Walker Downey

faculty

Walker Downey, PhD he/him

Assistant Teaching Professor

Art Education, Art History & Media Studies

Contact

508-910-6936

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College of Visual & Performing Arts 204D

Education

2022Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPhD
2015Williams CollegeMA
2013Wheaton CollegeBA

Teaching

Programs

Teaching

Courses

Charts film's evolution from the 19th century to the present day, investigating narrative/genre, but also attending closely to developments in film technology. The course moves from pre-cinematic techniques of making images move, to the first sound films of the 1920s, to the color and widescreen spectacles of the mid-20th century, and finally, to computer-generated films of the digital age.

Charts film's evolution from the 19th century to the present day, investigating narrative/genre, but also attending closely to developments in film technology. The course moves from pre-cinematic techniques of making images move, to the first sound films of the 1920s, to the color and widescreen spectacles of the mid-20th century, and finally, to computer-generated films of the digital age.

An introduction to the practice of ¿sound art.¿ Through readings/listening assignments, students learn about historical and contemporary artists (from Annea Lockwood to Christine Sun Kim) who have taken sound out of concert halls and into museums. Through hands-on projects, students learn to: record/digitally edit sound; capture vibrations, underwater sound, and electromagnetism with DIY microphones; create experimental compositions and installations.

Select publications

Walker Downey is an interdisciplinary scholar writing on art, music, and technology. He received his PhD in the History, Theory, & Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT in 2022. Walker’s research follows artists and makers of the last fifty years who productively misuse technology—whether magnetic audiotape, handheld camcorders, mainframe computers, or artificial intelligence. He studies circuit-bending figures for whom media experimentation is a potent means of interrogating and reimagining identity (along axes of race, gender, and disability), and who appropriate instruments of violence—the electronic runoff of military surplus—as vehicles of social critique and psychic liberation. Walker’s research and criticism has appeared in Resonance: the Journal of Sound and Culture, Art Journal OPEN, Art in America, and Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.

Under contract with University of California Press, Walker’s current book project, Resonant Bodies: David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, and the Engineering of Hybridity, retraces the intertwined paths of American musicians David Tudor (1926–1996) and Pauline Oliveros (1936–2016), 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. The book shows that over the course of the 1960s, through their unconventional experiments with 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.