Dead Air - 2017, Cohen Gallery, Brown University

This group exhibition presented by the Brown Arts Initiative featuring works by Tony Bragg, Cooper Holoweski, Martin Smick, and Ziyang Wu. Framed by Herman Melville’s meditation on the sea’s hidden forces, the exhibition explored the evolution of consciousness—from its speculative origins in deep time to its fragmented, digitized state in the present. The show asked: What is consciousness, and how has humanity’s pursuit to understand and control it shaped both the world and the self?

Together, the artists offered speculative, critical, and poetic responses to consciousness as both a shared and fractured experience. Dead Air ultimately explored how our inner worlds are shaped by broader systems—natural, technological, and cultural—and asked what lies ahead as we drift deeper into mediated and contested realities.