The beauty of a rewilding

Biological interconnection: Flytrap poster by Stavit Allweis, 1991

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

According to the art historian, Jonathan Fineberg, Williamsburg's creative community was moving beyond self-contained art forms to create "a richer, more dynamically interacting whole"^[17] and "returning to immediate experience, to the body, and to a neighborhood cultural interaction".^[17] The emphasis on year round environmental engagement distinguished Brooklyn Immersionism from more human-centric and 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, a condition the local cartoonist, Tony Millionaire humorously characterized as an "urban pastoral"^[40] in a strip for Williamsburg's 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".^[41] Writing for the London-based Mute Magazine in 1997, Peter Boerboom discusses how a creative practice in Williamsburg emerged from such conditions:

"As you ride the L train beneath the silent weight of the water or cruise over the looming Williamsburg Bridge, you cross a cultural schism. On one side Wall Street's financial engines hum endlessly, on the other empty warehouses and factories lie abandoned. On one side the energy of commerce drives human interaction, while on the other the ethic of neighborhood still binds communities. On one side the established art world is slick and lucrative business, on the other, up from between the cracks in the concrete and through the windows of the abandoned warehouses, grows a vibrant creative community."^[42]

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:

"The soil is very dark and feels deliciously heavy in my hands. How can something so toxic be so beautiful? I want to take a bite of it. I want to BE it. About a foot beneath the dark, scrumptious dirt there's a layer of red clay. Beneath that, a two-inch layer of city mishmash. Pieces of cement, glass, chicken bones, clothes pins. Below that, the rats and the angels... My home town friends would suggest I move back to Vermont... But they don't see that the potholes are the ONLY entrance into the underground where all the answers lie. They assume, from watching too many Star Trek episodes or reading Appalachian hiking guides or Zen Buddhist propaganda, that there are other options. The answer, as strange as it seems, lies beneath Williamsburg. This is a sacred dump."^[22]

Living in a district on the edge of economic and environmental collapse, active transformation of their social and physical environment seemed of greater importance to these creative urbanists than the positioning of isolated modules of art and music within an assumed "art world" across the river. Suzan Wines wrote in Domus Magazine of the Immersionists' organic fusion of the arts, and their sense of "place as a web of convergent forces".^[12] In his introduction to the exhibit, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, Professor Jonathan Fineberg described how some of the work reflected the toxic nature of their north Brooklyn home:

"The old motor oil dripping down between the layers of Kit Blake's Oil Curtain and the strange oozing substances in Lauren Szold's drips and pours on the floor also evoke the ominous undertone of North Brooklyn, one of the most polluted pieces of real estate in America (where there is a toxic waste site and a lead level in the soil that exceeds by 500 times the acceptable standard)."^[17]

Fineberg was also struck by the creative community's "recourse to biological metaphors".^[17] Beginning with the mischievously titled Sex Salon of 1990, large convergences of music, dance, performance and installation art in Williamsburg's abandoned warehouses and streets employed a language of healing, rebirth and animal vitality.

Interactivity and feedback, a fundamental property of living things, were also reoccurring themes in the neighborhood. Hit and Run Theater, while not explicitly referencing biology, emphasized visceral interaction with the public. Other immersive theater companies actually referenced biofeedback systems in their names. Floating Point Unit (FPU) tapped into the mathematics behind feedback-driven "fuzzy logic." Nerve Circle's immersive media rituals, such as the Eyeball Scanning Party in its loft on Grand Street, and a series of communal "Media Compressions" at Minor Injury Gallery, explored the aesthetic dimensions of collective information synthesis.^[43] Frank Popper, an art historian at the University of Paris VIII, has noted in the book, Contemporary Artists, that the experimental company's goal was to induce a local nervous system by cultivating "the living properties of information"^[44] and to nurture collective "media organisms".^[44]

In a similar fashion the "omnisensorial"^[15] collective, Lalalandia often used the term "techno-organic"^[45] to describe a variety of interactions the group had with their social and physical environment, including the recycling of materials scavenged from Williamsburg's abandoned factories. Kit Blake named Worm Magazine after both a burrowing creature and a digital virus, both of which involve environmental penetration and feedback. In a 1989 editorial for Worm's progenitor, Word of Mouth, Blake explicitly stressed that interaction with the larger community was a fundamental goal:

"Your input is highly valued at Word of Mouth. Your thoughts. Your letters. Your writings. Your poetry. Your art. Word of Mouth will, ideally, be an interactive, alternative publishing network."^[30]

