Image: Color photograph of white person, Charles Eppley, speaking at a music conference at Columbia University. On the left is a small projection screen that depicts two photos of a vinyl record of music by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. The heads of numerous attendees are seen from the back as they look at the screen, and a large audio speaker sits on the left side of the image.
Charles Eppley has held positions as Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Oberlin College, Research Strategist at MIT Media Lab, Research Fellow in Experiments in Art & Technology (EAT) at Bell Labs, and Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Epistemes of Modern Acoustics research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
Charles earned a PhD in Art History from Stony Brook University in 2017, where they wrote a dissertation on the experimental musician, sonic artist, and engineer Max Neuhaus (1939-2009). Charles researches the history of sound, time-based media, and computational aesthetics in modern and contemporary art and media culture, focusing on techno-material cultures and the politics of listening. They are currently writing a book on postwar sonic art called Soundsites: Max Neuhaus and the Politics of Listening in Postwar Intermedia Art, as well as a co-authored manuscript on the history of "art and technology" as an aesthetic/social paradigm.
Charles is a founding member of the Cybernetics Library, an interdisciplinary browsing library on the history and theory of cybernetic systems and culture, and Editor & Curator at Avant.org, a distributed platform for critical art, research and writing. They have organized workshops, public programs, exhibitions, and performances at spaces such as MoMA PS1, Queens Museum, Tate Modern, Issue Project Room, and the School for Poetic Computation. Their writings appear in peer-reviewed journals like Leonardo Music Journal, Public Art Dialogue, and Parallax, and magazines such as Art in America, Rhizome, Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic.
In addition to their scholarship, Charles is active in digital accessibility and disability arts communities, where they often provide sound description and audio description services. For more information about my access work, please see the services page.