“Fading Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins” is an experimental live docu-audio performance and visual exhibition that explores abandoned spaces as sites of memory, disappearance, and lingering transmissions. The piece combines live storytelling, archival tape, and ambient field recordings, manipulated in order to create the feeling of the audience becoming a rogue radio transmission that drifts into America’s historical underbelly. Developed under the banner of the U.K. Press Gazette Future of Media Award nominee Blake Pfeil's acclaimed multimedia travelog “All-American Ruins,” this particular experience journeys into the abandoned Sumner School in Topeka, Kansas — one of the segregated schools central to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Drifting in and out of dreamlike sonic reconstructions of personal reflection and grandiose Americana mythology about migration and race, the piece explores what it means for a place historically significant to exist simultaneously as landmark, ruin, and unresolved cultural strife.
Blake Pfeil is an Ambie Award-winning multidisciplinary artist. His latest body of work, "All-American Ruins," has been the recipient of numerous awards for its genre-bending multimedia storytelling, with installations in 13 countries, including his recent On Air Fest program "The Sound of Ruins" which was featured in Forbes. In 2025, the podcast arm of the project "abandoned" (with its intentionally lower-cased "a") hit no. 1 on Apple Podcasts’ Places & Travel charts, and in 2026, the American Writing Awards named it "Podcast of the Year.” Outside "All-American Ruins," Blake served as a guest producer for season 5 of History Colorado's Lost Highways while working his full-time "day job" as the Operations & Programs Manager at TMI Project and part-time "night job" as co-host of "Cinema Kingston!" on WKNY. Blake resides at the foot of the Catskill Mountains of New York with his handsome partner Jake and his equally handsome pitbull-boxer-bulldog Jax.
Supported by YAMAHA
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