Ebon Fisher's AlulA Dimension

At first it’s hard to get a handle on exactly what it is that Ebon Fisher creates. An artist and organizer based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Fisher has spent much of the last fifteen years breeding freefloating artistic entities that he characterizes as neither installations, nor concept art, nor happenings, but as “media organisms,” artificial life forms cultivated in the plasma of popular culture.

Fisher collectively named his creations and the world they inhabit the “AlulA Dimension,” after the spurious, “bastard” feathers on a bird’s wing. As an undergraduate art major at Carnegie-Mellon University, he decided to abandon traditional art (“we had learned nothing about life, and too much about Alexander Calder” ¹ ), deciding that the school’s science and technology programs were where the action was. As he put it, “[The science students] were so intense and brilliant and engaged—they seemed to be on the pulse of the soul of the world, and I thought, ‘Isn’t art supposed to reflect the soul of the world? And why are these scientists so much more poetic and full of rapture?’” This sentiment, idealistic yet utterly practical in a day-to-day sense, is echoed throughout Fisher’s work and conversation: that art has lost touch with everyday life, and that science and technology are better places to start from in a search for universal meanings. The AlulA Dimension was born there in Pittsburgh when he began spray-painting simplified drawings of nerve cells on surfaces around town, combining art, science, and rebellion.

After college, Fisher moved to Boston where he attended graduate school at MIT’s then brand-new Media Lab. In Boston he began organizing “media rituals”—events which incorporated theatre, performance, art, music, and a healthy dose of partying spirit. In 1989, after one such ritual got him kicked out of his loft apartment by his landlord, Fisher took the opportunity to relocate to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In the building energy of that budding artistic community (proximate but comfortably independent from what he described as the cultural and financial “mommy and daddy of Manhattan”), Fisher found fertile ground for his ideas on art, technology, and community. He continued to work on enormous collaborative events in the early 1990s at venues such as Minor Injury Gallery and the Mustard Factory building. Organism, for instance, a one-night event in 1993, was a 12-hour extravaganza featuring the work of 120 artists in every conceivable medium—and then some—and attracting more than 2000 participants and party-goers. Fisher, more interested in an organic, interactive, web-like model of artistic production than in what he regards as the art historic myth of individual creativity, describes the method of Organism as “for every creative person to create a system, a whole web throughout the site. Not like ‘here’s a pedestal, you put your sculpture here; here’s your wall space, you put your painting here.’ But it’s more of a systems approach, where everything spreads out. So if you did T-shirts, you’d have five people wearing your T-shirts all over the place, spreading your idea out in public space.” Meanwhile, his drawings of neurons were evolving and mutating, and they began to reflect the observations of behavior he gleaned from these rituals, becoming graphic abstractions of prescriptive ethical models for human behavior—or as art historian Jonathan Fineberg has written, “templates for a new social order.” ²

Fisher calls these designs “bionic codes,” hybrid structures based on computer networks and the human brain’s neurons. The AlulA Dimension encompasses the bionic codes as well as the fictional alternate world into which the codes are being absorbed. Much of Fisher’s work is based on the idea of memes, a way of studying the spread of information by representing ideas as organic entities which breed in the mind and culture like parasites. Fisher regards his bionic codes as models for productive and peaceful human interrelations which he hopes to spread like viruses throughout the host culture, “hacking” into human brains and rewriting some of their self-centered hardware. Captioned by vaguely pleasant imperative aphorisms...