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Select publications

• Walker Downey (2023).
  Unsound Judgments: Noise Pollution, the White Noise Machine, and Sonic Color Lines
  Resonance, Vol. 4, no. 1, 39–68.
  
• Walker Downey and Parham Ghalamdar (2023).
  Echoes of Loss and Celebration: Iranian Home Videos as Beautiful Apparitions
  Ajam Media Collective
  
• Walker Downey and Caroline A. Jones (2022).
  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
  

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.

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