Ebon Fisher - Affiliate Associate Professor
	Affiliate Associate Professor Email: efisher@stevens.edu Phone:  (201) 216-5529 Fax: (201) 216-8245 Office: Morton 200 Office Hours:   Mon, Wed 11:30a-12:30p;  or by appointment
Research Interests Since the mid 1980s I have been approaching culture as a living structure which emerges in a hybrid network of machines, environments and minds. Art can be construed as something we cultivate and with some effort, sustain, even as we attempt to sustain the support structures in which it breeds. I am particularly interested in cultivating new forms of social-environmental ethics as they might be expressed in a nervelike language of networks.

Biography

One of the first instructors and media artists at MIT's Media Lab, Ebon Fisher has been exploring the ethics and rituals of technology usage since the 1980s. He is the creator of an ongoing transmedia world, the Nervepool, and his Bionic Codes, Zoacodes and experimental media rituals have been presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Guggenheim Museums online CyberAtlas, a rave by DJ Ritchie Hawtin (AKA Plastikman) and to 10 million television viewers in Japan.

Fisher's community-based information rituals in the 1990s helped to build vital channels of communication in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which has grown into a landmark arts district. According to Domus Magazine, Fishers bionic ritual, the Web Jam, became a symbolic climax to the emerging Williamsburg creative community. The event, billed as Organism, was created by 120 collaborators and attended by 2,000 participants for 15 straight hours. Newsweek dubbed the Web Jam a sequel to the rave. Stemming from his media rituals Fisher developed a network-based system of ethics called Zoacodes, which lead to his transmedia world, the Nervepool. Fisher is currently developing a series of sci fi videos in conjunction with the Nervepool.

Following a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, Fisher received an M.S. in Visual Studies from MIT in 1986. In 1998 he was invited by the University of Iowa to create a new digital arts program, Digital Worlds, which he directed for three years. Fisher has lectured at numerous colleges and universities, including New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Bennington College, the University of Washington and Columbia University. He has written on media and the arts for Art Byte, the Utne Reader, Digital Creativity, the Walker Arts Center and the New York Council for the Arts.

Fisher's transmedia world is at www.Nervepool.net.

A Sample of Courses Taught

Cultivating Culture: Art, Biology & Biophilia
Introduction to Art & Technology
Transmedia Performance (and green screen)
3D Animation (using Maya)

top of page^