Three Transmissions from a Carceral State is a live performance and radio broadcast bringing together three sound archives connected to the history of imprisonment in Upstate New York. The first set of recordings derives from a practice of listening to the electromagnetic and acoustic environments of active and decommissioned prisons in Wave Farm’s vicinity. The second set draws on Wave Farm’s archive of radio programs highlighting the analysis of imprisoned people, their families, and communities. Finally, a third set of recordings engage with current abolitionist organizing in Upstate New York. The three sound archives will be mixed in real time to evoke the prison as a physical structure and a discursive site. Listening to its past, present, and future, the project seeks to contribute to the abolitionist imagining of imprisonment’s afterlife.

Hans Kuzmich is a Belarusian interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work attends to gender as an interface between subjects and the state with the desire to unsettle their regulatory logics. Working from a trans, diasporic position, Kuzmich creates moving image and sound installations that foreground phenomena on the edges of visibility and audibility, such as infrared light and electromagnetic fields. Kuzmich is currently completing a hybrid doctoral dissertation in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, a BFA from the Cooper Union, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. Kuzmich has been awarded artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Studios at MASS MoCA, and SOMA Summer. His work has been exhibited at Art in General, the Kitchen, the 8th Floor, Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, Performance Project at University Settlement, Temporary Agency, and Not An Alternative/No-Space (New York, NY); Underground Museum, New Wight Gallery, and Pacific Design Center (Los Angeles, CA); AS220 (Providence, RI); Beirut (Cairo, Egypt); and SOMA (Mexico City), among other venues. Kuzmich’s writing has appeared in journals (Theory, Culture & Society, Art Journal, and Native Strategies) and exhibition catalogs (Imagine Freedom: Art Works for Abolition, New Wight Biennial: Compassion Fatigue, and Sharon Hayes: There’s So Much I Want to Say to You).