In much the same spirit, Genia Gould launched Waterfront Week with the help of Ethan Pettit. The weekly format allowed for a constant stream of letters from the public, casual cut-and-paste advertising, and a popular comic strip, Medea's Weekend by Tony Millionaire, which explored an imaginary version of Williamsburg. Genia Gould later decided to move to a full magazine format with Breukelen Magazine, to get "close-to-the-pulse"^[25] of north Brooklyn's neighborhoods. Underscoring the interdisciplinary nature of a community, the opening editorial stated:

"Poets, essayists, lyricists, comic artists, illustrators, photographers, critics, political spectators, community organizers, scene makers, jokers, and other adventurers will report to you directly on the arts, clubs, bars, hideouts, hangouts, back rooms —as well as, on political, housing, health, and environmental issues. A legacy of artists and activists."^[25]

In January 1990, Ladislav Czernek posted his own public invitation to "inject vitality"^[46] into the struggling neighborhood and "to create a meeting place in which an atmosphere of sharing and collaboration is nurtured".^[46] Open meetings at Czernek's experimental arts center, Epoché included many members of the fledgling Immersionist community: The Lizard's Tail, Minor Injury, Nerve Circle, Waterfront Week, Word of Mouth and Versus. These meetings led to the launching of the seminal Immersionist event, The Sex Salon. Opening on Valentine's Day 1990, the three-day festival involved nearly a hundred artists from a range of disciplines and celebrated a fluid vision of sexuality.^[47]

The Sex Salon's playful title underscored the emerging community's desire to engage a public outside academic and specialist circles. 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.^[48] In 2016, the curator, Brainard Carey drew connections between this ecological orientation and a highly fluid and interconnected social, sexual and cultural space. On the website for his program on Yale University Radio, WYBC (AM), he states:

"These young artists, musicians and urbanists made immersion in their immediate world more critical than participation in a remote, and often disappointing 'art world' across the river. Culture, art, entertainment and biological survival fused together into a highly spirited local ecosystem... [The artists were] immersing themselves in a 24-hour matrix of parties, printed matter, urban agriculture, music and gender fluid performances."^[49]

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

In an ardent embrace of everyday life in the neighborhood, creations were often drawn from their environment and completed by their environment. In a reference to women's work traditions, Lauren Szold combined materials from her kitchen and poured them onto the floors of abandoned factories. Her flows of flour, milk, eggs and blood would eventually ferment on location.^[50] Exploring a form of social fermentation, Dennis Del Zotto, aka AirZotto, inserted inflatable pods into various local environments. The room-sized structures were created by Del Zotto out of sheet plastic and fans from local hardware stores and installed within abandoned warehouses and clubs such as El Sensorium, Fake Shop and Galapagos Art Space.^[16] The large, crude bladders were completed by the presence of participants who often spent whole evenings inside them. Echoing the same, raw aesthetic as Szold and Del Zotto, Andrew Hampsas conducted sparse, visceral performances on rooftops, abandoned factory yards and even immersed himself half naked in the East River.^[51] As an exploration of animal presence, varying degrees of nudity were also in evidence at enterprises like Keep Refrigerated, Fake Shop, Mustard, Radioactive Bodega, El Sensorium, Galapagos and many of the large warehouse gatherings. In his introduction to the museum exhibit, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, the art historian Jonathan Fineberg spoke of the shift to a living, bodily process:

"After twenty-five years of a language-based focus to the art world – hand in hand with the demise of confidence in the ability of 'vanguard' artists to affect culture by showing radical work in SoHo galleries (much less ones in Kreuzberg or the Marais) – many artists today are returning to immediate experience, to the body, and to a neighborhood cultural interaction. As Ebon Fisher, a key figure on the Williamsburg scene recently told me, 'we're not making art out here, we're creating culture.'"^[17]

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".^[11] 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.^[52] 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.^[53] 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".^[54] The author, Matthew Purdy, praised Pool's public presence as an extraordinary "ripple in a vast sea of humdrum daily life".^[54]

Beyond postmodern alienation

A performance above the audience's heads at Mustard, an event space at the Olde Dutch Mustard Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1994.

Although the Immersionists were deeply enthralled by the decaying industrial world they were encountering in Brooklyn, many maintained jobs in Manhattan and kept at least one eye on that borough's fixations. And what they saw was not enticing them back to endure the more expensive lodgings. Manhattan's philosophical platforms, modernism and postmodernism, seemed to be on the wane.

While modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had given birth to a heroic search for technological miracles and abstract truths and art forms, a sense of skepticism, irony and alienation began to set into western culture towards the end of the 20th century. Modern technology and culture seemed to be polluting 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 edgy Punk Rock music, ironic 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, a major center of both modern and postmodern thought, and an immersion in a sparsely populated industrial section of Williamsburg, allowed the new creative community to benefit from what ecologists like Aldo Leopold have called edge effects. Situated between worlds, the youthful, emerging community could allow a diverse set of ideas and values to come together in creative new forms. There in Williamsburg's struggling industrial district, community organizations such as El Puente, Los Sures and the People's Firehouse, and the eco-communitarian artist community, had room to evolve and grow. Moving beyond an increasingly stagnant postmodern orientation became a lot easier in a district with long stretches of empty industrial buildings and where nature was reclaiming the shorelines.

