the new director, Kevin Pyle, moved the politically engaged gallery to Grand Street in 1990 to be closer to the emerging Immersionist scene near the waterfront.
The first major event to gather an interdisciplinary mix of artists, The Sex Salon, opened on Valentine's Day, 1990, at Epoché. An early cross-section of Immersionists formulated the event and included members of Minor Injury, the Lizard's Tail, Nerve Circle, Waterfront Week, Word of Mouth, and the band, Versus. 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, erotic 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:
Five months after the Sex Salon, 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." Street, warehouse, and rooftop events began to spread to the rest of Williamsburg, and a network of local media emerged. These included Hit and Run Theater's street productions, the Pedestrian Project which grew out of the Green Room, and Nerve Circle's interactive media experiments like the Weird Thing Zone on Grand Street and collective "Media Compressions" at Minor Injury Gallery. A second, larger Cat's Head appeared in an abandoned warehouse by the waterfront which immersed audiences in a night of dancing, art and music near the waterfront. In the Village Voice, Helena Mulkerns described how the event easily became an extension of its postindustrial environment:
By 1993, the Immersionist community had helped to launch five large interdisciplinary gatherings in Williamsburg’s abandoned warehouses, growing larger and more layered with each iteration: The Sex Salon, Cats Head I and II, Flytrap and Organism. Another influential warehouse experiment to emerge in the early 1990s was the night club, Keep Refrigerated which helped to establish several other groups and venues: the night club, Room Temperature; a project group, Lalalandia; and the second hand music shop, Earwax. Room Temperature gave birth to Floating Point Unit and FakeShop, and Lalalandia, in turn, 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:
Wines also explored the weblike nature of two projects initiated by Nerve Circle: the large, all night community event, Organism and a climbable structure built into Nerve Circle studio as an infrastructure for experimental media events:
Drawing the new media technologies of the early 1990s into Williamsburg's creative ecosystem, all of these Immersionist media groups explored different strategies for bending the technology away from its intended purpose as a profit maximizing tool, into more organic and communal purposes. 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. 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 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. Her series, Hybrid Nights (1994–1999), became one of the most popular events of that experimental arts center. The announcement for the very first event touches on many Immersionist themes: "Body & language, sound & form, earth & air, interruptions & concentration." 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, 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:
With semi-annual projects like Gene Pool’s Crest Hardware Show penetrating deep into a local Williamsburg hardware store, and the opening of the interdisciplinary club, Galapagos with its innovative burlesque shows and resident film collective, Ocularis, the struggling district enjoyed a renaissance. Williamsburg had evolved from an industrial area that was losing jobs overseas and enduring an explosion of violent crime, 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. The 1990s in Williamsburg, dubbed the “Golden Era" in Ward Shelley’s print, The Williamsburg Timeline, was eventually overwhelmed by a very different kind of gold. As stated in the introduction, a partnership between real estate financiers and the City of New York, neither of which could claim actual immersion in the creative district, resulted in rezoning and tax abatement measures that strictly favored corporations. A steep rise in the cost of living followed this classic form of corporate welfare, undermining Williamsburg's revitalized village culture and the ability of many of its artists and musicians to remain in the neighborhood. The creative community was largely made up of renters and had nothing to protect them from the takeover. A less intimate, mass produced corporate culture moved in, replacing the eco-cultural movement that made it possible.
By the turn of the 21st century, Williamsburg's creative upwelling had been 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.
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 in the Village Voice and the Drama Review appeared on the Cats Head warehouse gatherings. In 1993, the European art journal, Flash Art noted that the neighborhood's immersive "tradition" had made its way to Williamsburg's first large commercial gallery, Test-Site. Initiated by one of its artists, Ebon Fisher, the gallery’s 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. As listed in Worm Magazine, the salon was “totally open, noncurated, no size limitation, any medium." By eliminating restrictions on size and medium, the entire gallery was turned into an experiment in emergent, communal design. The gallery director, Annie Herron stated in Flash Art that “At first I thought it was crazy”, but then admitted the Salon of the Mating Spiders had become her best-selling show. The event was announced with a poster by Minor Injury's new 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, 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.
