Ebon Fisher

At its inception in 1985, Ebon Fisher helped the MIT Media Lab to establish itself as an innovative research center and think tank. Running for two years, Fisher's course, “Creative Seeing” introduced students to new ways of thinking about media, information and living systems. In 1986 Fisher began to formulate an immersive rock theater company, Nerve Circle, which was dedicated to exploring biological systems and themes. After performances at Boston rock clubs, Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Arts, and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), three Boston police officers shut down a performance of Nerve Circle’s “Evolution of the Grid” at a party in Fisher's studio in Boston.^[1][2] The intrusion finally convinced Fisher to follow the advice of ICA director, David Ross, to move to New York.^[3] In 1988, two years after receiving a Master of Science from MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Fisher brought his biological systems thinking to Williamsburg, Brooklyn where he became a leading figure in an ecological arts movement, the Brooklyn Immersionists.^[3] Fisher's Quaker upbringing in Philadelphia, and his experiences at the Meeting School, a small Quaker school situated on a farm in New Hampshire, were significant influences on his ecological approach to culture.^[4]

Anticipation of a digital invasion: A Heat-Seeking Psycho-Suction cultivated by Ebon Fisher at Test-Site Gallery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn 1992

Coming of age in a postmodern era that questioned human objectivity and industrial progress, the Immersionists transitioned to a post-postmodern cultural paradigm that emphasized environmental immersion, organic vitality, and a departure from 20th century individualism that Fisher called “subjective ecology."^[5][3] In the 1990s, Fisher and his interdisciplinary colleagues played a key role in transforming Brooklyn's depressed industrial waterfront and bringing down the rate of attrition for the area’s disadvantaged populations.^[6] In 2024, The New York Times included Organism, Fisher's 15 hour ecological event in an abandoned mustard factory, among the creations that established Brooklyn as "Where It's At" in New York's cultural life.^[7] Other significant contributors to the Immersionist movement included Anna Hurwitz, co-producer of several large warehouse immersions; Greg Asch, a prominent DJ (DJ Olive); Jeff Gompertz of Fakeshop; Genia Gould, founder of Waterfront Week; Kevin Pyle, director of Minor Injury Gallery; Kit Blake, publisher of Worm Magazine; Robert Elmes, founder of Galapagos; Tony Millionaire and Medea DeVyse, creator and subject of the comic strip, Medea's Weekend; and several creative collectives: El Puente, Epoché, The Green Room, IFAM, Hit and Run Theater, Lalalandia, the Lizard's Tail Cabaret; MultiPolyOmni; and the Outpost.

Using media technology in the service of living systems, Fisher innovated live, communal media-sharing rituals in Williamsburg that helped to build a community. He organized an ecological "web jam”^[8] for 2,000 people,^[9] and cultivated "media organisms"^[9] in the streets, warehouses and neighborhood cultural spaces. Featured in several art history books, listed among the “New York Cyber Sixty” in New York Magazine,^[10] and interviewed on Fuji Television and Yale Radio,^[11] the media artist established himself at the vanguard of both Brooklyn's and the internet’s emergence. Britannica.com featured Fisher’s early website as one of The Web’s Best Sites in 1994^[12] and his work has been discussed in Wired Magazine five times.^[13][14] Numerous museums have presented Fisher’s works, including the Cooper Hewitt Museum, the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal and the Guggenheim Museum. In 1997 Elliott Sharp included Fisher’s music in his anthology, State of the Union.^[15]

Much of Fisher's work and writing redefines both art and technology as forms of environmental nurturing and cultivation,^[13] encouraging a paradigm shift that has gained the interest of numerous institutions of higher learning. Since teaching at MIT, Fisher has also taught at the Massachusetts College of Art, the New School in New York, and he became the Marjorie Rankin Scholar in Residence at Drexel University in Philadelphia. In 1998 Fisher was invited to set up a new digital arts program at the University of Iowa and three years later was invited back to New York to help launch an integrated media arts program at Hunter College. That program was suspended in 2001 following New York City’s fiscal contraction that followed the attack on the World Trade Center. Fisher then moved with his family to the Pinelands National Reserve in New Jersey where he began to develop an independent media studio by a river. There he began to immerse himself and other media artists in the local wildlife, extracting video footage from those multi-species relationships for a fictional series called Zoapool or “living pool.”^[3] In the foreword to a retrospective of Fisher’s work in 2006, media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff underscored Fisher’s biological approach to culture:

“It's not enough to come up with a great idea, or even the solution to one of the world's great problems… For what if the person you truly need to hear your message doesn't speak your language, refuses to see through your cultural bias, or hasn't even been born yet? How can one communicate across these chasms? The work in your hands is just such an artifact. Ebon Fisher's expressions are at once an immediately hypnotic viral challenge, and an advanced set of social protocols for evolving into a more inclusive and collaborative cultural organism.”^[16]

—Douglas Rushkoff, Prof. of Media Theory and Digital Economics, Queens College

Media rituals and subjective ecology in Brooklyn

In Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1990s the artist directed an immersive theater company, Nerve Circle which conducted live media sharing rituals in an effort to cultivate vital channels of communication in a district which had been losing industrial jobs and suffering from a growing drug trade. Nerve Circle played a critical role in building a creative, environmentally engaged community among the warehouses, streets and rooftops of Williamsburg's waterfront area. Fisher was among the early members of Williamsburg’s international "artists colony,"^[17] as Die Zeit described the Immersionist scene by the Brooklyn waterfront, and collaborated with groups like Minor Injury, El Puente, The Lizard’s Tail, Epoché, El Sensorium, the Green Room, the Outpost, Hit and Run Theater, Galapagos, Waterfront Week and Worm Magazine.^[4][18] As a featured artist at Test-Site Gallery, Fisher encouraged the enterprise to open its doors to the community by building a media store into the entrance and hosting public events like The Salon of the Mating Spiders, which included over 600 local artists and non-artists alike.^[19]

Nerve Circle's experimental arrangements of bodies, information and living context were designed to induce a shared presence that Fisher likened to a "media organism."^[9] According to Newsweek, one of the largest events Fisher led in the neighborhood, Organism drew over 2,000 people into a conflux of overlapping systems which included the dancing guests. The event was cultivated through an emergent process Fisher called a "web jam."^[20] 120 members of Williamsburg's creative community contributed to dozens of overlapping cultural, technological and biological webs. Suzan Wines described Organism’s strategy in Domus Magazine as engaging “the entire space, the body and mind of the audience and through this process ultimately integrates with the community at large.”^[20] She notes the event’s prominence in Williamsburg’s creative emergence:

"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."^[20]

In the book, Contemporary Artists, University of Paris historian, Frank Popper states that Fisher's works in Williamsburg embodied "a de-centered authorship where one creates with the community, with the medium, and with nature."^[9] The rituals were sometimes accompanied by other innovations such as Fisher’s “bionic codes,” a system of network ethics which Popper describes as "artificial lifeforms cultivated in the plasma of popular culture."^[9] Popper underscores the organic vitality driving Nerve Circle's immersive creations in Cambridge and Boston in the 1980s, and later in Williamsburg beginning in the late 1980s:

"These rituals focused on the immediacy of body-experience and on community-based culture, as Fisher organized massive participatory art events in gyms, nightclubs and neighborhoods. They were also efforts at exploring new ways to build vital convergences of humans and media technology."^[9]

Fisher, along with a dozen other Immersionist groups and art collectives, helped to catalyze a renaissance in Williamsburg that spread through much of Brooklyn and beyond.^[13] As the art historian, Jonathan Fineberg wrote of that creative community:

“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.’”^[3]

According to a 2004 report in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the emergence of such a dynamic culture in the early 1990s helped Williamsburg to revive its neighborhood-based economy and to stem the rate of attrition for its disadvantaged population.^[21] In the new millennium, the Bloomberg administration rezoned the district for high rises and provided tax abatements for large corporate developers.^[22] Instead of embracing the Immersionists' emergent local economy, these corporate welfare policies led to a rise in the cost of living.^[23] Among those forced to leave were the artists, activists and writers which had initiated the renaissance.^[4]

Philosophy

Submodernism

Truth as a burrow: A manifesto by Ebon Fisher from 1988 encouraged immersion in a dreamlike “burrow" beneath modernism and postmodernism.

