Ebon Fisher
Ebon Fisher is an internationally recognized media artist whose pioneering works explored the cultivation of living systems. He taught at MIT’s Media Lab at its inception and later became a leading figure in the Brooklyn Immersionists arts movement that revived a struggling industrial neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1990s. The artist’s immersive strategies of creation, and his cultivation of living networks, have challenged both the 20th century paradigm of human self expression, and the distancing aesthetics of postmodernism. Fisher’s manifesto from 1988, You Sub Mod, introduced “submodernism,” a philosophy of deep environmental participation.
From art to living systems
Cultivating living systems
The French art historian, Frank Popper, has stated in the book, Contemporary Artists, that Fisher's goal was to create neither art nor science, but to cultivate "the living properties of information." Citing a body of work spanning street graffiti, immersive rock performance, information sharing theater and viral network ethics, Popper states:“ can be seen as an effort at moving our collective gaze away from both art and science and towards the nurturing of ‘life’ in the broadest, non-objective, and non-human sense. It is an attempt to seed a form of ‘subjective ecology.’ This leads, among other things, to a de-centered authorship where one creates with the community, with the medium, and with nature.”
Fisher's experimental theater company, Nerve Circle, cultivated what Fisher called "media organisms,” living media systems that helped to revitalize a distressed industrial area of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1990s. Fisher and other Immersionists eventually catalyzed a renaissance that spread through much of Brooklyn. In 2024, The New York Times included Organism, a 15 hour "web jam” Fisher instigated for 2,000 artists, musicians and guests, among the immersive events that established Brooklyn as “Where It's At” in New York's cultural life. Earlier, in Domus Magazine, Suzan Wines described that all night gathering as a “symbolic climax” to Williamsburg’s creative emergence:
In his introduction to a museum exhibition at the University of Illinois in 1993, the art historian, Jonathan Fineberg spoke of Fisher’s commitment to creating with, not above, his Brooklyn neighborhood:
"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 – 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.'"
Living systems at the MIT Media Lab
While still a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ebon Fisher was appointed by Professor Muriel Cooper to teach an immersive media course, Creative Seeing to undergraduates at the MIT Media Lab at its inception in 1985. Running for two years, Fisher's course helped to establish the Media Lab as a think tank that explored radically new approaches to art, media, information and living systems. Moving beyond Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media as an extension of the human being, Fisher presented the arts and media as an equal relationship between humans and their environment. He invited students to join him in public media experiments in the streets of Cambridge; to analyze television on the top of the tallest building on campus; and to experience total sensory deprivation inside MIT’s anechoic chamber. Drawing from these experiences, Fisher began to formulate an immersive rock theater company, Nerve Circle in 1986 that introduced biological systems and themes into public spaces. On the strength of Fisher’s biomorphic imagery, the director of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, David Roth paid Fisher a studio visit and advised him to move to New York where his experimental nature might be more fully embraced. After performances at Boston rock clubs, Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Arts, and the ICA, three Boston police officers shut down a highly charged performance of Nerve Circle’s “Evolution of the Grid” at a party in Fisher's studio. The intrusion convinced Fisher to follow David Roth's advice and move to New York.Revitalizing Brooklyn
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 that would eventually be called the Brooklyn Immersionists. That international "artists colony," as Die Zeit described the interdisciplinary scene by the Brooklyn waterfront, built a creative, environmentally engaged network among the warehouses, streets and rooftops of Williamsburg's waterfront area. Fisher and his theater company, Nerve Circle, shared a culture of neighborhood participation with other experimental groups like El Puente, Epoché, the Green Room, Hit and Run Theater, Keep Refrigerated, Lalalandia, The Lizard’s Tail Cabaret, Minor Injury Gallery, and the Outpost. Huge interdisciplinary events emerged in the abandoned warehouses like The Sex Salon, the Cats Head, Flytrap and Organism. Fisher and his colleagues initiated a discourse on ecological thinking and neighborhood participation in local zines like Waterfront Week and Worm Magazine, and soon other immersive enterprises emerged like Alien Action, El Sensorium, Galapagos, Fakeshop, Mustard and Ocularis.As a featured artist at Williamsburg's experimental Test-Site Gallery, Fisher initiated a community-friendly media store in the entrance, and launched public events like The Salon of the Mating Spiders, which was both a performance party and a celebration of 600 local artists and non-artists alike. In an interview with Franceso Bonami in the Italian art magazine, Flash Art, the gallery director reveals she was initially reticent to green light Fisher's event, but eventually acknowledged the neighborhood's immersive “tradition." As listed in Worm Magazine, the salon was “totally open, noncurated, no size limitation, any medium." By eliminating restrictions on size and medium, the entire gallery was turned into an experiment in emergent, biological design. Even the name referenced living things, in keeping with Immersionist sensibilities. The gallery director, Annie Herron stated in Flash Art that “At first I thought it was crazy,” but then admitted that the Salon of the Mating Spiders had become her best-selling show with six hundred artists lined up around the block to install work of every kind in every conceivable space.