As the new generation of artists began to absorb Brooklyn's more neighborly ethos, Manhattan's postmodern template began to lose its charm for them. Connecting to the neighborhood, exploring its rewilding waterfront, and contributing to local vitality was simply more gratifying than maintaining a conversation with Manhattan and its cold and ironic postmodern discourse. Furthermore, the struggling artists who were adventurous enough to move to the more bleak and dangerous areas near the waterfront were simply more inclined by nature to explore their new home and seek out a new kind of relationship with it. As Laurel Casey states in The New York Press in 1991, "I craved to share the thrill and horror of it."^[55]

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

The movement away from postmodern distance and towards a connection with the immediate world was not just a theoretical stance. In Word of Mouth as early as 1989, Ladislav Czernek invites the public to his cultural space, Epoché "to feed, and feed off a neighborhood, not just occupy it".^[56] Likewise, the Lizard's Tail's philosophy of "multidimensional convergence",^[19] Lalalandia's "techno-organic"^[45] use of recycled materials, and Nerve Circle's cultivation of "media organisms"^[57] were deliberate strategies for deep immersion in a living world. That Newsweek would report on the community's terms "omnisensorial sweepout"^[15] and "web jam", suggests that a new cultural think tank was beginning to influence the larger culture as early as 1993.

Reconnection with the world was not merely an academic exercise to replace the old postmodern agenda with good urban policy. It was a radical, submodern^[58] act of local enchantment. Turning Williamsburg's streets and rooftops into settings for performances, groups such as Hit and Run Theater, Alien Action and the Pedestrian Project animated the world they lived in. Yvette Helin's work in Williamsburg, and other locations like New York's Chinatown and London, moved beyond the hall of mirrors of postmodern pictorial space to draw the public more deeply into an awareness of their own streets. By working with live performers to emulate the jet black figures on pedestrian crossing signs, Helin's Pedestrian Project was able to render the public's immediate surroundings more meaningful, not less. The Pedestrians' slow, silent movements created an arresting sense of urban reality.

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

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

Submodern immersion

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

"You are the SUB MODERN. You live in a million tribes and burrows, beneath the illusion we call the real world. While the Party passes over your heads you see its abject nakedness. You never believed in modernism and you aren't fooled by its vain reflection, postmodernism... Without proclamation you have integrated yourself into the endless unfolding of spectacles. You found that to immerse yourself was the thing, sensing that objectivity was only another dream."^[58]

Bradley follows that with another quote from the cultivator of communal "media organisms".^[43] On the contrast between postmodern fragmentation and the Immersionist pursuit of living interconnection, Fisher states: "Postmodern deconstruction was over. Immersionism was about biological congealing and the vitality born from such convergence."^[59]

In the early 1990s, large, dynamic gatherings referencing biological forms in their names became almost annual focal points for such biomorphic congealing: The Sex Salon, Cats Head I and II, Flytrap, Human Fest and Organism. As the choreographer, Melanie Hahn Roche says in The Drama Review, "The purpose of these shows goes beyond simply throwing a good party. Rather, this activity is necessary for the well-being of the community."^[7] 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".^[45]

Although artifacts of art, music, literature and even diagrams of immersive systems^[60] 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 "aesthetic activism". Anna Hurwitz, who had studied human ecology at the College of the Atlantic, is cited by Rose on her preference for a culture of participation. "I hate precious art,"^[61] she declared. "I measure the success of my installations by the degree to which people participate."^[61] Rose discusses Hurwitz's displacement of furniture into a "Weird Thing Zone" on Grand Street that had been organized by Nerve Circle. Bringing artists out of their studios to interact with the public was one of the event's objectives, along with replacing the term "art" with the more lively "weird thing" to render the event more approachable. The impulse behind the zone was to abandon the lofty realms of modernism, and the equally ethereal postmodernism, and return to a natural interaction with the world (submodernism).^[3] As Hurwitz intimated, the interaction was the goal. Rose quotes the local activist, Chris Lanier on how the Zone connected with people at the Waterfront Festival where it was immersed:

"'Oh, the kids loved it. They crawled all over everything,' says Chris Lanier of El Centro Cultural de Williamsburg, sponsors of the Grand Street Waterfront Festival. "That was a unique festival... Something happened at that festival. A coalition was formed."^[61]

