This video documents a sculptural mural and sound installation I created at MACRE Ithaca in August 2025 upon the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

From two speakers, a dialogue unfolds between myself and an AI-clone of my (deceased) father’s voice reading his own words from in Answering Their Country’s Call: Marylanders in World War II (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). To create the clone, artist and sound engineer Norm Scott built a digital model of my father’s timbre from archival footage. Then to get the rhythm right, Norm merged the model with a recording of my brother Gerry L. Brewster reading the same passage the way our father would've read it. The result is uncanny.

My father’s voice as if speaking from the grave, and mine narrate a red-splattered landscape, recalling both the carnage he endured and enacted on Sugar Loaf Hill—one of the Pacific’s most brutal battles—and the larger “rain of ruin” of the atomic bomb. The artwork arises from turbulence within my own body: the myth of my father as a war hero, the silence of trauma, the patriotic stories I learned in school, and the more complex, morally ambiguous histories I later uncovered. 

(This is an edited excerpt of the audio. The full run-time is 12 minutes. Still imagery and videography by Robert Barker and Ry Ferro. Editing by Elizabeth Seldin and Alexis Neophytides.)