Broadcast Bash

Join us for our second annual Broadcast Bash. This year, we’re celebrating the release of our first ever print edition. Since 2020, Pioneer Works Broadcast has thrived as a forum for inspired and radical thinking across the arts and sciences. Now for the first time, we’re committing Broadcast to paper and ink. And boy, does she look handsome.

We'll have readings from the issue by hannah baer and Ed Park; a performance from the wildly unpredictable Dynasty Handbag; rock theater by the legendary The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black; a DJ set by Herbert Harmonix (aka EZRAKH) of the label Thread Imprint; and stargazing in the garden with the Amateur Astronomers Association.

Join us as we celebrate the artists, scientists, writers, and in-betweens who make Broadcast possible. We’ll be handing out copies of the print issue for free; first-come, first served.

hannah baer is a writer and therapist based in New York. She is the author of the memoir trans girl suicide museum, and the admin of the Instagram meme account, @malefragility. Her work has appeared in Jewish Currents, Artforum, The Drift, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

EZRAKH is a musician, songwriter, producer, and co-founder of New Jersey-based record label Thread Imprint. He draws inspiration from the soulful and psychedelic sounds of his upbringing, and mixes rock, R&B, jazz, electronic, and world music to create a style all of his own. Under his Herbert Harmonix alias he DJ’s utilizing his New Jersey dance music roots. He’s also the bandleader of the Mystery Klub, his live performance ensemble. In 2020 he released his album Infinity: Sankopha & 87, featuring cover art direction by Ibrahim Ahmed, while in 2022 he released the single “Warrior Woman.” He has performed at Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, MANA Contemporary, South by Southwest, AFROPUNK, bunkr, and more.

Dynasty Handbag—alter ego of performer, visual artist, and actor Jibz Cameron—has presented multimedia work at arts venues such as Pioneer Works, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Broad Museum, The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, BAM, and the Centre Pompidou, among others. Cameron is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, a 2021 United States Artist Award recipient and a 2020 Creative Capital Grant awardee. She produces and hosts Weirdo Night, a monthly comedy and performance event in Los Angeles and New York.

Ed Park’s new novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, will be published by Random House on November 7, 2023. His first one, Personal Days (2008), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Park was a longtime editor and writer at The Village Voice and a founding editor of The Believer. His short fiction and nonfiction appear in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, McSweeney's, The Atlantic, and Harper's. Park currently teaches writing at Princeton.

Kembra Pfahler formed The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black (TVHKB) with Samoa Moriki in New York in 1990. A theatrical rock group, TVHKB links a monster aesthetic to a dark feminine archetype. Named in honor of cult horror film heroine Karen Black, Pfahler's band performs amid elaborate hand-constructed sets, in which she acts out transgressive physical feats. Wearing a number of teased black wigs with blacked-out teeth, black stiletto boots, and her body painted blue, pink, red, or yellow, Pfahler heads a team of "The Girls of Karen Black," similarly styled. TVHKB records include: A National Healthcare, Triple X Records (1990); The Anti-Naturalist, Cleopatra Records (1995); Black Date, Cleopatra Records (1998); and the limited edition vinyl LP, Fuck Island (2012) and Slippery When Dead (2020). Pfahler is represented by the gallery Emalin in London and will be releasing a capsule collection for SSENSE, made in collaboration with her longtime friend, designer Rick Owens. For the Broadcast Bash performance, co-founder Samoa Moriki will be on guitar, Gyda Gash on bass, and Eric Robel on drums.

Pioneer Works Broadcast is an ad-free publication that encourages radical thinking across the arts and sciences. Helmed by editors-in-chief Janna Levin and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Broadcast reflects the spirit of Pioneer Works and extends beyond the space’s physical walls in Brooklyn through narrative-driven journalism, essays, criticism, ruminations, and original videos. Noted contributors include Hilton Als, Elif Batuman, Richard Dawkins, Jennifer Egan, Rivka Galchen, Brian Greene, Hua Hsu, Gary Indiana, Marlon James, Ben Lerner, Eileen Myles, Roger Penrose, and Frank Wilczek.

Founded in 2020, 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.