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 Kit Blake, another contributor to the Weird Thing Zone and publisher of Worm Magazine, on the emergence of a hands-on culture along the waterfront: "Everybody chips in and does what they can. Money as compensation is never part of the discussion."^[61]

Subjective ecology

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

"Common space is what the Williamsburg art-activist movement is all about; a heady experiment to integrate into, defend, help build and somehow connect the community at large... In fact, the Williamsburg Way is to create art through activism and interconnection."^[61]

A year earlier in Worm, Ebon Fisher had defined this hybrid space as a "psycho-physical swirl"^[61] and Rose quotes the passage in his article:

"Our western myth of the passive, consuming being who sits in a brain surrounded by concrete objects of prey and repulsion is beginning to dissolve... we are beginning to place the locus of attention beyond the mythical "self" and into a psycho-physical swirl as we might call common space".^[61]

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

"Three hours past showtime, with the men in blue still searching out fire hazards, a crowd of 300 was outside, getting restless. Suddenly Ethan Petit (a/k/a Medea de Vyse) stepped into the entranceway and began playing a kind of guitar-rigged light board, casting wild spectrums of color over the rubble-strewn lot. Meanwhile, the walls inside were trembling with the sound of an impromptu scrap concert, as folks began heaving rusted car parts into a pile of steel drums. 'We're squatting this place and they can't stop it!' shouted one guy, cracking a tail pipe over a girder, as a group of startled firemen scurried away. By midnight the authorities backed off, and the whole space was throbbing with people banging metal dangling from a huge web of ropes, putting neon golf balls up Jesse Helms's ass, and dancing to Chemical Wedding, Lauren Stauber, Laughing Sky, Rats of Unusual Size, and Colored Greens."^[62]

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.^[63]

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"^[48] in an essay for the British journal, Digital Creativity in 1998.^[48] 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. One of the installations announced on the poster 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".^[64] In contrast to the "weak-tie connections"^[64] 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.^[34] 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"^[22] and entering "the bottomless potholes on Kent Avenue."^[22] This intense sense of connection to her urban wilderness were spiritual notions for Casey. "Somehow I'll get down there,"^[22] she wrote.

Immersionism, in effect, was not an abstract discourse, but a process of deep connection to a local world. It was an embodied web of activity. Williamsburg's decaying factories and warehouses, along with the surrounding residential areas, became both elements of the work and contributors with agency. To witness the Pedestrian Project, for example, moving silently through the streets of Williamsburg was not to simply delight in walking sculptures that emulated figures on street signs, but to become aware of the surrounding sounds, imagery and dynamics of Williamsburg's unique industrial setting. The audience was not framed as passive voyeurs, but participants in an unusual situation. Dancing in the streets with the Hungry March Band, or interacting with the Bindlestiff Family Circus or Circus Amok drew audiences into a highly personal and unpretentious sense of communal being. The same pertained to Lalalandia's fusion of music, food and bodies at Comfort Zones; or the throbbing convergences of phenomena in the warehouse events. Worm and Waterfront Week were as much windows into Williamsburg's creativity as they were deliberate exercises in the formation of community networks, and an attempt to connect the neighborhood discourse to larger planetary concerns.^[34] El Puente's Toxic Avengers were not just an after school program that kept youth out of trouble. The troupe staged creative environmental actions throughout Brooklyn that not only helped to raise awareness of environmental issues, but also cultivated community. The whole artistic, social and environmental system was greater than the sum of its parts.

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

The ethos of biomorphic interconnection also appeared in "360-degree visual jam sessions" at popular clubs like Keep Refrigerated, El Sensorium, Fake Shop and a complex media and performance event by OVNI called 360° which was conducted at the Grand Street Ballroom. The catalog for the last warehouse event of the decade, Organism, states that it was deliberately grown "out of the creative loam of Williamsburg, Brooklyn."^[65] 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."^[65]

Suzanne Wines discussed this lifelike quality in Domus:

"Conceived by Ebon Fisher, Organism became a kind of symbolic climax to the renegade activity that had been stirring within the community since the late eighties. It exploited the notion of architecture as living event, breathing and transforming for fifteen hours in an abandoned mustard factory. Unlike a traditional gallery exhibit where each object only engages the cube of space that it occupies, the collaborators in a 'web jam' create work that engages the entire space, the body and mind of the audience and through this process ultimately integrates with the community at large. A layering of system upon system..."^[12]

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

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

Demonstrating that historical information could be treated as a subjective phenomenon with ecological properties, the documentarist Pegi Vail used spot lighting on artifacts found on the event's factory site to draw attention to industrial labor practices going back decades. Accompanied by the works of dozens of other artists and performers, and an audience that danced among the artifacts, the neighborhood's industrial past was brought back to life.^[66] In a similar fusion of modalities at Organism, Genia Gould turned the circulation of a medical emergency kit into a nightlong nursing performance.^[67]

