David Bering-Porter
Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School
Research
My research explores the intersections of film studies and media theory, critical race studies and postcolonial theory, and science and technology studies, all of which carry an emphasis on the body, itself, as a medium. Methodologically, I am interested and invested in the material conditions of media. I emphasize the technological and historical context of film and digital media and the various ways that media technologies extend and automate the capacities of the human body. My research into media studies inevitably raises questions of embodiment, whether that is technological or biological, and is guided by an attention to race, labor, and value. In these ways, my work is innovative, theoretically rigorous, and experimental, which contributes to the long-standing tradition of cutting-edge scholarship at The New School.
My research in film and moving image media focuses on race and genre, specifically the intersections of Blackness and horror in the zombie movie. I have published both public-facing and scholarly articles on the zombie and I am currently completing my monograph, Undead Labor: On the Uncanny Vitality of the Zombie, which explores the mediated body of the zombie as a nexus of race, labor, and value within modern culture and looks to the shifting representations of the zombie across moving image media to consider how and why the zombie remains such a significant element within the popular imagination.
My research in digital media emphasizes labor and sensation within the growing field of generative media. Generative media refers to any form of digital production that is created through the use of algorithms, generally some form of artificial neural network to generate content. My work on generative media has led to questions of creativity, labor, sensation, and learning, inspiring a second book project.
Talks and Publications
Undead Labor: On the Uncanny Vitality of the Zombie. Public talk (March, 2022)
McGill University, Montreal
Data as Symbolic Form: Datafication and the Imaginary Media of W. E. B. Du Bois (Winter 2022) Published in: Critical Inquiry
A Philosophy of Refraction: Vilém Flusser’s Speculative Biology and the Study of Paramedia. Book chapter in Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Uncanny Whiteness and the New Weird: Three Revivals in Folk Horror. Public talk at University of Washington, Bothell. (2021)
Semiotics of the Click. Computer Mouse Conference 2021
Contact
Please don’t hesitate to reach out via email: beringpd (at) newschool (dot) edu.
Undead Labor 