Ebon Fisher taught at MIT's Media Lab at its inception in 1985, and later became a leading figure in the Brooklyn Immersionists arts movement in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.[1] [2] An innovator of ecological "web jams" and "media organisms," Fisher has worked extensively on strategies for using media technology in the service of living systems. Much of his work and writing redefines both art and technology as forms of nurturing and cultivation. Fisher's Quaker upbringing and his youthful experiences at a Quaker farm school in New Hampshire, The Meeting School, were significant influences on his democratic and ecological approach to culture.[3]
In Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1990s the artist directed an experimental theater company, Nerve Circle which conducted live media sharing rituals in an effort to cultivate vital channels of communication in an economically depressed district. Fisher was among the early participants in Williamsburg’s international "artists colony,"[4] as Die Zeit described the Immersionist scene by the Brooklyn waterfront. Other early environmentally engaged groups included El Puente, Minor Injury Gallery, the Lizard’s Tail Cabaret, Epoché, the Green Room, The Pedestrian Project, Lalalandia, Fake Shop, Ongolia, Hit and Run Theater, Mustard and neighborhood media operations like Waterfront Week, Worm Magazine and The Outpost.
Nerve Circle's experimental arrangements of bodies, information and living context were designed to induce a shared presence that Fisher likened to a "media organism." These immersive creations included information-sharing events at Minor Injury Gallery, Media Compressions; a large interactive installation at the Flytrap warehouse gathering called Endless Tissue; a phone-in community bulletin board, (718) SUBWIRE; a creative space situated in a traditional street festival, The Weird Thing Zone;[5] and The Eyeball Scanning Party which partnered with Kit Blake’s Worm Magazine to publish images of participants' eyeballs from the party along with their commentary about being scanned.
One of the largest events Fisher led in the neighborhood was called Organism. According to Newsweek, over 2,000 people danced at the all night event which was cultivated through an emergent, social-ecological process Fisher called a "web jam." It involved overlapping cultural and biological webs created by 120 members of Williamsburg's creative community. Suzan Wines described the event’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.”[6] 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."
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." 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." Popper continues, referencing Nerve Circle's early immersive experiments in Cambridge and Boston in the 1980s, and 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."Fisher, along with a dozen other immersive groups and art collectives, helped to catalyze a renaissance in Williamsburg that spread through much of Brooklyn and beyond.[7] As the art historian, Jonathan Fineberg wrote of the creative community that came to be known as the Brooklyn Immersionists:
“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.’”
According to a 2004 report in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the emergence of such a dynamic culture in the early 1990s helped Williamsburg to revive its economy and to stem the rate of attrition for its disadvantaged population.[8] In the new millennium, the Bloomberg administration rezoned the district for high rises and provided tax abatements for large corporate developers. The result was a corporate occupation of Williamsburg[9] and a steep rise in the cost of living. The rate of attrition among the disadvantaged began to rise again.
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.’”
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:
“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.’ ”
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.[10] 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.
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.[11] 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.[12]
In Williamsburg, Brooklyn Fisher helped to revive a struggling area of New York which had been losing industrial jobs to outsourcing and suffering from a growing drug trade. Cultivating what he called "media organisms" like The Weird Thing Zone, Endless Tissue, the Eyeball Scanning Party, Organism and The AlulA Dimension, Fisher's immersive theater company, 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 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.
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.
Ebon Fisher is one of the early, pre-web explorers of network culture and viral media. Wired Magazine dubbed him "Mr. Meme"[13] in 1995 for his biological and memetic approach to art and he has been lauded as one of the "Visionaries of the New Millennium"[14] by David Pescovitz for Java Magazine. Drawn to both the formal and functional properties of nerves and networks, Fisher's work has followed a trajectory from neuron graffiti to his weblike media creation, Zoapool.
- Neuron graffiti: Pittsburgh, PA (1980–82).
- Nerve Circle: Interactive rock theatre group, Boston, MA (1986–88).
- Network rituals: Information-sharing rituals in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (1989–98).[15]
- Network ethics: Bionic ethics system, the Bionic Codes, which evolved into Zoacodes (1992-present).
- The Nervepool: Transmedia world with a "nervecenter" at Nervepool.net (1992-present).[16]
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. In 1986, sensing rock music's potential for popular intercoding, Fisher launched the multimedia rock band, Nerve Circle, in Boston, MA. In 1988 Nerve Circle's raucous, interactive production, "Evolution of the Grid," was shut down by the police leading to his eviction from his loft.[17] This precipitated a move to Brooklyn in 1988.
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.[18] Fisher's Zoacodes website has been presented by the Encyclopædia Britannica as one of the "Best of the Web"[19] and his cybernetic terms have appeared in numerous dictionaries and glossaries.[20] [21]
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.”[22] [23] 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,[24] 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.