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

"The experience of a space is more important than the material which creates it. This kind of organic flexibility and environmental efficiency is a refreshing perspective with which to approach architecture and urban design, particularly now, when the creative energy of the digital revolution is still relatively untainted by social and political restrictions. It is a perfect time to revitalize an architectural practice that has become so culturally alienated from its context... The [immersive environments] described above propose spatial systems which evolve with and establish new relationships between the rich complexity of existing cultural and environmental forces. Nowhere in the world is the concentration of these forces as intense."^[12]

Deep convulsive immersion

Deep immersion in a district the city of New York had largely abandoned was not for the light-hearted. An aesthetic attuned to an environment marked by factory waste, lost jobs and a dangerous drug trade could sometimes be more "illbient"^[21] 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"^[15] 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".^[68] The rhythmic smashing of bottles could be heard throughout the Old Dutch Mustard Factory, giving voice to a painful truth about consumer waste. Williamsburg writers like Laurel Casey shared her own complex balance between the ill and the inspired. In 1991 Casey writes in the New York Press:

"Having landed in the sacred dump of Williamsburg from Nowheresville, Vermont, I was experiencing such a peculiar bliss in the midst of toxic fumes and crack whore street dancing, that I craved to share the thrill and horror of it."^[55]

In its Web Jam Manifesto of 1993, Nerve Circle celebrated the convulsive, ecstatic nature of the neighborhood's creativity as "one really strange continuum":^[69]

"We are a storm of undefinable presences, suckling up to one another, congealing, integrating, staring into a mutual murk. We cyclically strain against, and surrender to, some wild howling node that lures the cosmic waters into its pretty little vortex. And the question emerges from this timeless cocoon: how do we extract pleasure from such an equation? Can human beings integrate with rusting steel, plants, socio-economic forces, local and international media, the very biosphere in which we breath, and still delight in the mix? Can we dance with such a monstrous Organism?"^[69]

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

Several musicians did attempt to dance within Williamsburg's Organism as wandering performers, including members of the band Thrust, the singer and guitarist Tim Robert, Karen Cormier from the band Fric n Frac dressed as a wolf, and the "roving rapper"^[68] Doc Israel who improvised lyrics in response to the writhing event.^[70] 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."^[70] Brody worked with Carlton Bright, Bozidar Kemperle and his brother Daniel Brody to install a web of video cameras and monitors at Organism, providing a kind of raw electronic circulation. This was echoed by WFMU's live audio broadcast via a phone line. This was emphatically not network television, but reflected the vinelike, trial-and-error strategies of neighborhood auto mechanics. David Brody's own animation research involving fractal growth patterns has reflected these sensibilities.

In a street ritual called Glow Nighttime in 1991, a dramatic rejection of television led by Rob Hickman vividly demonstrated convulsive adaptation in Williamsburg. With the help of Kit Blake, Ilene Zori Magaras, Richard Posch and the Aldus-Jiminez Gallery, Hickman gathered a large crowd on South 11th Street to witness five televisions and two mock satellites being jettisoned off a six-story industrial building. Many of the items were plugged into long extension cords and lit the sides of the building as they fell. In the ceremony, the adaptive, human animal and ritual street life were celebrated.^[71] 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.^[72]

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

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

Immersionism rejected both modernist objectivity and postmodern distrust in all systems of belief. It gave birth to an immersion in what might be likened to a natural, adaptive, feedback-driven collective being. This was both a vital and turbulent presence emerging in the neighborhood's "neuroelectronic brew"^[73] 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.

Religious roots

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:

"All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Humanity did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves."^[74]

The word "immersion" first appeared in English in the late 15th century and stems from the Latin, immersio, to "dip into".^[75] 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,^[76] and some Christians of Hindu origin have translated baptist immersion to mean "holy bath".^[75] 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.

Literary roots

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

Ecological roots

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

While ecological thinking can be observed in all ancient and indigenous cultures, the first 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.^[77] 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 an entire living world where they lived.

Neighborhood discourse

References in the Williamsburg community's writings on 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"^[78] which took on the properties of a fluid, dreamlike world: "To immerse yourself was the thing, sensing that objectivity was only another dream."^[78] In 1992, Laurel Casey references immersion in Waterfront Week as she draws the reader into a chimerical ride through the neighborhood:

"Williamsburg is a glob of individuals within globs of religious and racial groups with a vast array of orientations that are interwoven into class structures with globs of desires primarily remaining unfulfilled... [So] I went back into therapy and was encouraged to confront the problem head-on. I would participate in a psychological and sociological immersion..."^[22]

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".^[75] 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".^[79] Other references to immersive culture include Worm Magazine's "publishing network",^[30] Breukelen Magazine's "close-to-the-pulse"^[25] Alejandra Giudici's "everybody does everything",^[28] and Robert Elmes' description of Galapagos as an "ecosystem of the senses".^[80]

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"^[17] as art historian Jonathan Fineberg described it. Kelly Webb of the band, Thrust spoke of a "very alive whole".^[31] Suzanne Wines echoes Fineberg and Webb in Domus, noting the community's weave of "immersive environments".^[12] 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.

