This video documents a sculptural wall 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 across time between myself and an AI-clone of my (deceased) father’s voice, reading from his oral history in Answering Their Country’s Call: Marylanders in World War II (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). The clone was created with artist and sound engineer Norm Scott and my brother Gerry L. Brewster, who read the passage to capture my father's cadence. Norm merged Gerry's recording with a digital model of my father’s timbre built from archival footage. The result is uncanny.

My father’s voice and mine narrate a red-splattered landscape, recalling both the carnage my father 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. Above all, it asks how these legacies shape our perception of the mass destruction of human life and the environment happening now.

(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.)