Ever since he spray-painted a series of neurons in the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as an art student, Ebon Fisher sought to move his creative operations out of the ivory tower and immerse it in a public arena. A manifesto on environmental immersion that Fisher wrote in 1988 and posted in the streets of Williamsburg was discussed in 2023 by music historian, Cisco Bradley. In his book, The Williamsburg Avant-garde: Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, Bradley notes that Fisher's manifesto, You Sub Mod helped to shape the discourse of Williamsburg's creative community:

“Some theorists have characterized the period as one of immersionism, a kind of total artwork… As Ebon Fisher stated in 1988, in reference to the first use of the term, '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.’”^[3]

Biological congealing: "Equalize Seduction," a Zoacode projection by Ebon Fisher at MOMA PS1, 2000. Event curated by Robert Elmes.

Bradley also quotes Fisher on the contrast between the postmodern approach to culture and that of the Immersionists: “Postmodern deconstruction was over. Immersionism was about biological congealing and the vitality born from such convergence.”^[3]

According to Bradley the aesthetic philosophy Fisher helped to launch was pivotal in transitioning away from the cynicism of postmodern theories of art and culture:

“In many ways, Immersionism was the next stage of evolution of the New York art scene, which had evolved from the rationalist works of figures like conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) or minimalist Donald Judd (1928-94) to the postmodern rebellion of the 1980s... As some of the early theorists of Immersionism stated, ‘[Immersionism] helped to shift cultural protocols away from cold, postmodern cynicism, towards something a whole lot warmer: immersive, mutual world construction.’ ”^[3]

Wigglism

Inspired by both the living community networks in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and an increasingly collaborative internet culture, Ebon Fisher posted the first draft of his Wigglism Manifesto on the internet in 1996. He formally invited the public to contribute to its evolution, establishing Wigglism as one of the first intentionally open source systems of philosophy.^[24] From its inception Wigglism has promoted the notion that the truth, or that which seems true, is interactively constructed with the world as a whole, not just with other humans or in the limited text space known as discourse. As dialogues surrounding the evolving manifesto have suggested, the most significant property of an interactively determined truth is not its veracity but the vitality in the collaboration in which it emerges. Wigglism also points to a post-art, post-science, post-human world in which both objective reality and subjective aesthetics give way to a living, subjective ecosystem. This supports an emerging green culture underscored by an ethic of nurturing vital systems.

The Wigglism Manifesto

Loop into strange coilings, this coiling. Well up in the fibrillations of this hysterical continuum, this bionic boiling. Rise up and nurture the wiggling – of sinew and circuit, riot and union, mud and imagination. Nurture with the loaded logic of the living, with ceaseless reflection and a moving center.

Ovulate your tender eggs, your shivering codes, into the blood of interconnection. Soak tendrils of thought and gesture in an ethical jelly of feedback. Infuse phantoms and facts with equal measures of visceral significance. Creep along the rivulets and curls of writhing truth, this feral fetus squinting in a boundless womb of cultivations.

Breed turbulent creatures in a mongrel jungle of plasma, machines and minds. Embrace these creatures, these hives, these worlds. Keep that which is lively, and that which sustains life, in succulent focus. May the lonely pools of science, art and heaven congeal into a sea of quivering being.

At this twist in the orgy of Mystery we are drunk with the sweat of the stars, with that which seems alive, with lunges, lickings and startled presences. We fuse with the creatures of our devotion, becoming everything we encounter, becoming devotion itself. We transmute mind and matter into a zoology of spirit.

Dare to suckle this wild vapor. Convulse and clutch in waves of milky wonder. Siphon every atom, and theory of atom, into the folds of our collective screen, our flesh. Melt into the monstrous, grooving spasm of the infinite wiggling.

Nurture the wiggling, for that which wiggles is amazing.

— Ebon Fisher, with input from the public, 1996-2007

The AlulA Dimension

The AlulA Dimension, Nerve Circle studio, 1994. The structure provided a gathering space situated between Williamsburg and the early internet. “Fleshlinks” were conducted with Lalalandia, Fakeshop, Port, MIT’s Media Lab, and the internet collective, Bianca’s Smutshack.

