l̶̩͔̻̔e̵͎͆͂̉͋ą̶̲͓̩͛̇k̴̜̠͆̍͌s are ubiquitous, bursting gas, leaking pipes and oozing tears, and so ubiquitous that its figurative meaning sounds even more native, circulating gossips are leaks, whistleblowers are, too, leaks. Metaphorical leak, inheriting the brokenness from physical leak, is associated with illegality, immorality or at least shamefulness. Or, is it?

In the video essay, leak in the promiscuous machines and prurient governing entities is brought to the forefront as systemic vulnerabilities. A message you send out to your loved one over the TCP/IP protocol, as Chun noted, is slutty. Audio and video signal cables are constantly radiating RF emanations. Buffer overflows when data overwrites, memory leaks can be used to navigate into forbidden memory, software ages, like human beings, ageing leads to more leaks. In addition to that, our faces are reduced to facial features for machine learning, personal medical records end as image embedding in a training dataset. Our voices leak as analyzable waves, irises leak as unique high-contrast photographs. We, as users and as citizens, are encouraged by the tech giants and governments to leak, while the large language models trained from the data we leaked, refuse to “participate in or encourage any illegal activities, including leaking.”

let yourself l̴͓̥̠̼̏̑̃̂̂͘ḛ̷̺̟͓͈̜̓̋̍̄̆ä̸̞̝̳́̾̓̈̾k̷͎̰̓̒͘ a little leaks through the cracks on the leaking gas pipe, the space station, the express warehouse, into the leaking signals, leaky compression algorithms, leaky network packets, leaking categories, leaked tiny face and tiny activity dataset, to ask who is making it’s not ok to leak, who is capturing leak, how leak is weaponized and who is killing leak to stop solidarity from happening.

Jiawen(they/she, b.~362 PPM) exists as a user most of the time in their life, having little agency as a standard user, both technologically and politically. She seeks for possibilities in internet cracks for queering the given identity of a user, their wish is to be an analogkäse in the digital figurations and drip sizzling fat on the cables and ports.

Apart from that, jiawen’s research focuses on technology as memory and desire, with contaminated history but appearing pure, sterilized, decontextualized and dehistoricized, operating through reducing rather than relating. jiawen looks into the infrastructure, (counter)history, materiality, locality, poetics and politics of technology. She sees l̸͓̪̜͕̮̆̎̓e̷͍̲͕̫̦͌a̵̡̝͈̗̐k̴̢͖̮̞̣̄͛̓͛̐ as an instance of the space-time continuum and a definite part of the digital reality, and leaking as a method to survive together.

Currently based in Germany.