Coming of age in a postmodern era that questioned human objectivity and industrial progress, the Brooklyn Immersionists transitioned to a post-postmodern cultural paradigm that emphasized environmental immersion, organic vitality, and a departure from 20th century individualism that led to what Fisher called “subjective ecology." 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 disadvantaged populations. They helped to catalyze a renaissance in Williamsburg that spread through much of Brooklyn and beyond. 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 populations. In the new millennium, the Bloomberg administration rezoned the district for high rises and provided tax abatements for large corporate developers. Instead of embracing the emerging local economy, these “trickle down” corporate welfare policies led to a rise in the cost of living and corporate predomination of local culture. Rates of attrition for the disadvantaged began to rise again under the City's corporate welfare policies in the new millennium. Among those forced to leave were the artists, musicians, writers and activists which had initiated the renaissance.
Advancing art and urban ecology
Interviewed on Fuji Television and Yale Radio, and covered in Newsweek, Die Zeit, Wired, Flash Art, and the New York Times, Ebon Fisher has been at the vanguard of several emerging cultural paradigms: urban ecology, digital culture and Brooklyn’s renaissance at the turn of the 21st century. In the 2000 edition of his book, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, Jonathan Fineberg elaborates on Fisher’s interdisciplinary range:“The artist Ebon Fisher inhabited the close-knit artists’ neighborhood that existed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at the start of the nineties. His work involved the interface of media, technology, and industry with the human environment of a small community... ‘The web,’ he said, 'has created the new Vienna.’...Fisher also began making digital art that had no fixed materiality; instead it had the flavor of contemporary Cyberpunk fiction, as in William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer... Fisher wrote utopian “social programs” on the computer through community-based cultural enterprises and consumer technology, he aspired to reclaim the production of culture from the mass marketers.”Fisher’s media rituals were sometimes accompanied by other innovations such as his Bionic Codex, a system of network ethics which Frank Popper describes as "artificial lifeforms cultivated in the plasma of popular culture." Popper underscores the organic vitality driving Nerve Circle's immersive creations beginning in Cambridge and Boston in the 1980s:
Recognizing the artist’s "subversive play” in the spaces between culture, nature and technology, Wired Magazine covered Fisher’s works five times, beginning in 1995 with an article titled “Mr. Meme.” The artist’s diagrams of living media systems have appeared in numerous 20th century survey exhibitions, including the Cooper Hewitt, the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, and the Guggenheim Museum. Three years after including Fisher’s voice activated community board, Subwire in its “New Bohemia” issue on Williamsburg, New York Magazine included Fisher in another cover story, “The New York Cyber 60,” comparing him to a well known SoHO-based artist as “More Jenny Holzerish than Jenny Holzer.” The Encyclopædia Britannica featured Fisher’s website as one of “The Web’s Best Sites” in 1994 and his Bionic Codes were presented from 1996 to 2006 in the Guggenheim’s online CyberAtlas which curator Laura Trippi described in the Guggenheim Magazine as “the first concerted effort to chart the cultural terrain known as cyberspace.” In 1997 Elliott Sharp included Fisher’s music in his anthology, State of the Union, along with two other prominent Williamsburg artist-musicians, Greg Asch and Karthik Swaminathan. Included with other pioneering technology artists and theorists like Mark Pauline, Jaron Lanier and Douglas Rushkoff, Fisher has been lauded as one of the "Visionaries of the New Millennium" by David Pescovitz in Java Magazine. 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.”
