Allan Downey
Biographic Data
| ID | 644787 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Allan Downey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Allan |
| FAMILY NAME | Downey |
| SIGNATURE | DOWNEY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Birmingham City University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3418-1754 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Creative endings
The return of the uncanny
Although often considered to be a fault or a glitch in the system, the event of hallucination is integral to models of image-processing regularly employed by artificial intelligence (AI). Evoking an inhuman logic, the works in Trevor Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations series (2017–ongoing) render this hallucinatory space visible and open it up to investigation from within these systems. Produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN…
To Know the Indigenous Other
Celebrating its centenary in 2022, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (JCHA) has been home to scores of articles on Indigenous history within the colonial borders of Canada. Offering a historiography of the past one-hundred years of scholarship appearing in the journal focused on Indigenous topics, this article argues that the JCHA offers a unique case study of the history of the field. While the journal has offered a dearth of sc…
The Algorithmic Apparatus of Neocolonialism
The techno-politics of programming vision
Broadening debates about the future of image technologies, this conversation discusses the histories of image-making technologies and how they define post-digital and neo-colonial models of representation. Amin and Downey explore the interdisciplinary relationship that exists between art practices and models of academic and critical research, neo-colonial violence, machinic vision, photography and colonial exploitation, and data extraction
Indigenous Brooklyn
On May 10, 2013, eighteen hundred feet above the city streets of Manhattan, workers erected the crowning spire of One World Trade Center, marking the completion of the first of six towers that would replace the buildings destroyed on September 11, 2001. Atop that tower stood one of the latest generation of Haudenosaunee ironworkers to follow in the footsteps of Indigenous families who, for the last 140 years, have helped create some of North Amer…
Witness statements and the technologies of memory
Bringing together artistic and scientific modes of inquiry, Witness statements and the technologies of memory examines the impact that digital technologies have on the substance of truth and historical facts. Hosted as part of Heba Y. Amin and Anthony Downey's online symposium, which was held in conjunction with Amin's exhibition When I see the future, I close my eyes, Chapter I (curated by Downey for the Mosaic Rooms in 2020), the panel discusse…
Topologies of Air and the Airspace Tribunal
Can we deploy creative practices to critically address the fatal interlocking of global surveillance technologies, neo-colonial expansionism, environmental degradation and the lethal threat of drone warfare? Throughout the following conversation, Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey examine these and other questions in relation to the recent publication of Topologies of Air (Sternberg Press and The Power Plant, 2022). Edited by Downey, the book i…
Sport-for-development and the failure of aboriginal subjecthood
In November 1989, the United Nations initiated a fundamental shift in international support for the rights of children by introducing the Convention on the Rights of the Child. As part of that Convention, the UN helped solidify the rights of children to engage in rest, leisure, play, and recreational activities introduced in article 31 of the resolution. As a result, the institutionalization of sport as a catalyst for social change – known as spo…
Photography as Apparatus
Photographs are affected by their means of production, reproduction, and distribution. The social and political economy in which they circulate, in turn, imbricates the very fabric and content of a...
Raven Plays Ball
Beginning in the nineteenth century, Anglo-Canadian colonial agents (residential school administrators and teachers, missionaries, and government officials) introduced a number of Western-style sporting activities among Indigenous peoples through athletic clubs, church gatherings, and school physical fitness programs. In keeping with a Victorian conception of leisure, these elites understood sports in moral terms, believing that they would suppor…
Stickhandling through the Margins
Book Review| April 01 2014 Stickhandling through the Margins: First Nations Hockey in Canada Robidoux, Michael A. Stickhandling through the Margins: First Nations Hockey in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. ix+168. References and index. $21.95 pb. Allan Downey Allan Downey Nak’azdli First Nation, Wilfrid Laurier University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2014) 41 (1): 175–…
Learning Culture through Sports
