Draft:Williamsburg Scene

Williamsburg Scene: Art & Music collectives 1989-1998

Art & Music collectives active in Williamsburg Bklyn during the years 1989-98

This creative community included exhibition spaces, warehouse events, storefront entrepreneurial ventures and loosely defined organizations

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 Theater. 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.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/10158131745272362/?wtsid=rdr_0WwnoS1jYL28ZMnC1

Not all of Williamsburgh bohemian and artist history concerns Immersionism, but it is largely owing to this movement that the neighborhood was transformed in the early 90s from an artist colony to an urban subculture. Immersive culture in Williamsburg sprang broadly from three groups of artists working independently of each other — a group around the Lizard's Tail cabaret on South 6th Street; an "entertainment research" outfit in a warehouse called Keep Refrigerated at 110 North 6th Street; and a "laboratory" called Nerve Circle Studios on Grand Street. Immersionism received influence and collaboration from spaces in lower Manhattan that had been doing work in this direction since the late 70s, such as Gargoyle Mechanique, Generator, Gas Station, Collective Unconscious, and others. PRIMARY LINKS TO IMMERSIONISM: A General Introduction to Immersionism Immersionism is a cultural movement that took shape in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 1990s. It bears some affinity to the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, to Relational Aesthetics, paganism, and multi-media art.

Here are a few articles and albums that I and some others have assembled on Immersionism

Articles

Immersionism: Manifesto and Introduction with further links, February 13, 2011

Bernard Carey of Yale Radio talks with Immersionist pioneer Ebon Fisher, July 2016

The Omnisensorialists 1991-1999, by V Owen Bush, January 19, 2012

Immersionism and Relational Aesthetics, March 19, 2012

Go with the Flow (pdf download), Domus, February 1998. Suzan Wines coins the term "immersive environments" in this article.

The Cat's Head, Constructing Utopia in Brooklyn and Dublin (pdf download), TDR, Fall 1993. Melanie Hahn investigates early appearances of immersive culture.

The Inflatable Man – Dennis Del Zotto and the Williamsburg Scene, June 7, 2006

Discourse sur la Moutarde: the evolution of warehouse events in Williamsburg (pdf download 622 KB), Breukelen Magazine, Winter 1993

Williamsburg's Arcadian Past, NY Observer, Zachary Woolfe on Billy Basinsky, November 2011

David Brody's 4-part series, From Biofreak to Organism, 2001 (pdf download)

Facebook albums of key immersive laboratories

Immersionism: Warehouse Events in Williamsburg, 1989-98

The Lizard's Tail

Lalalandia

Nerve Circle

Mustard

The Federation of Ongolia

The Inflatable Man, immersive pioneer Dennis Del Zotto

Multipolyomni

The Sayanayas

Chronology:

Chapter 1 -  The early Warehouse parties