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 who created mobile architecture for communal gatherings. Volado later went on to establish the Greenpoint Film Festival. Fisher’s solo show for Test-Site, "Heat-Seeking Psycho-Suctions" (1992) involved audience-triggered projections on the floor of the darkened gallery. The interactive exhibit trapped viewers in a variety of networks, providing an early commentary on the seductions and hazards of social media. The digital code behind these “media organisms” were sold along with their projection apparatus so the code behind the exhibit could be cultivated memetically. This was a unique approach to culture for the time and discussed in Wired Magazine, Digital Creativity, Fuji Television, Domus, and several art history books.
Inspired by Williamsburg's emerging presence in the press, the art historian Jonathan Fineberg flew out from the University of Illinois to study 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 artists 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 community’s warehouse event, Organism, and Melissa Rossi was discussing Organism's cultural strategy, the "web jam" and Lalalandia's term, the "omnisensorial sweepout" 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 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. Jarmusch's scene featured a conversation between the actors Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan sitting next to the dark reflecting pool at Galapagos, a symbol of the club's devotion to ecological immersion.
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 Immersionist works with strong messages about interdependence in his book, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. These included a wall piece by Kit Blake that lights a copy of the New York Times’ Real Estate section on fire, Ebon Fisher's bionic code, Link with Distressed Humans, and an elastic and steel sculpture by Mary Traynor called Horror of Human Need. 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."
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.
Along 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:
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:
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. Nerve Circle cultivated community through living social media experiments in a variety of locations, including the streets, an abandoned factory, Minor Injury Gallery and its own loft above a furniture factory on Grand Street. The geographic separation of these groups and venues 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 earlier 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 Nose, The Curse and other zines were dedicated to building a local discourse on a range of concerns, from the philosophical to the political to the ecological. 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 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 and extensive national and international media attention. 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:
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:
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:
Casey then takes the fever deeper:
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.
In 1996, Neil Straus noted in the New York Times that Manhattan's ambient club scene at the time had drawn its inspiration from the "pioneers" of the "early 1990's in Williamsburg, Brooklyn." However, where the Brooklyn Immersionists cultivated gatherings and venues that connected to their local environment, many of Manhattan's clubs focused on 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 culture was natural for such a borough, but it contrasted vividly with Williamsburg's ecological and more neighborly forms of Immersion. Sound artists like Sweet did speak of how "context over content" informed the design of his Manhattan space, but the context in question was deliberately limited to the inside of the club.
Enclosed immersive venues had many antecedents, whether of the experimental black box or proscenium arch variety. Even more recent precursors such as 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 spectacles with little connection to a larger ecosystem. Although a feedback loop at the Trips Festival emerged between performers, technology and audience, the emphasis was on individual pleasuring rather than the well-being of the larger ecosystem. In keeping with 19th and 20th century orientations, high technology was glorified as an end in itself, not a means to connect more deeply with nature. This techno worship is evident in the very title of Warhol's multimedia shows, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
In the late 1960s, when the Trips Festival and Warhol's sound and light shows were appearing, humanism was a fully established belief system, a form of species-centrism which even the counter culture treated as inviolable. That new forms of technology were mixing things up a bit did not shift the underlying assumption: celebrating reality was a celebration of humanity, and in many cases the individual's own existence to the exclusion of other people. 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 humanity's species-centric orientation.
Between the 1960s and the 1990s the human-centric world began to lose its allure. 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 which signaled a significant shift from humanism to ecological thinking. 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". The district's immersive events, rooftop gatherings, street culture and networked zines began to nurture 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 Williamsburg's crime-ridden and toxic nature at the time, 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" and "web jams" (Nerve Circle). The Immersionists, in effect, were suspended in a common "green room," a term celebrated in the name of one of the scene's popular havens, The Green Room.
Since the Immersionist movement emerged in Williamsburg, ambient environments have not only appeared in nightclubs, but also galleries, digital simulations, and even in walk-in corporate advertising experiences. Most of these bounded immersions, however, are divorced from a larger social and ecological context and do not reflect the sensual, political and ecological involvement that the Brooklyn Immersionists were encouraging. 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 millennium. 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: "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..."
Digital social networks, however, were already connecting university labs in the 1970s and the biological version of the network has been around for as long as there have been animal migration routes, 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".
To live a creative life seven days a week inside such an environment was fundamentally different from the specialized, and product-focused culture industries, even when those industries use the label "immersive". Where the Brooklyn Immersionists gave birth to a deeply interactive, civic and ecological paradigm, the bounded variety of immersion has removed a sense of political and ecological agency from participants, often with intention. Likewise, where the deep culture of 24 hour neighborhood immersion in Williamsburg helped to catalyze a borough-wide renaissance, the bounded variant has been limited to selling products and services which are often divorced from a wholesome, well-integrated lifeworld.
In the new millennium, the City of New York's support for corporate developers in Williamsburg accelerated the cost of living and turned many of the Immersionists and their neighbors into economic refugees from the district they had rejuvenated. As Su Friedrich showed in her documentary, Gut Renovation, a demonstrably less gentle culture moved in. The term "gentrification" is sometimes used to soften the blow of corporate colonization, but the City's deliberate rezoning for high rises, and its tax abatements which favored large construction projects, had nothing to do with free markets and individual home buyers. Artists like Friedrich were renters, not home owners, and were in no position to take advantage of the corporate welfare program that was unleashed on Williamsburg and the surrounding borough. Friedrich was even forced out of her own loft by a developer while making her film.
Williamsburg's takeover by city-subsidized real estate companies 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 gradual or gentle about the shift. 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. Such corporate welfare reflects a larger process taking over democracies 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 and was largely prevented from financing its own revival due to red lining and banking restrictions that favored corporations, nevertheless began a slow creative revival through cultural, educational, and small business initiatives. City-sponsored developers essentially seized the community once the bottom-up village economy had made the neighborhood viable and the crime had eased.
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 their decade of activity. 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 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 occupations sponsored by governments. 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 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".
Terms like "gentrification" have tended to lump artists and small businesses 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 city policies that only benefit large developers.
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 renters (artists and average citizens) and beneficiaries of corporate welfare. It can even 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. The term "gentrification" can even make matters 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 and immersive approach to life.
In 2014, Abby Ellin’s article for the New York Times, "The Brooklyn Brand Goes Global” acknowledges the alternative and progressive culture at the roots of Brooklyn's transformations in the 1990s, and dismisses some of the lifestyle clichés projected onto the borough by outsiders. Ellin concludes:
Co-optation, however, was not just a branding exercise for foreign fashion labels. The creative independence that Ellin speaks of in neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Fort Greene were deliberately leveraged by the City of New York to engineer the wave of corporate welfare projects which overwhelmed the creative community and even upended the intimate, local business growth which had begun to return after decades of disinvestment by the city. Such co-optation by corporations is becoming better understood, but what is less familiar is the parallel wave of corporate co-optation of local neighborhood narratives. Like big box stores and other monopolies that take customers away from local businesses, corporate press in the new millennium has tended to upstage the rich, creative webs of connection within a community. The agency of local artists, small businesses and the citizens in general is often neutralized. The corporate press has also tended to hide from the public the kinds of authentic, hands-on community building strategies that actually worked in Williamsburg, strategies that could be emulated successfully in other post-industrial cities and towns. Rather than investigate the Immersionist culture of neighborhood engagement, superficial style labels like “bohemians” and “hipsters" were increasingly projected onto the scene. They were rebranded, in effect, as style-conscious, passive consumers of the corporate economy which eventually replaced them. In his book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde, Cisco Bradley discusses how the City of New York devalued the artists and residents of Williamsburg, justifying their displacement:
A similar process of neighborhood distortion and neutralization on the opposite coast sheds light on the exploitation of Brooklyn's creative community. The music industry in Seattle, with support from the mainstream press, turned a creative, and often very egalitarian street culture into a product referred to as “grunge” in the late 1980s. Bruce Pavitt, one of the founders of the indie rock record label, Sub Pop, laments the loss of the communal ethos that informed grunge in an interview with Spin Magazine. Speaking about a book of photos he assembled that documented the band, Nirvana, and its breakthrough album, Nevermind, Pavitt states in 2012:
A decade after Ellin wrote “The Brooklyn Brand Goes Global,” Williamsburg and Fort Greene continued to emerge as creative hubs, and did so despite the economic impediments presented by corporate socialism. However, the New York Times not only continued to mislabel Brooklyn's ecologically aware culture as "hipster", but co-opted Brooklyn's narrative to draw attention back to Manhattan. This was not just a case of poorly researched journalism, but a transparent attempt at catch up. As Joseph Giovannini stated in the Architectural Record in 2019, "[Brooklyn has] taken the baton of avant-gardism from Manhattan and run with it at uncatchable speeds. Manhattan was stuck." Manhattan's naked competition with Brooklyn was vividly on display in a Williamsburg timeline presented by the New York Times in 2024. The story, "Williamsburg. What Happened?" begins on the cover of the paper's Lifestyle section and continues through several pages of the print edition. Rather than cite a single Brooklyn periodical to answer the question posed by the title, or for that matter interview a Brooklyn professor, Cisco Bradley that had just come out with a book on the Williamsburg avant-garde, the New York Times quotes itself nine times and even gives a nod to its own cultural history, characterizing Williamsburg in the late 1980s as “reminiscent of the Lower East Side in the early 1980s.” The Daily News, New York Magazine, Timeout and other Manhattan periodicals are also referenced, and the timeline even features a photo of four copies of New York Magazine fanned out like products in a store window. Manhattan’s media institutions, in effect, are presented as both subject and source of Williamsburg's narrative.
