Walker Downey

faculty

Walker Downey, PhD he/him

Assistant Teaching Professor

Art Education, Art History & Media Studies

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

An introduction to analyzing images and the visual experience. This course focuses on `reading¿ visual phenomena (painting, sculpture, photography, film and digital media, including AR, VR, and the "metaverse") in light of the larger cultural forces which shape our interaction with them. `Case studies¿ will introduce selected major movements and personalities within the history of art and visual culture.

A thematic approach to the systematic study of art and architecture. Through intensive reading and discussion, students will work with formal, iconographic, and contextual methodology to produce research papers which consider critically social, economic, political, and/or religious structures that influence and formulate visual art traditions. Objects selected for study will be determined by the instructor.

A thematic approach to the systematic study of art and architecture. Through intensive reading and discussion, students will work with formal, iconographic, and contextual methodology to produce research papers which consider critically social, economic, political, and/or religious structures that influence and formulate visual art traditions. Objects selected for study will be determined by the instructor.

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.

Contemporary new media including digital/web art, animation, photo, digital film, virtual reality and cyber culture. Topics include virtual worlds and community identity; relationship of video installation to viewer experience; the impact of cyborgs, avatars and science fiction on how we define the body; and the transformation of language, art and design by the digital.

Contemporary new media including digital/web art, animation, photo, digital film, virtual reality and cyber culture. Topics include virtual worlds and community identity; relationship of video installation to viewer experience; the impact of cyborgs, avatars and science fiction on how we define the body; and the transformation of language, art and design by the digital.

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.

Organizational tools for thesis preparation, with analysis of content and style of theses by recent graduates and other writings. Writing begins with a revision of the thesis proposal as the introduction to the thesis. A preliminary draft is prepared by the end of the semester. Significant class time is devoted to group critiques of student writing.

Study under the supervision of a faculty member in an area covered in a regular course not currently being offered. Conditions and hours to be arranged.

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 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.