In the mid-1990s, a nervelike system of ethics Fisher developed from his media rituals in Williamsburg, the Bionic Codes were coupled with an immersive architectural system Fisher built into his loft called The AlulA Dimension. Over the years since, Fisher developed AlulA and the Bionic Codes into more biomorphic structures which were rendered in both physical and digital media: the Nervepool and the Zoacodes.^[13][25] Both codes and architecture are now evolving again into a weblike transmedia world called Zoapool which Fisher is cultivating in the Pinelands National Reserve of New Jersey.^[9]

Fisher conducted his earliest immersive experiments as an art student at Carnegie-Mellon University. In 1981 he spray-painted a series of neurons under a bridge and along the train tracks in Pittsburgh's Panther Hollow area, eventually being introduced to another Pennsylvania graffiti artist, Keith Haring by one of his professors, the painter Jim Denny.^[9]

Rather than follow Haring to the gallery world of New York, Fisher began to study the programming language, Pascal and created an image-generating program, Book.dat, that could, in theory produce an infinite sequence of text and images. The project opened the door to studies at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Fisher was invited to teach at MIT's Media Lab at its inception.

Informed by his exposure to cybernetics and feedback systems at the MIT Media Lab in the mid-1980s, Fisher began to approach his work as an evolving collaboration with the world. This approach has led to Fisher formulating an immersive rock band, Nerve Circle, which later began to conduct immersive media-sharing rituals in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A series of diagrams Fisher created that charted the flows of information within each ritual, in turn, evolved into a nervelike system of ethics, the Bionic Codes. Those have evolved into increasingly more biomorphic structures the artist calls Zoacodes which are now conveyed through an evolving transmedia world called the Nervepool.^[9]

Timeline of works and public reception

Ebon Fisher's cultural creations have followed a trajectory from neuron graffiti to cultural experiments at MIT’s Media Lab, to media rituals in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to an evolving media world. A common element in all of Fisher's work has been both the nurturing and illumination of living networks.^[26]

• Neuron graffiti: Pittsburgh, PA (1980–82).
• Nerve Circle (phase 1): interactive rock theatre born during studies and teaching at MIT (1984–88).
• Nerve Circle (phase 2): community-based information-sharing rituals in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (1988–98).^[27]
• Network ethics: Bionic ethics system, the Bionic Codes, which evolved into Zoacodes (1992-present).
• The Nervepool and Zoapool: Evolving transmedia world that began in Brooklyn as The AlulA Dimension (1992-present).^[28]

In 1985, Fisher was one of the first instructors at the MIT Media Lab where he began his research into culture as "intercoding networks" of humans, machines and ecosystems. Sensing rock music's potential for popular intercoding, Fisher began experiments on immersive rock theater at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the MIT Gym. Assignments he gave his students included evolving communications on telephone poles in the streets and analyzing random television shows from the roof of the Cecil and Ida Green Building. These forays into public culture led Fisher to launch the multimedia rock band, Nerve Circle. In 1988 Nerve Circle's production, "Evolution of the Grid” was presented at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art and a second version of the production emerged in Fisher’s loft in downtown Boston, but was shut down by the police. Over 200 guests were sent into the streets, and Fisher was evicted from his loft by its owner, a local real estate monopoly and holding company based in London.^[29]

Eviction from his loft precipitated a dissolving of Nerve Circle’s company of musicians and dancers and Fisher’s move to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1988. Nerve Circle’s drummer, Scott Grande moved to Philadelphia and was able to join Fisher in one of his first community-based creations in Brooklyn. For the next ten years Nerve Circle was reformulated as community-based media sharing theater and played a key role in cultivating a renaissance in that once struggling neighborhood. Fisher’s leading role as one of the Brooklyn Immersionists in Brooklyn were picked up by the international press, along with Fisher’s contributions to a discourse on innovators of the new media technologies. Three years after including Fisher’s voice activated community board, (718) Subwire in its New Bohemia issue on Williamsburg, New York Magazine included Fisher in another cover story, “The New York Cyber 60” describing his communal network codes as “More Jenny Holzerish than Jenny Holzer.” Fisher’s works were referenced in articles and commentaries in Wired Magazine five times, beginning with a 1995 article titled “Mr. Meme”^[30] for his biological and memetic approach to art. Fisher’s Bionic Codes are among the early digital cultural projects to be featured in the Guggenheim Museum’s 1996 CyberAtlas,^[31] professed to be “the first concerted effort to chart the cultural terrain known as cyberspace.” Associated with artists and theorists like Mark Pauline, Jaron Lanier and Douglas Rushkoff, Fisher has been lauded as one of the "Visionaries of the New Millennium"^[32] by David Pescovitz in Java Magazine.

