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 into 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. Stressing organic vitality and rejecting traditional tendencies to cloister the arts in separate disciplinary siloes, the Immersionists created fully dimensional experiences in the streets and abandoned warehouses, and cultivated rich webs of connection with their surrounding world. The ecologically engaged, post-postmodern culture helped to transform Williamsburg’s deteriorating industrial waterfront and spread a wave of interdisciplinary creativity to Bushwick, DUMBO, and throughout Brooklyn.

In 1999, the City of New York began to leverage Williamsburg's creative revival for the benefit of corporate developers and wealthier apartment seekers. Zoning laws were changed on the waterfront to favor high rise construction and eventually billions of dollars in tax abatements were provided to developers. Writing for the New York Times, Russ Buettner and Ray Rivera questioned this undemocratic development, stating 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 “gentrification,” which is a free market process initiated by individual home buyers, the City's privileging of both 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 helped to revive.