Charles Eppley, PhD

Image: Closeup color photo of a white-gloved hand holding a small computer breadboard, which shows a "CryptoKitty" digital artwork with pictorial display of a crudely-drawn cat using a pixelated contour line. A bright green leaf juts into the photo horizontally on the right, mirroring the light-skinned human hand on the left, centering the colorfully-wired computer system in the middle of the image.

Teaching & Pedagogy

My research and teaching are consciously connected, so that each informs the other. I practice "engaged pedagogy," and understand the classroom to be a dynamic social space in which instructors and students learn and teach together. This feedback is essential for keeping my research and teaching grounded, and allows me to forefront urgent contemporary sociopolitical issues that connect the past, present, and future. I also include creative practices in my courses, whether lecture or seminar, so that students can apply course ideas to other parts of their life. (Examples of this include image description, alt text, and other disability/access projects, Wikipedia articles and edit-a-thons, audiovisual recordings, creative artworks, etc.)

black and white photo of artist laurie anderson, holding two microphones, and quickly moving her head from one to the other while making vocal sounds. her head is blurred from the fast movement.

Sonic Art History: Listening to Modern & Contemporary Art

This interdisciplinary lecture course explores the history and theory of 'sonic art’ across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing the connections of art history to sound studies, media studies, music history, and the history of technology.

color photograph of a hologram by artist simone forti. the rainbow hologram depicts forti standing with one arm raise up, while she stares out to the viewer. her miniature body is contained in an elliptical resin structure.

Bell Labs to Blockchain: Art & Technology, 1925-Present

This course considers art & technology through artistic, institutional, and social paradigms across the 20th and 21st centuries. Students study the history and theory of artist-engineer collaboration from early kinetics to artificial intelligence, and how this activity intersects with global networks of power.

Multisensory Art History

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar (PhD & MFA) examines the methods, theories, and values of art history through modes of non-visual sensation. Expanding on the “ways of seeing” that define the methods of this discipline, heres we further theorize ways of hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching that are crucial for understanding and rethinking the history of modern and contemporary art. Students engage in experiential learning by composing multisensory event scores in the style of Fluxus performance and intermedia art.

Blockchain Aesthetics

This course examines “Blockchain Aesthetics & Epistemology” using an interdisciplinary Art History and Science and Technology Studies (STS) view. Students learn and critically discuss methods and concepts of blockchain and cryptocurrency, and analyze the positive/negative impacts of this emerging technology moves into museums and galleries from the decentralized web (i.e., "Web3"). We approach blockchain as a new artistic medium and as a technology of power to understand how "Crypto Art" is entangled with sociopolitical and environmental issues of climate change, digital equity, and human rights.

color photo of a brick wall with a wheat paste artwork by alex bell, depicting two versions of a new york times front page covering the michael brown murder: one depicts an even spread between derek chauvin and michael brown, conveying the latter's problems, while celebrating the former. the right cover depicts a full page color photo of brown in a graduation cap, the headline changed to "a teenager with promise."

Beyond the Plane: Photography as Intermedium

Photographs are understood to be two-dimensional. But what do we see when we look beyond the plane? This course examines “intermedia art” from a photographic perspective. Beginning with early ideas of photography as a ‘fixed’ medium during the 1820s, students follow the artistic, technological, and social development of the medium through the 21st Century to understand how photography embodies 'unfixed' multimodal forms circumscribing urgent sociopolitical issues.

a color photograph of an installation by artist jes sachse. in a storefront window in an urban setting, two large panels are in blue and green, one saying "i'm here for you," the other "are you there?" in german ("dort bist du")

Disability & Accessibility in Contemporary Art

This interdisciplinary seminar explores topics of access and disability in contemporary art. Students learn key writings, methods, and concepts of disability studies and apply them critically to understand contemporary artistic, curatorial, and museological practices, giving special attention to revealing how art and disability interrelate within broader contexts of ableist culture, political economy, infrastructure, race, gender, sexuality, immigration, and decolonization.

color photograph of three ancient greek busts. moving from left to right, the busts are slowly colored with flesh toned paint, referring to their original painted state.

approaches to Western Art

This introductory art history course introduces students to approaches and methods for understanding the dynamic and conflicted histories of "Western Art." This writing and reading-intensive course gives students an introduction to Western art from an artistic and aesthetic viewpoint, and additionally reveals the varied historical and sociopolitical contexts that have circumscribed how art (and the field of art history) has been created and experienced, past and present, under colonial power structures and political economies.

black and white photo of a computer screen, a human body partially seen on the left, showing a digital rendering of a human face and the tongue/throat in contour style.

Digital listening

This seminar course considers how digital forms of listening transformed oral history, the written word, and analog audio recording. Students engage writings by artists, composers, performers, philosophers, and cultural critics to think critically about new mediums such as the smartphone and MP3, art and music that engages digital media and the internet through peer-to-peer, networked, or streaming culture, and how practices of digital listening fit in the history of the mediated body.

Currently Teaching

Here is a brief look at some of the courses that I am teaching in the 2022-2023 academic year:

Documentaries

Examines the technological and cultural history of documentation a mode of production, expanding the documentary form beyond film alone to asses its artistic and social contexts broadly conceived, spanning literary, photographic, acoustic, and digital culture traditions, from the printed word to contemporary immersive media. In addition to critical discussion and reflection, students create works of documentary media, such as films, podcasts, soundscape recordings, art installations, photographic essays, travelogues, and other experimental forms.

Media & Diversity

Considers how issues of diversity, equity, and inclusivity impact the arts through technologies of expression and representation. This course offers critical discussion around past and current histories of exclusion and empowerment in cultural forms, spanning visual art, music, film, dance, computer/video games, performance, and contemporary digital media.

Art & War

Contextualizes the creation of art during times of war and deep within zones of conflict, past and present. The course provides an overview of how and why people have create art when they are most vulnerable, and takes into account contemporary conflicts as expressed through visual art, music, sculptural monuments, memorials, street art, and more. Modules include: Defining War, Representing War, Declaring War, Protesting War, Surviving War, and Remembering War. In addition to learning about the history/theories of war (and how it has been a subject of cultural expression) students also conceive and design a war memorial of their own.

Perspectives on Interdisciplinary Art & Performance

Provides rich historical and theoretical context to modern and contemporary interdisciplinary art practices, bolstered by critical media studies perspectives that question how systems of power manifest in artistic media and cultural spaces.

20th & 21st Century Art, Performance & Media

Provides an introduction to the history and theory of modern and contemporary art, as well as their connections to adjacent media and techno-material cultures. In this course, students gain fundamental knowledge about modernism and its numerous, sometimes conflicting, transformations over the 20th and 21st centuries. This leads us to examining our present conditions of creating and interpreting art amidst (and at times despite) computational networks, systems, and platforms that comprise and govern how we live and work today.

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