On the matter of Williamsburg's culinary world, the same New York Times timeline states: “A Times critic notes that Williamsburg, as a dining destination, 'is slowly becoming visible against the Milky Way of Manhattan restaurants.’” Rendering invisible Brooklynites' own views on the matter, it uses Brooklyn's narrative to present Manhattan’s restaurants on a galactic scale. In a similar fashion, the timeline quotes another Times writer, Frank Bruni who compares a popular Williamsburg restaurant, Cafe de la Esquina to a famous Manhattan nightclub from the 1970s, calling it “Studio 54 with chipotle instead of cocaine.” By giving Manhattan restaurants a cosmic allure and invoking nightclub nostalgia, even of a shabby chic nature, the creative evolution of Williamsburg away from decadence and into passionate environmental stewardship is co-opted to maintain a Manhattan publicity advantage.
In another form of co-optation, the New York Times timeline characterizes Williamsburg at the end of the 20th century as “a cheap-rent paradise for artists and, finally, a prime destination for developers and international luxury brands.” Underscoring Ellin’s thesis that co-optation of Brooklyn includes a downplaying of Brooklyn’s “desire to be counterculture,” the Times makes it clear in 2024 that the corporate takeover is what matters. Effectively neutralizing both artists’ and activists’ agency in the neighborhood, Ellin’s term, “counterculture” is dropped and the less threatening moniker, “pure bohemia” is substituted. In addition, the use of the phrase “finally, a prime destination” positions the colonization of Williamsburg as a worthy goal and erases the mechanisms of rezoning and corporate welfare which enabled it.
Furthermore, the New York Times’ phrase, “cheap-rent paradise for artists” is both inaccurate, given the weekly shootings in the district at the time, and an insult to artists as it also suggests that such difficult conditions are appropriate for them. Not stopping at the denigration of Brooklyn's creative community, the same Times' Lifestyle article also reduces immigrants to entertaining, dysfunctional “types” rather than fully dimensional human beings. Had the newspaper investigated Brooklyn's own documentation of the 1990s era or interviewed members of cultural institutions still in operation such as El Puente or The Outpost, they would have found a more compelling and humane narrative than that of a "prime destination" for luxury brands.
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. This indifference from a Manhattan paper is particularly disconcerting because Williamsburg’s economic collapse in the 1970s and 1980s was propelled by Manhattan’s own business community which had transferred much of New York's industrial production overseas. Williamsburg's Sex Salon, which opened at Epoché on Valentine’s Day, 1990, is also omitted. The three day festival was the district’s first major gathering of artists and musicians and possibly New York’s first interdisciplinary celebration of non-binary sexuality.
The timeline did reference some of the large warehouse events that followed the Sex Salon, but these complex community-building gatherings are presented with infantilizing descriptions, a classic form of colonial distortion. The Cat’s Head, for example, was described simply as "It’s an art show. It’s a concert. It’s a party.” A photograph of a planning circle for Organism was introduced in a section titled "Where It's At," but without any mention of the web jam's roots in Jazz and Native American devotion to the web of life. There is no mention of the Native American, Vernon Bigman who has joined the circle and was documenting the historical moment with a video camera. A poster for the Flytrap by Stavit Alweiss is presented with no mention of how its interconnected, biomorphic imagery reflected the creative community’s collaborative spirit. Devoid of any interviews with Williamsburg’s Immersionist community, the district's emerging ecological culture is conspicuously absent from the New York Times’ portrayal. It's as if Manhattan’s own bohemian torpor, left over from mid 20th century existentialism, were being grafted onto a creative, post-industrial force across the river that had surpassed the industrialists.
