WALKER P. DOWNEY
ABOUT ME
I am an interdisciplinary scholar writing on art, music, and technology, and an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Art Education, Art History, & Media Studies at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
I received my PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT in 2022.
RECENT NEWS
I am currently collaborating with historian Katsushi Nakagawa (Yokohama National University) on an article mapping the development of sound art in Japan. It will appear in the last of six volumes comprising A Cultural History of Asian Art, an expansive cross-historical survey due out in 2028 through Bloomsbury.
CONTACT
In Resonance: The Sonic Art of David Tudor and Pauline Oliveros, book under contract with University of California Press.
In this project, I retrace the intertwined paths of American musicians David Tudor and Pauline Oliveros, arguing that their postwar innovations in electronic music and sound art were motivated by a shared questioning of the boundary between the human and the technological. I show that over the course of the 1960s and 70s, through their ruggedly DIY experiments with circuitry, reel-to-reel tape, and biofeedback, these friends and collaborators arrived at distinct yet complementary theorizations of the body as prosthetic: always already inhabited by and reliant on a technological otherness. I conclude that their mercurial and interdisciplinary practices model a technological ethics badly needed in our present moment, rejecting the posthumanist dream of a final convergence and instead embracing what is unfinished—because constitutionally incomplete—in human and machine alike.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
“Unsound Judgments: Noise Pollution, the White Noise Machine, and Sonic Color Lines,” Resonance 4, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 39–68. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2023.4.1.39.
Editor, with Sarah Rifky, Thresholds 47, "Repeat" (2019). Available via The MIT Press.
"In the Free Field: Doug Wheeler’s PSAD Synthetic Desert III and Anechoic Histories," Art Journal OPEN, August 30, 2018, http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=10247.
Essays, Criticism, and Book Reviews
“As the Famed ‘October’ Journal Turns 50, This Reading List Charts Its Legacy,” Art in America, Spring 2025, http://bit.ly/4d5ZTgB.
Book Review: Prudence Peiffer’s The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, Art in America, Fall 2023, p. 46–49, https://bit.ly/3r0br1e.
With Parham Ghalamdar, “Echoes of Loss and Celebration: Iranian Home Videos as Beautiful Apparitions,” Ajam Media Collective, April 8, 2023, https://bit.ly/3ogQs9a.
With Caroline A. Jones, “At Hearing’s Edge: Artist Doug Wheeler Achieves a Semi-Anechoic Immersive Artwork, Synthetic Desert, with Arup’s SoundLab,” a+u: Architecture and Urbanism Magazine, December 2022, p. 156–163, https://bit.ly/41QJbdU.
“For Eyes and Ears: New Sound Art Serves Different Senses with a Multimodal Approach,” Art in America, June 7, 2022, https://bit.ly/3mkAKVX.
“Material Histories: Ruth Hardinger at Mana Contemporary,” Art in America, August 4, 2021, https://bit.ly/3xQ0mgG.
“Rebooting the Art-and-Technology Movement: A Review of W. Patrick McCray’s Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, March 17, 2021, 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2021.1885863.
“The Sounds of Quarantine: How Experimental Musicians are Overcoming Domestic Isolation,” Art in America, June 24, 2020, https://bit.ly/3iEZowK.
“Agnes Denes’s Idealistic Projects Refuse to Accept Apocalypse as Inevitable,” Art in America, January 2020, p. 73–75, https://bit.ly/3koHwXx.
"Reappraising Luc Ferrari and Éliane Radigue, Two Renegades of French Music," Art in America, December 11, 2019, https://bit.ly/2LGUp0j.
"Robert Morris's 'Para-Architectural' Drawings Envision a Fantasy Complex That Prioritizes Movement Over Static Form," Art in America, December 2019, p. 97–98, https://bit.ly/36d60PD.
"Surveying Manfred Mohr’s Five-Decade Collaboration with the Computer," Art in America, November 2019, p. 103–104 https://bit.ly/2LLA3mp.
"In Resonance: Oliver Beer at the Met Breuer," Art in America, July 30, 2019, https://bit.ly/2PFHKvN.
“Christine Sun Kim: Too Much Future,” Art Papers, Winter 2018–2019, p. 72–73, https://bit.ly/3sHHD4Z.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
PhD: Architecture: History and Theory of Art; May 2022
Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts
MA: Art History; June 2015
Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts
BA: Studio Art and Art History; May 2013