Join us for a screening of the film Atlantics (2019; dir. Mati Diop), followed by a conversation with David Bering-Porter, PhD. 

Light refreshments will be served. 

About the Film 

In a popular suburb of Dakar, workers on the construction site of a futuristic tower, without pay for months, decide to leave the country by the ocean for a better future. Among them is Souleiman, the lover of Ada, promised to another.

About David Bering-Porter 

David Bering-Porter is Associate Professor of Culture and Media at the Eugene Lang College of the Liberal Arts at The New School, where his research and teaching address film and media studies, digital culture, and the intersections of Black studies and artificial intelligence. His first book, Undead Labor: Capitalism's Zombie Workers (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), traces the figure of the zombie from Haitian revolutionary culture to contemporary automation discourse, showing how race, labor, and value converge in the mediated body of the undead worker. He is currently at work on a second book, Digital Doppelgänger: The Second Life of Living Labor, which extends that inquiry into voice cloning, generative avatars, and other AI systems built to replicate human behavior. His writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Post45, Culture Machine, MIRAJ, Flow, Calibano, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

About the Screening Series 

Presented by SexTech Lab in collaboration with the Philosophy Film Club and Ruff Cuts, the screening series is an interdepartmental, cross-disciplinary initiative that engages with film as an intellectual and cultural work to be discussed, debated, and thought with. The series draws on New York City’s extraordinary density of critics, journalists, artists, filmmakers, and public scholars in our orbit, bringing them into dialogue with internal experts at The New School, moderated by students across departments and programs. Each event pairs a screening with dialogue that approaches cinema through historical, philosophical, political, and psychological lenses, showing how public debate, academic inquiry, and applied industry insight can sharpen one another.