poster by Velveeta Heartbreak for the first Cat's Head event - 14 July 1990

The Infinite Immersion

Let us loop into strange coilings, this coiling. Let us draw into that which we share and cannot master. Reach through your skin, your scaly simulations, and nurture these rude couplings – of sinew and circuit, riot and union, of mud, oil, flim-flam and imagination. 

Engineer a new communion with the loaded logic of the living, with ceaseless reflection and a moving center. Soak tendrils of thought and limb in an ethical jelly of feedback. Siphon every atom, and theory of atom, into the folds of our flesh, our collective screen, infusing phantoms and facts with equal measures of visceral significance. Let us creep along the rivulets and curls of writhing truth, this feral fetus squinting in a boundless womb of linkages and cultivations.  Let us ovulate our slippery codes and systems into the blood of interconnection, into the writhing waters of every nation, planet and galaxy. 

And let us wiggle like furious squid into pink and pulsing knots. Let us breed coy entanglements, endless mysteries, seething in outrageous placentas of mind, machines and matter. We must embrace these hives, these creatures, these worlds – and keep all that is lively, and everything that sustains life, in succulent focus. Let us fuse with these organisms, these spasms of our devotion, becoming everything we encounter, becoming devotion itself. May the lonely pools of science, art and heaven congeal into a sea of quivering devotion. 

At this twist in the orgy of infinite flesh we are drunk with the sweat of the stars, with everything alive, with lunges, lickings and startled presences. We convulse and clutch in waves of milky wonder. 

Dare to suckle this wild vapor my friends. Draw into this hysterical continuum, this bionic boiling. Melt into the monstrous, grooving spasm of the infinite immersion. 

– Ebon Fisher, with continuous input from the public, 1989-2012

Immersionism, a Brief Introduction

Immersionism is a cultural movement that took root in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, NY between 1989 and 1994. Its primary activity was the deployment of multi-media events and environments in the abandoned warehouses and factories that lined the Williamsburg waterfront at that time. During its formation the movement was loosely known as "the warehouse scene” and participants began using terms like "immersion" and "omnisensorial" to describe their fledgling aesthetic. Writing in Domus magazine in 1998, the architect Suzan Wines described the movement as “immersive culture.”

Immersive culture in Williamsburg sprang broadly from three independent groups — The Lizard's Tail performance space on South 6th Street; Keep Refrigerated, an "entertainment research" outfit located in a warehouse on North 11th Street; and an experimental systems studio called Nerve Circle based in a furniture factory on Grand Street. 

A group around the Lizard's Tail initiated the giant warehouse events known as Cat's Head I, Cat's Head II, and The Flytrap. A fourth large warehouse event, Organism, was initiated by Nerve Circle and included participants from the Flytrap, Keep Refrigerated, and Hit & Run Theatre. These massive, all-night immersions occurred between 1990 and 1993.

Keep Refrigerated gave birth to entities such as Lalalandia Entertainment Research Corporation, El Sensorium, Trans-lounge, fakeshop, Room Temperature, and The Federation of Ongolia. These subsequent environments were dispersed all over Williamsburg.

No fewer than 47 spaces and events, large and small, have been identified with Immersionism in the early 1990s alone. Immersionist theater groups included Gang Green, Hit & Run Theater, IFAM, Open Window Theater, and Wild Child Productions. The Green Room, a cabaret and performance space, became a kind of back stage – literally a "green room" – for those who were creating immersive culture in the surrounding warehouses and storefronts. Collaborators from lower Manhattan included artists and performers from Gargoyle Mechanique, The Collective Unconscious, and the Gas Station.

It has taken two decades of hindsight to identify the rich array of Immersionist patterns and sensibilities emerging in North Brooklyn in the early 1990s. But as far back as 1991, when Nerve Circle's director, Ebon Fisher, was asked by the New York Press to describe the emerging aesthetic along the Williamsburg waterfront, he described it in Immersionist terms: "linkage, interaction, integration." A few years later, Ward Shelly's well-published chart of the Williamsburg scene presents the early 90s period as a bubble of activity with the large Immersionist warehouse events taking center stage. This is echoed in articles in New York Magazine, Newsweek, Flash Art, The Village Voice, The Drama Review, Die Zeit, and Domus.

Immersionism was the largest and most identifiable cultural innovation to have emerged in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in recent history. It was largely on account of this development that Williamsburg in the early 90s made a transition from an outer-borough artists’ colony to a major international subculture in its own right. The Immersionists sparked a Brooklyn Renaissance. They helped to shift cultural protocols away from cold, postmodern cynicism, towards something a whole lot warmer: immersive, mutual world construction and the "blood of interconnection" as Ebon Fisher puts it in his manifesto, The Infinite Immersion.

Immersionism may be warm, but it isn't always comfortable. Lalalandia's own poster for its experimental restaurant "comfortzones" features an array of forks zeroing in on a plump consumer. Stavit Allweiss' poster for the Flytrap warehouse event unfurls the event's performances and installations as interconnected entrails. While it is tempting to point out that the forces of gentrification that followed the Immersionist scene have turned much of Brooklyn into what Lalalandia would have called a bourgeois "comfort zone," the Immersionists were never simplistic in their modes of operation, in their goals, and the "ethical jelly of feedback" they catalysed.

It is undeniable that a spirit of environmental involvement and collective renewal began by the Immersionists has not only persevered, but has been spreading through Brooklyn ever since. The book that we are preparing may go a long way towards bringing some of the visionary systems engineering back into the Brooklyn cultural industry which the Immersionists helped to catalyse.

— Ethan Pettit, Ebon Fisher, Susie Kahlich, 2012 

IMMERSIVE ALBUM:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150091577597362.267754.655962361&type=3&l=f07ee18277

IMPORTANT READING ON IMMERSIONISM:

Suzan Wines, Go with the Flow, Domus, February 1998:

http://web.me.com/swyrv/warehouse/Domus_GoWithFlow_Wines_Feb1998.pdf

Melanie Hahn, The Cat's Head, Constructing Utopia in Brooklyn and Dublin, TDR, Fall 1993:

http://web.me.com/swyrv/warehouse/TDR_CatsHead_Hahn_Fall1993.pdf