Zombies!: Collectivity and Mediation in Post-Fordism

In film and media studies, crowd studies usually revolve around questions of control andrepresentation, and most of all, the role of technological mediation in such construction. The zombie,for its collective presence and its materializing of the mediation process, has profound resonancewith the emergence of the global masses, who, facing the new forces of production (includingautomation, AI, and network connectivity), are grappling with new production relations as part ofthe class struggle process to negotiate the next mode of production for capital accumulation. So far,post-Fordism has been marked by its highly heterogeneous modes of production supported by theinternational division of labor: ranging from the most ruthless exploitation with direct slavery(African miners, East Asian seafood slavery) to mechanized division of labor (Foxconn), to digitalTaylorism (knowledge workers) and the Silicon Valley digirati. With its own heterogeneity, thedigital zombie multitude comes to challenge the global masses to explore potential forms of socialformation in the zombie apocalypse. It is with the most advanced visual technology of crowdsimulation and our engagement with the new zombie multitude in films and games that we come toimagine and to experiment with alternative mode of production. In sum, this three-year project willexplore the various post-Fordist reconstructions of the masses through crowd theory, along the lineof mediation and collectivity formations in zombie films and games. More specifically, thisinterdisciplinary project will encompass a revisit of classical crowd psychology, explore theboundaries of the masses and modernity in critical theory and the Italian Autonomist multitude,Digital Taylorism, and the political economy of the visual effects industry, and conduct a criticalstudy of the technical development of crowd simulation to explore the aesthetics and politics of thezombie multitude in film and video games.