Zachary Furste is an artist, scholar, and permanent lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He works on theories and histories of technical media,  as well as artistic research and technology in the arts. His multimodal practice draws from archival techniques, digital forensics, software infrastructures, and the history of aesthetics. His book project, Bare Metal: Material and Abstraction in Computing, argues that virtualization—the technique in which one system models another—is a neglected foundation of both computing history and contemporary digital infrastructure.

In creative projects like compressions.cc, postal.media, i-o.tv, thermostat.tv, iiil.li, and cybersyn.cc, Furste experiments with the technical and material layers of the internet to investigate their role in contemporary epistemological, social, and political life.

Alongside this research and creative practice, Furste is a systems developer at the Digital Methods Initiative, where he works on the infrastructure behind the DMI's suite of tools for internet research.

Furste holds a PhD in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University. Previously, he was a visiting scholar in Media Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Southern California, and a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in Software Curation at Carnegie Mellon University.