Had the New York Times taken the care to investigate the district's own historical material on the matter, it would have determined that a creative force was emerging that not only rejuvenated a district the City of New York had abandoned, but was moving far beyond modernism, postmodernism, and even commercialism. "Williamsburg. What Happened?" seemed to co-opt the entire topic of Brooklyn's transformations to promote Manhattan, the very borough which had abandoned Williamsburg in the first place. Furthermore, despite a few humorous asides, it largely glorifies the Manhattan real estate industries which exploited the unusual recovery.
The timeline does helpfully point out that Manhattan's corporate developers, with support from the City of New York, began to take over Williamsburg real estate as early as 1999. 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. Colonization, whether by empires or corporations, has always involved both mental and physical forms. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon provides a framework for understanding the corporate takeover of both land and narrative in Williamsburg:
The music historian, Cisco Bradley is not reticent about using the word "colonization" to characterize the Manhattan establishment’s takeover of Williamsburg’s culture and community. In 2023, Bradley states in The Williamsburg Avant-Garde:
Not every media outlet, however, has reduced Williamsburg’s innovative community in the 1990s to Manhattan’s lifestyle markers “hipster” and “pure bohemia." In 2016, Brainard Carey excoriates the term “hipster” and 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 continues:
Breaking free from a 20th century paradigm of the alienated artist, and embracing a vivid sense of shared environmental being, the Immersionists created a model that has spread through academic 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. Although the Immersionist revival of Williamsburg was exploited in the new millennium by city-corporate partnerships, Immersionism's philosophical influence on Brooklyn and the wider culture is extensive.
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. Other community-based groups based in Williamsburg continued to operate well into the new millennium such as Circus Amok and the Bindlestiff Family circus. Driven out of its building by developers in the 1990s, one of the original Immersionist organizations, The Outpost moved to Ridgewood in the new millennium. New groups have emerged in Bushwick and Fort Greene in Brooklyn, and in nearby Ridgewood, Queens. The ecologically engaged, experimental artists’ collective, Woodbine also emerged in Ridgewood soon after the Outpost’s relocation. According to The Guardian, among Woodbine’s goals is to “organize a farm share, offer yoga classes, screen films and host lectures on topics including universal healthcare and climate disinformation.” In 2013 BRIC Arts opened Media House, a multi-disciplinary arts center to the public.
In many ways, the Immersionists anticipated a planetwide shift towards interdisciplinary culture, social practices in the arts, 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" near the Williamsburg waterfront, a professor at Yale University noticed a similar embrace of a wider, living context for his colleagues' work. Nicholas Wolterstorff states in a PBS interview in 2020:
Even the world of commerce began to pick up on these ecological themes. In 2025 a coffee company associated with Aldi supermarkets has extolled the virtues of its fair trade practices and referenced the interconnections of nature in its marketing, stating on the back of its Sumatra ground coffee, “We live & breathe the whole experience.” Litigation has been attempted against some businesses, such as Coca-Cola, that have used the language of sustainability to market products that have not actually reduced the amount of plastic it introduces into the planet’s oceans and landfills, a marketing practice known as “greenwashing." Nevertheless, the Brooklyn Immersionists set the stage for a green culture that has spread to both the commercial and non-commercial sectors at least in principle.
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 echoes Immersionist philosophy:
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:
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 discusses Ebon Fisher's early paradigmatic shift in a catalog for the artist's 2006 museum retrospective, Transformations in the Nervepool:
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 minds and local economies, it has anticipated new theories in psychology, and predates a social practices art discourse that emerged in the academic sphere in the new millennium. Conferences dedicated to grassroots local development such as the Economics of Happiness opened decades later in Berkeley, California in 2012. The group Local Futures launched World Localization Day in 2020, thirty years after the Sex Salon brought the creative forces of Williamsburg together.[1]
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.
Over two decades after the Immersionists were coming together in multidimensional convergences and celebrating life in the form of an ecological web jam, Adrian David Nelson, in his book, Origins of Consciousness, suggests that the universe may be an "evolving, vital and creative" process, and may be thought of more as an organism than a machine. Like the Immersionists' references to "subjective ecology" and constructs that embrace hybrid forms of "internal/external" and "physical/psychological" presence, Nelson suggests that the physical world 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:
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: