Education

Teaching

Programs

Programs

• Art History BA
• Film & Media Arts

Research

Research interests

• Sound art, intersections of art and experimental music
• Acoustic ecology and bioacoustics
• Emerging media (AI, AR and VR, locative media) in the arts, media theory
• Film and video art

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 a historian of modern and contemporary art. He received his PhD from the History, Theory, & Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT in 2022. While anchored in art history, Walker’s research cuts across media studies, musicology, and sound studies. His primary focus is the contemporary field of sound art and its historical and technological roots. Walker’s additional research interests include: intersections of experimental music and the expanded arts in the postwar decades; the interdisciplinary history of field recording, and artists’ and musicians’ use of natural and environmental sound; acoustic ecology and changing views on noise pollution; and film and video art.

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. He has lectured and presented on such subjects as contemporary sound artist Christina Kubisch, musician and experimental filmmaker Tony Conrad, and the unique historiographic challenges posed by sound art. In Spring 2023, he co-curated an exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum with NBAM Executive Director Suzanne de Vegh; titled "Sound in Space, Sound in Place," the show featured work by celebrated and emerging sound artists, audio recordings sourced from New Bedford residents, and experimental sound works by UMassD students in Walker's own sound art seminar. More information about the exhibition, which received praise from The Boston Globe and The Standard-Times, can be found at: New Bedford Art Museum: Sound in Space, Sound in Place. 

Under contract with University of California Press, Walker’s current book project, Resonant Bodies: David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, and the Emergence of Sound Art, follows the intertwined paths of musicians David Tudor (1926–1996) and Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) in the postwar U.S., tracking their migration from experimental music into the art world to better understand how sound and sound art entered museum spaces. Tudor and Oliveros are each well recognized for their contributions to electronic and experimental music of the late twentieth century. However, there has been little acknowledgment of the genre-crossing nature of their practices, which, shaped by interdisciplinary collaboration and emerging technologies, evolved beyond the definitional and institutional limits of music and expanded the parameters of listening and sonic creation across the arts. 

Meshing the perspectives of art and music history, and leveraging the insights of media theory, Resonant Bodies argues that Tudor and Oliveros’s imbrication with different art forms and extensive work with electronic media—from reel-to-reel tape machines and oscilloscopes, to modified electroencephalograms (EEGs)—led them to reimagine musical composition in spatialized and participatory terms. Examining the musicians’ individual innovations and frequent collaborations in the Sixties and Seventies, the project shows how Tudor and Oliveros arrived at embodied models of sonic creation that resonated with ascendant developments in installation and performance art, and set the stage, circa 1980, for museum exhibitions trumpeting the collapse of art and music—and the arrival of a nascent sound art.

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