Book Review| October 01 2011 Learning Culture through Sports: Perspectives on Society and Organized Sports Prettyman, Sandra Spickard and Brian Lampman, eds. Learning Culture through Sports: Perspectives on Society and Organized Sports. 2nd ed. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011. Pp. 299. Notes, contributors, and index. Allan Downey Allan Downey Nak’azdli First Nation, Wilfrid Laurier University Search for other works by thi…
Zones of Indistinction
The category of ‘bare life’ is used to refer to subjects who are denied both political and legal representation. For Giorgio Agamben, the subject who most immediately exemplifies the plight of ‘bare life’ is the stateless refugee. However, this can be extended, the author would suggest, to include political prisoners, the disappeared, victims of torture, and the dispossessed – all of whom are excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of…
An Ethics of Engagement
In the last decade or so we have seen a series of incremental shifts from object‐based to context‐based art practices and, more recently, to artworks that primarily utilise forms of collaboration and participation – or, so‐called socially engaged artworks. A significant factor in the latter practices has been the emergence of the artist as a quasi‐ or pseudo‐ethnographer. Such developments, whilst not necessarily new, have nonetheless further pro…
Towards a Politics of (Relational) Aesthetics
The aesthetic criteria used to interpret art as a practice have changed radically since the 1960s. To note as much is to observe a truism: the idea (or should that be the ideal) of a universalist a
Miniatures
A Life Full of Holes
Critical Imperatives
Grub For Sharks
In 1840 J M W Turner painted Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming on (The Slave Ship). The subject matter concerned the ‘Zong’, a slave ship that had departed from Liverpo
Curating Africa
(2005). Curating Africa: ‘Africa remix’ and the categorical dilemma. Wasafiri: Vol. 20, No. 46, pp. 47-55
Yinka Shonibare in conversation
The Spectacular Difference of Documenta XI
Art
Yinka Shonibare
Zones of Indistinction
The category of ‘bare life’ is used to refer to subjects who are denied both political and legal representation. For Giorgio Agamben, the subject who most immediately exemplifies the plight of ‘bare life’ is the stateless refugee. However, this can be extended, the author would suggest, to include political prisoners, the disappeared, victims of torture, and the dispossessed – all of whom are excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of…
Raven Plays Ball
Beginning in the nineteenth century, Anglo-Canadian colonial agents (residential school administrators and teachers, missionaries, and government officials) introduced a number of Western-style sporting activities among Indigenous peoples through athletic clubs, church gatherings, and school physical fitness programs. In keeping with a Victorian conception of leisure, these elites understood sports in moral terms, believing that they would suppor…
An Ethics of Engagement
In the last decade or so we have seen a series of incremental shifts from object‐based to context‐based art practices and, more recently, to artworks that primarily utilise forms of collaboration and participation – or, so‐called socially engaged artworks. A significant factor in the latter practices has been the emergence of the artist as a quasi‐ or pseudo‐ethnographer. Such developments, whilst not necessarily new, have nonetheless further pro…
Towards a Politics of (Relational) Aesthetics
The aesthetic criteria used to interpret art as a practice have changed radically since the 1960s. To note as much is to observe a truism: the idea (or should that be the ideal) of a universalist a
Indigenous Brooklyn
On May 10, 2013, eighteen hundred feet above the city streets of Manhattan, workers erected the crowning spire of One World Trade Center, marking the completion of the first of six towers that would replace the buildings destroyed on September 11, 2001. Atop that tower stood one of the latest generation of Haudenosaunee ironworkers to follow in the footsteps of Indigenous families who, for the last 140 years, have helped create some of North Amer…
Creative endings
The return of the uncanny
Although often considered to be a fault or a glitch in the system, the event of hallucination is integral to models of image-processing regularly employed by artificial intelligence (AI). Evoking an inhuman logic, the works in Trevor Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations series (2017–ongoing) render this hallucinatory space visible and open it up to investigation from within these systems. Produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN…
Topologies of Air and the Airspace Tribunal
Can we deploy creative practices to critically address the fatal interlocking of global surveillance technologies, neo-colonial expansionism, environmental degradation and the lethal threat of drone warfare? Throughout the following conversation, Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey examine these and other questions in relation to the recent publication of Topologies of Air (Sternberg Press and The Power Plant, 2022). Edited by Downey, the book i…
Photography as Apparatus
Photographs are affected by their means of production, reproduction, and distribution. The social and political economy in which they circulate, in turn, imbricates the very fabric and content of a...