Children visiting Lalalandia, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1995

Performance groups like the Pedestrian Project, Hit and Run Theater, the Hungry March Band and Alien Action activated the desolate streets in between warehouse enterprises and have spoken of their own philosophies of environmental sensitivity. In an essay she wrote for Fineberg's exhibit at the Krannert Art Museum, Yvette Helin defined her Pedestrian Project in Williamsburg as "improvisational interaction with the given environment".^[27] She also spoke of reaching out to both physical and mental public spaces in an effort to "pull people into a collective consciousness"^[27] and to encourage them to "reconstruct the place we are in".^[27] Helin maintained that involving the public was intended to be transformative:

"Onlookers can interject their own experiences in the performances, making the project accessible and transcending the hierarchies of education and class."^[27]

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.^[81] 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.^[82] 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.

Radiant vs bounded immersion

In 1996, Neil Straus noted in the New York Times that Manhattan's ambient club scene drew inspiration from the "pioneers"^[10] of the "early 1990's in Williamsburg, Brooklyn."^[10] However, where the Brooklyn Immersionists held interdisciplinary gatherings that radiated out to their local environment, many of Manhattan's clubs created more isolated spaces to escape their surrounding world. Underscoring this critical difference, Strauss quotes Tim Sweet who states that his Manhattan club, Recreational Vehicle (The RV), was intended to "shut out the rest of the world".^[10] Sweet continues: "you can come in and forget about the city outside and hopefully gather some strength before you have to return".^[10] Creating a refuge from Manhattan's competitive culture was inspirational for such a borough, but it contrasted vividly with Williamsburg's radiant forms of Immersion. Sound artists like Sweet did speak of how "context over content"^[10] informed the design of his Manhattan space, but the context in question was limited to the inside of the club.

A neighborly and more ecological form of immersion also distinguished the Immersionists' culture from some important predecessors. Both experimental and classical forms of theater and opera in the 20th century have tended to take place in bounded spaces, whether of the proscenium arch or black box variety. Even 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 affairs with no larger ecosystems to engage. These earlier spectacles made high technology a feature rather than a means to connect more deeply to nature. Such techno-worship was exemplified by names like Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. In the case of San Francisco's Trips Festival of 1966, the mixing of music, dance, and multimedia was largely limited to the Longshoreman's hall, not its surroundings. Although a feedback loop at the Trips Festival emerged between performers, technology and audience, feedback between the human domain and the non-human environment was rare. Like much of late 20th century Western culture, the emphasis was on individual pleasuring rather than the well-being of the larger ecosystem.

In the late 1960s, when the Trips Festival and Warhol's sound and light shows were appearing, humanism was a fully established belief system. It was 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 their ecological context. The fact that scientists have come to label the current stage of natural history the Anthropocene reflects some awareness of the problem, but it may also be reinforcing our species-centric orientation.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s a popular shift in sensibility began to question the human-centric world. Books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Ian L. McHarg's Design with Nature had begun to spread ecological thinking to a wider public. In 1970 Earth Day was established and the United States launched the Environmental Protection Agency. That same year one of the producers of the Trips Festival, Stewart Brand began to publish The Whole Earth Catalog. A significant shift from humanism to ecological thinking had begun. It may not have been until the Sex Salon of 1990 that a new generation in New York City was prepared to fully abandon the show business of human-centric existentialism and redirect attention to an actual neighborhood ecology. As the writer and Immersionist choreographer, Melanie Hahn Roche has maintained in the Drama Review, Williamsburg's immersive culture "goes beyond simply throwing a good party".^[7] Williamsburg's immersive events, rooftop gatherings, street culture and networked zines shared a life world within a complex and shifting urban environment.

Immersionism, in other words, was not just a singular event bounded by space and time. Nor was Immersionist culture an idealization of life put forth as a proposition. It was a living continuum of elements catalyzing an actual neighborhood's rejuvenation. Given that environment's crime-ridden and toxic nature, the Immersionists' large, celebratory gatherings could no longer simply indulge freedom within a clique of humans. The entire social and ecological environment was reconnected in a "techno-organic"^[45] mesh (Lalalandia), congealed in a "multidimensional convergence"^[19] (Lizard's Tail), and cultivated into "media organisms" (Nerve Circle).^[43] The Immersionists, in effect, were suspended in a common "green room" (The Green Room).

