Moving (1974) is an early tape made as part of a key work from Downey’s catalogue, Video Trans Américas. A series of tapes and installations, the project is the outcome of journeys made by the artist through North and South America in the 1970s. Starting in Cambridge, New York, he visited and made recordings with indigenous people in various locations including Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, using a Sony Portapak, a battery powered recording system that made amateur video-making much more widely accessible in the mid 60s.

For Downey, video provided a means of contesting the unchallenged authority of mass culture and televised documentary, in particular the conventional observer-subject dynamic, thereby opening up the possibility of alternative modes of cultural communication and feedback. Within these new modes, visual information could be afforded a complexity of understanding he saw as more fitting to the politics of contemporary experience.

Juan Downey was born in Santiago de Chile in 1940. He studied Architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and began exhibiting his art. In 1961, after finishing his studies, he moved to Barcelona, Madrid and Paris where he studied print making at Atelier 17 with S.W. Hayter. During his stay in Paris he befriended Roberto Matta, poet Pablo Neruda, Julio Le Parc and Nicolás Guillén among others. In 1965 he moved to the United States to exhibit at the Organization of the American States in Washington D.C.. In 1969 he relocated permanently to New York where he produced the largest part of his oeuvre and was recognized as one of the leading artists of the period. He worked across several media and is currently recognized as one of the pioneers of video art. During his lifetime he had two solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He received several grants, including two Guggenheim Grants, a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Cambridge, MA, two Rockefeller Grants and several National Endowments for the Arts. He taught at Hunter College and Pratt Institute. He travelled extensively across the Americas and lived among the Yanomami Indians in the Amazon Rain Forest for a year. In 1993 Downey passed away at the age of 53 in New York.