Nervous Media
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Immersive Learning Systems
Above: Ebon Fisher's Digital Worlds program at the
University of Iowa's School of Art & Art History
"Professor Fisher is a visionary who demonstrates a strong connection with people and technology. Professor Fisher, along with Professor Julie Harrison, both creative and deeply intellectual talents, built the Art & Technology department at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Professor Fisher motivated students to take dreams and make them become reality in his 3D animation class and taught students to think beyond everyday reality in our media theory course. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a student of Prof. Fisher's and came to realize that inventing the future requires an intimate collaboration between aesthetics and systems. He was truly a visionary in a space that needed
creative thinking and innovation."
– Allison Basile, student at The Stevens Institute of Technology
Left: Ebon Fisher (seated left) speaking in a panel discussion at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia on youth and technology. Hosted by Homer Jackson.
Currently an adjunct professor at Rutgers University, Fisher is fond of teaching and organizing immersive, hands-on learning systems of many forms. Teaching the first undergraduate course at MIT's Media Lab, he has immersed students in an alarmingly silent, anechoic chamber and was invited to create social disturbances for students at Harvard University. As a social media experiment at the New School for Social Research in New York, he simultaneously taught the same course in a classroom and online. (He maintains the classroom was more memorable.)
"I took all of Ebon's Digital Worlds classes at Iowa... They were definitely
the most interesting classes I took in college. Digital Worlds, for me, was
an enterprising mix of technology, biology and motion media and was
far ahead of its time."
– Matthew Butler, Multimedia Consultant
University of Iowa Libraries
As founder and director of Digital Worlds, a new digital arts program at the University of Iowa's School of Art & Art History, Fisher developed a curriculum which involved a sequence of exposures to increasingly complex software, while maintaining a strong connection to traditional, highly physical expressive skills. He brought this experience to consulting jobs for Hunter College in New York, the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken and the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia.
Left: Students at Occidental College, Los Angeles, in a bicoastal Skype exercise with
Ebon Fisher. Hosted by
Prof. Allison de Fren.
Fisher has given lectures on his experimental media work at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Bennington College and New York University, and was invited to give a keynote talk at IT Revolutions, a conference in Venice, Italy sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has been honored as The Marjorie Rankin Scholar-in-Residence at Drexel University and was the co-recipient of a major National Science Foundation grant to research the design of a “Transmedia Search Engine.” He has recently presented a talk on ethics and networks sponsored by TEDx Vilnius.
Fisher has a BFA with a Minor in Social Science from Carnegie-Mellon University and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT.
Above: Green screen studio designed by Ebon Fisher
for the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
Above: Trust exercise at De Paul University.