Broadcast Bash
Pioneer Works welcomes its virtual likeness, Pioneer Works Broadcast, into the real world for the inaugural Broadcast Bash. We’ll be celebrating the artists, scientists, musicians, and writers who’ve made this digital experiment possible, as well as the readers who make the work worthwhile. Enjoy food and drink, music and performance, and surprise special guests—all live, in-person, and off our screens.
The evening will include ruminations on the cosmos by Broadcast editor-in-chief Janna Levin; double bass by Cole Davis; prose by Elvia Wilk and Eileen Myles; a special musical act by Swamp Dogg; and DJ sets by Black Helmet and Chances With Wolves. Outside in the garden, telescopes from the Amateur Astronomers Association and wet, charlatan astrology by Joey Frank will be situated alongside a bar and food catered by Eat Offbeat.
Launched in Spring 2020, the Pioneer Works Broadcast encourages radical thinking across the arts and sciences. Through narrative journalism, essays, criticism, and original video and audio, The Broadcast extends the spirit of Pioneer Works beyond its physical walls. Noted contributors include astrophysicists Adam Becker and Joe Patterson, cultural critics Gary Indiana and Sasha Frere-Jones, autofiction pioneer Chris Kraus, New York Times bestselling authors Lauren Groff and Naomi Klein, and poets Kaveh Akbar and Eileen Myles.
Jerry Williams––aka Swamp Dogg––began his professional singing career as Little Jerry Williams back in the ’50s before working as an A&R man for Atlantic Records in the late ’60s. Following 2018’s critically acclaimed Love, Loss, And Auto-Tune—his first LP to debut on 11 Billboard charts and his first chart ink since his 1970 song “Mama’s Baby – Daddy’s Maybe”—Sorry You Couldn’t Make It allows Swamp to finally dive into the sound he grew up playing. With the support of Pioneer Works Press, they recorded the album at Nashville’s Sound Emporium with Ryan Olson as producer, and backed by a crack studio band led by Derick Lee, a keyboard virtuoso who worked as the musical director of BET’s Bobby Jones Gospel Show for nearly four decades.
DJ Black Helmet is a New York Based DJ / musician who specializes in long form live mixes + generative ambient works. He has performed at venues such as Elsewhere, Bembe, Pioneer Works, Public Records, The Sultan Room, Roulette Intermedium and MoMa PS1. He has worked for clients including but not limited to Tumblr, CARA NYC, Mana Contemporary, Ace Hotel Chicago, NADA, Feria Material and Platform Art. He currently has a weekly radio show on WFMU’s Give The Drummer Radio called Your Boy Black Helmet Radio.
Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist and art journalist. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, will be out in November. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994), Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include evolution (2018) and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (2015), and A Working Life is out in Spring, 2023. The Trip, a Super-8 puppets road film they wrote and directed can be seen on YouTube. They’ve received many grants and awards including a Guggenheim and Warhol/Creative Capital Art Writers Grant. They live in New York and Marfa, Texas.
Elvia Wilk is a writer living in New York. She is author of the novel Oval and a book of essays, Death By Landscape, both available from Soft Skull Press. The novel is available in Italian, German, and UK versions, and the essays are forthcoming in Italian. She contributes to publications like Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, n+1, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, 4Columns, Mousse, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers grant and a 2020 fellowship at the Berggruen Institute. From 2012 to 2016 she was a founding editor at uncube magazine, and from 2016 to 2018 she was the publications editor for transmediale and a contributing editor at Rhizome. Currently, she is a contributing editor at e-flux journal and teaches at places including the University of the Arts Berlin, Eugene Lang College, and City College of New York.
Cole Davis is often considered the most versatile upright bass player of his generation, creating a new sound in the instrument’s rich history. As the upright bassist in the indie rock band Lambchop, his bass lines have been described by NPR as “so thick [they] sound exactly the way your heart feels after surviving some surefire catastrophe.” He is also a prolific educator with several books to his name, most notably Freedom of Movement. He holds two degrees from the Juilliard School. He is currently based in Manhattan, New York.
Pioneer Works Broadcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, bridging the two cultures of science and the arts.