A Life Full of Holes
Grub For Sharks
In 1840 J M W Turner painted Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming on (The Slave Ship). The subject matter concerned the ‘Zong’, a slave ship that had departed from Liverpo
Yinka Shonibare in conversation
Art
Yinka Shonibare
The Spectacular Difference of Documenta XI
Yinka Shonibare in conversation
Grub For Sharks
In 1840 J M W Turner painted Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming on (The Slave Ship). The subject matter concerned the ‘Zong’, a slave ship that had departed from Liverpo
Curating Africa
(2005). Curating Africa: ‘Africa remix’ and the categorical dilemma. Wasafiri: Vol. 20, No. 46, pp. 47-55
Miniatures
A Life Full of Holes
Critical Imperatives
Towards a Politics of (Relational) Aesthetics
The aesthetic criteria used to interpret art as a practice have changed radically since the 1960s. To note as much is to observe a truism: the idea (or should that be the ideal) of a universalist a
Zones of Indistinction
The category of ‘bare life’ is used to refer to subjects who are denied both political and legal representation. For Giorgio Agamben, the subject who most immediately exemplifies the plight of ‘bare life’ is the stateless refugee. However, this can be extended, the author would suggest, to include political prisoners, the disappeared, victims of torture, and the dispossessed – all of whom are excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of…
An Ethics of Engagement
In the last decade or so we have seen a series of incremental shifts from object‐based to context‐based art practices and, more recently, to artworks that primarily utilise forms of collaboration and participation – or, so‐called socially engaged artworks. A significant factor in the latter practices has been the emergence of the artist as a quasi‐ or pseudo‐ethnographer. Such developments, whilst not necessarily new, have nonetheless further pro…
Learning Culture through Sports
Book Review| October 01 2011 Learning Culture through Sports: Perspectives on Society and Organized Sports Prettyman, Sandra Spickard and Brian Lampman, eds. Learning Culture through Sports: Perspectives on Society and Organized Sports. 2nd ed. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011. Pp. 299. Notes, contributors, and index. Allan Downey Allan Downey Nak’azdli First Nation, Wilfrid Laurier University Search for other works by thi…
Stickhandling through the Margins
Book Review| April 01 2014 Stickhandling through the Margins: First Nations Hockey in Canada Robidoux, Michael A. Stickhandling through the Margins: First Nations Hockey in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. ix+168. References and index. $21.95 pb. Allan Downey Allan Downey Nak’azdli First Nation, Wilfrid Laurier University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2014) 41 (1): 175–…
Raven Plays Ball
Beginning in the nineteenth century, Anglo-Canadian colonial agents (residential school administrators and teachers, missionaries, and government officials) introduced a number of Western-style sporting activities among Indigenous peoples through athletic clubs, church gatherings, and school physical fitness programs. In keeping with a Victorian conception of leisure, these elites understood sports in moral terms, believing that they would suppor…
Photography as Apparatus
Photographs are affected by their means of production, reproduction, and distribution. The social and political economy in which they circulate, in turn, imbricates the very fabric and content of a...
Sport-for-development and the failure of aboriginal subjecthood
In November 1989, the United Nations initiated a fundamental shift in international support for the rights of children by introducing the Convention on the Rights of the Child. As part of that Convention, the UN helped solidify the rights of children to engage in rest, leisure, play, and recreational activities introduced in article 31 of the resolution. As a result, the institutionalization of sport as a catalyst for social change – known as spo…
Topologies of Air and the Airspace Tribunal
Can we deploy creative practices to critically address the fatal interlocking of global surveillance technologies, neo-colonial expansionism, environmental degradation and the lethal threat of drone warfare? Throughout the following conversation, Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey examine these and other questions in relation to the recent publication of Topologies of Air (Sternberg Press and The Power Plant, 2022). Edited by Downey, the book i…
Witness statements and the technologies of memory
Bringing together artistic and scientific modes of inquiry, Witness statements and the technologies of memory examines the impact that digital technologies have on the substance of truth and historical facts. Hosted as part of Heba Y. Amin and Anthony Downey's online symposium, which was held in conjunction with Amin's exhibition When I see the future, I close my eyes, Chapter I (curated by Downey for the Mosaic Rooms in 2020), the panel discusse…
To Know the Indigenous Other
Celebrating its centenary in 2022, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (JCHA) has been home to scores of articles on Indigenous history within the colonial borders of Canada. Offering a historiography of the past one-hundred years of scholarship appearing in the journal focused on Indigenous topics, this article argues that the JCHA offers a unique case study of the history of the field. While the journal has offered a dearth of sc…
The Algorithmic Apparatus of Neocolonialism
The techno-politics of programming vision
Broadening debates about the future of image technologies, this conversation discusses the histories of image-making technologies and how they define post-digital and neo-colonial models of representation. Amin and Downey explore the interdisciplinary relationship that exists between art practices and models of academic and critical research, neo-colonial violence, machinic vision, photography and colonial exploitation, and data extraction
Indigenous Brooklyn
On May 10, 2013, eighteen hundred feet above the city streets of Manhattan, workers erected the crowning spire of One World Trade Center, marking the completion of the first of six towers that would replace the buildings destroyed on September 11, 2001. Atop that tower stood one of the latest generation of Haudenosaunee ironworkers to follow in the footsteps of Indigenous families who, for the last 140 years, have helped create some of North Amer…
The return of the uncanny
Although often considered to be a fault or a glitch in the system, the event of hallucination is integral to models of image-processing regularly employed by artificial intelligence (AI). Evoking an inhuman logic, the works in Trevor Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations series (2017–ongoing) render this hallucinatory space visible and open it up to investigation from within these systems. Produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN…
Creative endings
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Art (13 works) · Law (11 works) · History (9 works) · History (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Art history (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works)