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
In Spring 2023, I co-curated an exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum with NBAM Executive Director Suzanne de Vegh. The show, titled “Sound in Space, Sound in Place,” featured celebrated and emerging sound artists, field recordings sourced from New Bedford residents, and experimental sound works by my own UMass Dartmouth students. Read the Boston Globe write-up here: https://bit.ly/482oRus.
CONTACT
Resonant Bodies: David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, and the Engineering of Hybridity, book under contract with University of California Press.
In this project, I retrace the intertwined paths of American musicians David Tudor (1926–1996) and Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016), arguing that their postwar innovations in electronic and experimental sound were motivated by a shared desire to renegotiate the boundaries between the human and the technological, and thereby reinvent the embodied self outside of normative molds. I show that over the course of the 1960s, through their creative misuse of DIY circuitry, reel-to-reel tape machines, and electroencephalograms, these friends and collaborators arrived at highly distinct yet complementary theorizations of the human body as irreducibly hybrid: always already hyphenated by a technological otherness or technicity. For Tudor and Oliveros both, this revelation functioned as the grounds for a radical empathy—a listening across difference—and a reimagining of the body as a site of perpetual transformation. A continued drive towards hybridity yielded aesthetic and political changes in their work of the 1970s, which extended into the interdisciplinary space between music and art (the domain of an emerging “sound art”), and prototyped fluid new forms of identity and embodiment that unsettled binary constructions of disability, gender, and sexuality.
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
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