Neurons and Networks
A common element in all of Ebon Fisher's work has been the illumination of living networks. Fisher began to develop his nerve-like visual language in Pittsburgh while he was an art student at Carnegie-Mellon University. In 1981 he spray-painted a series of neurons along the train tracks in Pittsburgh's Panther Hollow, and was eventually introduced to another Pennsylvania graffiti artist, Keith Haring by one of his painting professors, Jim Denny. Rather than follow Haring to the world of New York galleries, Fisher began to take courses in computer programming which the young artist believed was extending the human nervous system into a mesh of machines. Using the programming language, Pascal, Fisher wrote the program, Book.dat, that generated random fields of zeros which stood in for the dots in a dot matrix. In an early harbinger of generative AI, the program could conceivably produce an infinite number of images and text. The project opened the door to graduate studies at MIT and Fisher was invited to teach at the institute'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 continued to approach his work as a collaboration with the world to cultivate nervelike systems.Neuron graffiti: Pittsburgh, PA.Nerve Circle : Interactive rock theatre born during studies and teaching at MIT.Nerve Circle : Community-based information-sharing rituals in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.Network ethics: Bionic ethics system, the Bionic Codes, which evolved into Zoacodes.The Nervepool: An evolving transmedia world that began in Brooklyn as The AlulA Dimension and evolved into the Nervepool and later Zoapool.
Embodied network architecture
In the mid-1990s, Ebon Fisher built an immersive architectural system into his loft called The AlulA Dimension. It acted as a three dimensional expression of a node in Fisher’s nervelike system of ethics, the Bionic Codes. In 1998, Suzan Wines discussed the weblike nature of the climbable structure which Fisher used as a site for fully embodied media events or “squirmcasts.""As a 'living media organism' the AlulA Dimension has a completely symbiotic relationship with its environment and inhabitants. Inspired by similarities between the flexible structures of ecological systems and the internet, Ebon Fisher began breeding the AlulA Dimension as an "organic matrix" for social interaction."Among the guests to Fisher’s squirmcasts in the AlulA Dimension was the team behind the San Francisco online chat group, Bianca’s Smutshack, and members of Williamsburg’s experimental night space and theater scene, Lalalandia and Fake Shop. MIT's List Visual Arts Center hosted a live broadcast of AlulA, along with another Williamsburg group, Floating Point Unit, as part of an international web broadcasting experiment called Port. 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 new incarnations went by the names, Nervepool and the Zoacodes. Both codes and architecture are now evolving again into a film and a weblike transmedia world called Zoapool which Fisher is cultivating in the Pinelands National Reserve of New Jersey.
Philosophy and teaching
Scholarly endeavors
Much of Fisher's work and writing redefines both art and technology as forms of environmental nurturing and cultivation, encouraging a paradigm shift that has gained the interest of numerous institutions of higher learning. In addition to teaching at MIT, the Massachusetts College of Art, the New School and the University of Iowa, Fisher has been invited to speak at New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Bennington College, the University of Washington, the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Columbia University. He has written on media and the arts for Art Byte, the Utne Reader, Digital Creativity Journal, the Walker Arts Center, the New York Council for the Arts and MIT’s Leonardo Journal. His bionic terms have appeared in Wired Magazine and numerous dictionaries and glossaries, and Fisher was invited to give a TEDx talk at the Academy of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania, and a Banquet Keynote at the Information Technology 'Revolutions Conference in Venice, Italy, sponsored by the European Union.In 1998 Fisher was invited by the University of Iowa to create a new media arts program which he directed for three years under the name Digital Worlds. In 2001 Hunter College invited Fisher to become an associate professor, but the attack on the World Trade Center undermined New York City's finances and the new media arts program that Fisher joined was suspended that same year. Fisher then moved with his young family to the Pinelands National Reserve in New Jersey where he began to develop an independent media studio by the Rancocas River. In 2005, a retrospective of Ebon Fisher's works was presented by the curator, Darrell Taylor, at the University of Northern Iowa. That 5,000 sq. ft. exhibition led to an invitation to become the 2005 Marjorie Rankin Scholar-in-Residence at Drexel University. In 2006 Fisher 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, Prof. Quynh Dinh, received a National Science Foundation grant for a "Transmedia Search Engine." At the Stevens Institute he was interviewed extensively by Marcin Ramocki for his documentary, Brooklyn DIY, which premiered to a sold out audience at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009. Fisher left Stevens that same year after enduring exploitive working conditions at Stevens which eventually led to the removal of the institute's president by the Attorney General of New Jersey. Fisher has returned to cultivating The Nervepool and its nerve-like ethics, the Zoacodes.' His transmedia world has moved 80 miles south of New York to the Pinelands National Reserve where Fisher 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.”
Submodernism
Ever since he spray-painted a series of neurons in the streets of Pittsburgh 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: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.”
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:
Fisher's Quaker upbringing in Philadelphia, and his experiences at the Meeting School, a Quaker educational experiment on a farm in New Hampshire, were significant influences on his ecological approach to culture.''''