Since the Immersionist movement emerged in Williamsburg, ambient environments have appeared in galleries, corporate settings, and in digital simulations which often ignore the social and ecological context. Such commercial environments, whether real or virtual, often separate participants from the larger environment and are sometimes even promoted as an escape. Bounded and precisely controlled experiences do not reflect the depth of sensual, political and ecological involvement that the Brooklyn Immersionists were exploring. Social networks in the neighborhood were rooted in the environment and reflected a much richer matrix of physical interactions. Immersionist practices involved, in effect, what Susan Wines described in Domus as "place as a web of convergent forces".^[12]

In a similar fashion, the term "social network" has also been drained of its environmental context in the new millenium. In a 2021 opinion piece for the New York Times, for example, Kara Swisher even suggests that the only kind of social networking possible was the online variety she was covering as a journalist in the new millennium: "As hard as it may be to imagine, social networks weren't around in 2001. Now they seem to govern every news event we experience —from elections to troop withdrawals..."^[118]

Social networks, of course, have been around for as long as there have been animal and human migration routes, interwoven tree roots and mycelium. In Williamsburg in the early 1990s, a conscious and deliberate use of networking emerged in both physical events and in what Kit Blake described as "publishing networks".^[30] 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"^[7] and she insisted that the "activity is necessary for the well-being of the community".^[7]

In contrast to bounded forms of Immersion in commercial nightclubs and computer games, Williamsburg's neighborhood-based forms of immersion, networking and participation were fully civic and expansive. To live a creative life seven days a week inside such an environment was fundamentally different from the operations of the culture industries, even when those industries use the label "immersive". Where the Brooklyn Immersionists embraced a rich, ecological and civic paradigm, bounded immersion removes a sense of political and ecological agency from participants, often with intention. Likewise, where the deep culture of neighborhood immersion in Williamsburg helped to nurture a larger world^[14] and catalyze a borough-wide renaissance, the bounded variant was limited to selling products and services, often with a mind to hoarding personal wealth, not sharing life with a community.^[119]

Corporate occupation

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 the filmmaker, Su Friedrich showed in her film, Gut Renovation, a demonstrably less gentle culture moved in, along with a financing system that had nothing to do with gentrification and individual home buyers and renters. Friedrich was even forced out of her own loft by a developer while making her film.^[95]

Often confused with free markets and "gentrification", 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.^[120] Jason Hackworth and Neil Smith have called this "third wave gentrification",^[38] but there was nothing gentle or gradual 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. The third wave was led by a completely different set of people and financing operations. It reflects a larger process taking over democracies and majority interests around the world.

Writing for the New York Times in 2009, Russ Buettner and Ray Rivera point out that beginning in 2001, it wasn't the creative community or even middle and working class entrepreneurs, but rather the billionaire, Mayor Michael Bloomberg who "loosened the reins on development across the boroughs".^[120] He deliberately "pushed more than 100 rezoning measures through a City Council that stamped them into law."^[120] 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 corporate banking restrictions and red lining, nevertheless began a slow creative revival. Cultural, educational, and small business initiatives brought back the district's village economy, only to have city-sponsored developers take it over after the community had made the neighborhood viable.

Although artists and activists are often blamed for the corporate takeover, beneficiaries of the sales of property to the developers were not the creative classes, who were largely renters. Much of the land sold to the corporate developers was owned by a small subset of local property owners.

The New York Times vividly lays the blame for a steep, disruptive rise in the cost of living in the new millennium on the Bloomberg administration. Buettner and Rivera are quoted: "His administration poured $16 billion into financing [across the boroughs] to foster commercial development."^[120] They then cite New York City's Comptroller on the wisdom of such corporate favoritism:

"Comptroller William C. Thompson has said the mayor focuses too much on large developments that go to favored builders who receive wasteful subsidies. When the new Yankee Stadium came up in Tuesday night's debate, he said: "This is just another example of a giveaway, of the mayor's giveaway to another one of his developer friends in the city."^[120]

Many have assumed that the creative community, despite moving into unwanted industrial areas, had displaced local residents. However, not only were most of the large property clusters sold to corporations by longstanding local residents, the positive emotional impact of the Immersionists, and the slow nature of Williamsburg's economic growth in the 1990s, was such that the rate of attrition for the disadvantaged actually went down during that decade. According to a 2004 report in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi point out that creative neighborhoods like Williamsburg "improve in many ways that may be appreciated as much by their disadvantaged residents as by their more affluent ones".^[37] In a discussion of their report for the Journal of the American Planning Association, "Gentrification and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s," Freeman and Braconi state:

