Brooklyn Immersionists

The Brooklyn Immersionists were a community of artists, musicians and writers that immersed themselves and their creations in an industrial area of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1990s. The dynamic, environmentally engaged scene played a significant role in reviving a struggling area of Brooklyn that had been losing jobs to outsourcing overseas and coping with a burgeoning drug trade.

In his book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, Cisco Bradley states that the Immersionists had moved beyond both modern and postmodern cultural paradigms and helped to shift the center of New York's creativity towards Brooklyn:

"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, ‘[Immersionists] helped to shift cultural protocols away from cold, postmodern cynicism, towards something a whole lot warmer: immersive, mutual world construction.'"

Rather than direct their creative life towards specialized art establishments in Manhattan, especially those which had become locked into skeptical and ironic modes of expression, the Immersionists began to cultivate a web of interpenetrating creativity in the streets, rooftops, warehouses and weed-strewn waterfront. The ecological nature of the Immersionist movement is noted by curator, Brainard Carey on the website for his arts program on Yale University Radio, WYBC (AM):

"The creative community that came together during the early 1990s in Williamsburg, now referred to as the Immersionists, shared a common interest in cultural innovation and deep involvement in their local environment."

Much of that environment was turned into a medium of expression, with increasingly large interdisciplinary events in the abandoned warehouses attracting attention from a wide variety of media, including The Village Voice, The New York Press, The Drama Review, Flash Art, Wired, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Utne Reader, Domus, The Guggenheim Museum CyberAtlas, Die Zeit, Newsweek, and Fuji Television. At least four major art history books have reflected on the movement, including Jonathan Fineberg's Art since 1940: Strategies of Being, and Cisco Bradley's The Williamsburg Avant-Garde. The international “artists colony”, as the German newspaper, Die Zeit referred to the interdisciplinary community near the waterfront, was composed of immigrants from across the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Seeking affordable spaces to live and work, the experimental artists found themselves in a distressed and toxic environment which they began to treat as a living medium worthy of caring and creative involvement. In many ways the movement had moved past a postmodern aesthetic of interpretation and shifted into a non-objective ethic of participation, immersion and nurturing.

The Immersionists' environmental ethic was evident in its nomenclature. Groups and art collectives emerged that often referenced animals, ecosystems and healing in their names and manifestoes. One of the earliest of Williamsburg's creative organizations, El Puente (The Bridge), referenced a deep, restorative connection to local youth. A series of large, community-building events in the streets and abandoned warehouses also referenced the living world, beginning with The Sex Salon, a playful nod to animal sensuality which opened on Valentines Day, 1990. That was followed by the Cats Head (I & II), Flytrap, Human Fest (I & II), El Sensorium and Organism.

Storefront venues and mobile theater and media groups began to emerge in parallel with the large, creative confluxes, but shared in the community-building process: Minor Injury Gallery, The Bog, The Lizard's Tail, Nerve Circle, Keep Refrigerated, the Green Room, the Outpost, Hit and Run Theater and Lalalandia. In the mid 1990s, interdisciplinary establishments appeared that followed in both the biomorphic naming tradition and the locally rooted, interactive culture: Mustard, The AlulA Dimension, Floating Point Unit, Galapagos, Ocularis and Ongolia. Local media emerged that helped to build a discourse around participation, biological feedback systems, and ecological sensitivity. These included Breukelen, The Curse, The Nose, The Outpost, Waterfront Week, Worm Magazine and (718) Subwire. Migrations of artists and musicians between groups were extensive, leading to a rich, creative weave of ideas and resources.

Nearly sidelined in the new millennium by corporate developers sponsored by the city, the Immersionist movement catalyzed a creative wave that spread through the rest of Brooklyn, helping to establish the borough as a major new destination for creative talent. While creative districts in New York had begun to emerge in Manhattan's West Village in 1900, Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, the East Village in the 1950s, SoHo in the 1960s and 70s, and reemerged in the East Village in the 1980s, Williamsburg's Immersionist community gave rise to the largest renaissance in New York to take root outside Manhattan. This was a significant shift celebrated as early as 1993 in the exhibition, Out of Town: The Williamsburg Paradigm, curated by Jonathan Fineberg for the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois.