Nervous Media
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NervousMedia.com brings the natural world into new kinds of relationships with technology. Along the way we hope to illuminate the ecological systems we are all immersed in and to question the assumed barriers between humans, technology and nature. Directed by media creator, Ebon Fisher, the studio performs original, creative research and produces video, web, text and social media.
Our production studio is located along the Rancocas River in a protected ecosystem, the Pinelands Natural Reserve, in central New Jersey. This unique forest is just minutes from New York, Princeton, Philadelphia and the Jersey shore. We are in the perfect place to investigate the peculiar phenomena at the intersection of art, communications and biological systems. As avid explorers of the natural world, no idea or project is too strange or challenging –as long as it is Earth-friendly.
Nervous Media is directed by MIT-educated media artist and writer, Ebon Fisher. His award-winning creations have been described in Wired Magazine as "breathtaking biology" and presented by PS1/MoMA, The Royal Scottish Academy and a rave with DJ Plastikman. His works have appeared in the exhibition, "One Hundred Years of Contemporary Art" at Le Centre International D’Art Contemporain de Montréal and presented in numerous publications, including Die Zeit, Domus, The Drama Review and Newsweek. Ebon's graphic representations of ethical networks, the Bionic Codes, were broadcast to 10 million viewers in Japan and presented on the Guggenheim Museum's website for a decade, leading to Ebon's designation by Java Magazine as a "visionary of the new millennium."
PROJECTS WITH A BIOLOGICAL TWIST
THE BROOKLYN ORGANISM: Exploring social networks and ecological systems in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1990s, Ebon Fisher was one of the pioneers of the Immersionist art movement which helped to revitalize that struggling industrial neighborhood. A "web jam" Ebon instigated in Williamsburg facilitated the congealing of diverse phenomena generated by120 artists and musicians in an abandoned mustard factory in 1993. 2,000 people attended the event, known as Organism. The web jam was one of the signature events of the 1990s leading to the transformation of Williamsburg from a struggling industrial neighborhood to an international cultural destination.
"Conceived by Ebon Fisher, Organism became a kind of symbolic climax to the renegade activity that had been stirring within the community since the late eighties. It exploited the notion of architecture as living event, breathing and transforming for fifteen hours in an abandoned mustard factory."
– Suzan Wines, Domus, 1998
RESEARCH AND LECTURING: Ebon Fisher holds a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He was invited by Professor Muriel Cooper to teach at MIT's Media Lab at its inception and later launched the Digital Worlds program at the University of Iowa. He has lectured at New York University, The New School for Social Research, Columbia University, and the University of Washington in Seattle. More recently Ebon gave a TEDx lecture in Vilnius, Lithuania, and gave a keynote talk at an IEEE-sponsored conference, IT Revolutions, in Venice, Italy.
Left: Ebon Fisher, TEDx Vilnius, December 2012. Photo by Gediminas Lašas
BIONIC CODES: Designed as memes years before the term "media virus" became popular, Fisher's Bionic Codes and Zoacodes have appeared in dozens of magazines, websites, tattoos, T-shirts, prints and projections at raves and museums. His early website featuring the Bionic Codes was presented online by the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of "The Web's Best Sites." Fisher's nervelike systems have been included in several art history books, including Jonathan Fineberg's book "Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being." Ebon has been called “Mr. Meme” by Wired and honored as one of the “New York Cyber 60” by New York Magazine. Java Magazine included Fisher among the "Visionaries of the New Millenium" along with Howard Rheingold, Mark Pauline, Carla Sinclair and Douglas Rushkoff.
Left: Bionic Code at PS1/MoMA
COMMUNICATONS: Fisher has also worked on communications and design for Barnum Commun-ications, Young & Rubicam, The Boston Eye Research Institute, Adweek/MediaWeek, The Ford Motor Company, The Boston Children's Museum and Test-Site Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he was the media director. Fisher has created diagrams of transgenic mice for the Wall Street Journal and a logo for the Neurology Department of the University of Iowa.
Right: Ebon Fisher (bottom right) directing a video shoot at
De Paul University in Chicago.
Left: A Zoacode emerges from the Nervepool.
3D digital image by Ebon Fisher
“Long before Friendster, locative media, and
emergent everything, Ebon Fisher saw the beauty
in telecommunications technology as a conduit
for cultural and social experimentation."
– David Pescovitz
Co-editor of BoingBoing.net
and contributing writer for Wired
Above: Zoacodes
"Ebon Fisher is an artist whose 'Media Organisms'
...constitute a highly original contribution to the
latest developments in technological art."
– Frank Popper
Contemporary Artists
“Some people are active in a social
environment that produces interesting work,
and some, like Ebon Fisher, help to lay the
very foundations of that environment.”
– Robert Elmes
Founder and Director
Galapagos Art Space, Brooklyn