Introducing the Broadcast 2.0
Pioneer Works is dust and wood, cement and steel. The proverbial brick and mortar. The building has an imposing physicality, a visceral appeal that works on your soul. The Broadcast by contrast is immaterial, an idea, a thought experiment, an aspiration. We fantasized about a virtual experience in the likeness of Pioneer Works. For years, that concept lived only in our minds, a cloud of electrical neural activity. Under the uncomfortable pressure of lockdown, we published a beta version, just in time to salvage one of our much loved events, The Universe in Verse. Our audience, ordinarily confined within our walls, had surged overnight to 80,000, with viewers tuning in from around the world.

When we went live a year ago, The Broadcast wasn’t yet everything we had imagined, but it was a beginning, a chance for the survival of our community. Now it’s growing, changing, evolving, asserting itself. Today, we are thrilled to launch a more fully-realized incarnation of this virtual extension of our physical campus, a cultural space for interdisciplinary discourse on Music, Technology, Science, and the Arts: Broadcast 2.0

Over the course of the last year we’ve realized that The Broadcast is not as unphysical as we originally imagined. It insists on feeling like a thing. I tap my keys. Real electricity travels. Light hits my eyes. Synapses fire. I trip out on time travel with scientists and artists. It’s as real as foot fall in a vast exhibition hall. As real as light on my face in the garden. We watch music together. We exchange opinions. We disagree sometimes. The Broadcast is an idea, a concept, a place, an exchange of electromagnetic energy. It lives in my mind and in yours. Welcome.

Janna Levin
Editor-in-chief