Fisher received an M.S. in visual studies from MIT in 1986 following a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1982. In 1998 he was invited by the University of Iowa to create a new digital media arts program, "Digital Worlds," which he directed for three years before being invited to become an associate professor at Hunter College in New York in 2001. Due to the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the City of New York removed millions of dollars in funding from numerous city programs, including Fisher's department at Hunter. Fisher and several other faculty, including the documentarist Lynne Sachs, were let go.

Fisher has lectured at numerous other colleges and universities, including New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Bennington College, the University of Washington and Columbia University. He has written on media and the arts for Art Byte, the Utne Reader, Digital Creativity, the Walker Arts Center and the New York Council for the Arts. His media works have been exhibited in museums and festivals around the world and his codes have been presented on the Guggenheim Museum's online CyberAtlas from 1997 to 2007.^[33] Fisher's Zoacodes website has been presented by the Encyclopædia Britannica as one of the "Best of the Web"^[34] and his cybernetic terms have appeared in numerous dictionaries and glossaries.^[35][36]

Later work

In 2005, a retrospective of Ebon Fisher's works was presented in a 5,000 sq. ft. museum at the University of Northern Iowa, leading to an invitation to become the 2005 Marjorie Rankin Scholar-in-Residence at Drexel University. In 2006 he collaborated with NPR commentator, Andrei Codrescu, on the creation of a new Zoacode, "Signal Strangely," which reflected Codrescu's stormlike travel patterns as he sought support for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

In 2006, Fisher became a full time affiliate associate professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, where he and a colleague in the computer science department, Prof. Quynh Dinh, co-authored and received a National Science Foundation grant for a "Transmedia Search Engine.”^[37][38] He was interviewed extensively in the documentary Brooklyn DIY, by Marcin Ramocki which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009. In that same year, Fisher was invited to present a keynote talk at the IT Revolutions conference in Venice, Italy, sponsored by the IEEE.

After weathering the occupation of Williamsburg by corporate developers, an exodus from New York induced by the attack on the World Trade Center and its financial destabilization of Hunter College, abnormal teaching conditions at the Stevens Institute of Technology that led to the removal of the institute's president,^[39] the Great Recession and the Coronavirus Pandemic, Ebon Fisher has returned to cultivating The Nervepool and its nerve-like ethics, the Zoacodes. The transmedia world has moved 80 miles south of New York to the Pinelands National Reserve and is now taking the form of a new incarnation called Zoapool.

See also

• Williamsburg, Brooklyn
• Brooklyn Immersionists

Bibliography

• Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, Abrams/Prentice Hall, 1995/2000
• Claudia Steinberg, "Vis-a-vis Manhattan," Die Zeit, 1997
• Frank Popper, From Technological to Virtual Art, MIT Press, 2007
• Frank Popper, "Ebon Fisher," Contemporary Artists, ed. by Tom and Sarah Pendergast, St. James Press, 2002
• Ebon Fisher, Music, "Circulate All Sensation," in CD Anthology, State of the Union, compiled by Elliott Sharp, 1996
• Sylvie Myerson & Vidyut Jain, "Interview with Ebon Fisher," Sandbox Magazine, 1996
• David Alm, "Soft Machines: Ebon Fisher Coils into Gentle Linkage," RES Magazine, vol. 4 no. 4, 2001
• Ebon Fisher, “Wigglism: A Philosophoid Entity Turns 10,” Leonardo Journal Vol. 40, Number I, 2007
• Flash Art, Interview with Annie Herron, director of Test-Site Gallery, Brooklyn, Feb. 1993
• Charles Runette, "The New York Cyber 60," New York Magazine, Nov. 13, 1995