"The study described in this article [examines] residential mobility among disadvantaged households in New York City during the 1990s. We found that rather than rapid displacement, gentrification was associated with slower residential turnover among these households. In New York City, during the 1990s at least, normal succession appears to be responsible for changes in gentrifying neighborhoods."^[37]

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."^[121] 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"^[121] 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 a corporate occupation sponsored by the city. By focusing on matters of style, class and consumer culture, the terms "gentrification" and even "hipster" not only deflect from the beneficial contributions of innovative communities like the Immersionists, it obscures the actual city-corporate partnerships that lead to a far more damaging rise in the cost of living. From an aesthetic standpoint, it also diverts attention from recognizing the differences between small scale village life and an alienating corporate lifestyle introduced by high rises and other crude mechanisms of a highly pyramidal economy. The media's fixation on glib, even 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".^[122]

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,"^[123] 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"^[124] as some have called the process, easily disrupted the neighborhood and its more gentle and immersive approach to life.

Interdisciplinary culture

In many ways, the Immersionists anticipated an embrace of interdisciplinary culture and the emerging fields of biological co-regulation,^[125] embodied cognition, and extended mind thesis.^[126] Three decades after The Sex Salon celebrated a communal, interdisciplinary mix of "love letters, performance, live music, jam, dancing" and inspired "multidimensional convergences", "omnisensorial"^[15] environments and an all night "web jam" along the Williamsburg waterfront, a professor at Yale University, Nicholas Wolterstorff noticed a shift toward embracing context and a wider definition of art among his own colleagues. As he states in a PBS interview in 2020:

"A number of [my colleagues] are beginning to come along with me and say: let's not just expand our understanding of concert hall music and museum visual art, but let's go beyond the museums and let's go beyond the concert halls..."^[127]

Embodiment in psychology

Psychologists have also begun to explore a broader, more ecological framework for studying the mind. The new fields of embodied and extended cognition stress that the cognitive, emotional and aesthetic properties of the mind cannot be fully understood by studying an individual's brain, but must be seen as a function of an organism's total interactions with the world. Quoted in a guest blog for Scientific American in 2011, over two decades after the Immersionists first began to cultivate a networked and immersive arts culture in Williamsburg, the psychologist Joshua Davis from Barnard College opined that embodied cognition was just beginning to gel as a new framework for cognitive psychology, stating: "I see embodiment as a new paradigm that we are shifting towards."^[128]

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

"Everything is in the coupling of the body to the environment in which it is immersed... Is it all in the head? Or is it somehow a partnership with the world, a partnership with the physical situation that we find ourselves in, that we mediate and couple with through our body?"^[129]

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

"You really have to think about the action-perception cycle, the circulation causality induced by the notion that the environment is acting upon you, and you are acting upon the environment. And it's a dance, a dialogue. So that's certainly in the ascendancy in the past few years."^[129]

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",^[43] Kit Blake was promoting a "publishing network",^[30] and Lalalandia was recycling industrial detritus into an "omnisensorial sweepout".^[15] 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."^[27]

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"^[24] and sums this up in two words that cover the gamut from the neighborly to the biological: "circuitous systems".^[24]

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

"Long before Friendster, locative media, and emergent everything, [the artists cultivated] cultural and social experimentation and connection. His art is a delightful reminder that communication is really about communality."^[60]

Grassroots urban renewal

For the Immersionists, of course, a new social-ecological theory of mind and culture was just the beginning. In applying these prescient ideas to their own struggling neighborhood they helped to revive one of the most blighted areas of the United States. And contrary to vague and misapplied labels like "gentrification", attrition rates among the disadvantaged in Williamsburg actually went down in the 1990s as Freeman and Braconi showed. When city-subsidized high rises moved in, attrition rates increased.^[116]

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

Theories of a living universe

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

In his book, Origins of Consciousness, published in 2015,^[130] Adrian David Nelson suggests that the universe may be, not unlike an Immersionist web jam or multidimensional convergence, an "evolving, vital and creative" process, and may be thought of more as an organism than a machine. In addition, like the Immersionists' references to "subjective ecology"^[48] and constructs that embrace hybrid forms of "internal/external" and "physical/psychological" presence, the physical world according to Nelson may even be "suffused with sentience".^[130] Such an "intrinsic consciousness movement"^[130] in cosmology points to a "reenchantment of the cosmos".^[130]

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

"We appear to see further and with greater understanding through an organismic lens than through any other concept available to us. Understanding the rise of the organismic paradigm requires that we understand some of the historical forces that have shaped the outlook of Western Science, as well as their resulting influence on the modern mind."^[131]

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

"There was a warmth to it that was stunning. It was even warmer than the scenes of the 1960s because there didn't seem to be these hierarchies. The appearance to the audiences was of an unusual generosity."^[49]

Articles

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