Brooklyn Immersionists

The Brooklyn Immersionists were a community of artists, musicians and writers that moved beyond the distancing aesthetics of postmodernism and immersed themselves and their audiences in the world where they lived. First emerging in the late 1980s and coming to fruition in the 1990s, the experimental scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn catalyzed the largest New York renaissance to take root outside Manhattan. Rejecting the cloistering of the arts into disciplinary siloes, and stressing local vitality over the curatorial priorities of Manhattan, the Immersionists created fully dimensional experiences in the streets, rooftops and abandoned warehouses. Unlike the shallow immersion of digital media, and installation art that is walled off in a museum or gallery, the Brooklyn Immersionists cultivated rich webs of connection with their entire neighborhood. The dynamic, post-postmodern culture played a critical role in revitalizing Williamsburg’s deteriorating industrial waterfront and spread a wave of environmentally rooted creativity and urban enchantment to Bushwick, DUMBO, and throughout Brooklyn.

In 1999, the City of New York began to leverage Williamsburg's creative rejuvenation for the benefit of corporate developers. Zoning laws were changed on the waterfront to favor high rise construction, and eventually billions of dollars in tax abatements were provided to developers. Questioning this undemocratic development in the New York Times, Russ Buettner and Ray Rivera stated in 2009 that “Comptroller William C. Thompson has said the mayor focuses too much on large developments that go to favored builders who receive wasteful subsidies." Often mislabeled as free market “gentrification”, the City's privileging of local real estate aggregators and corporate enterprises is more accurately described as corporate welfare. Most of the members of the Immersionist community were low income renters and could not afford the subsidized corporate economy that was imposed on the neighborhood in the new millennium. After a decade of innovative creation, a majority were forced to leave the neighborhood they had played a critical role in reviving. Many of the Immersionists went on to major careers outside Williamsburg in performance art, experimental media and interdisciplinary event creation.