Data Leaks (2025) transforms compression and digital distortion into a political and aesthetic strategy. Rooted in the artist’s experience transcribing audio for AI systems under strict nondisclosure agreements and closely controlled workplace conditions, the work confronts the culture of secrecy that surrounds data labor and conceals the extraction of private, sensitive information. Through layered, compressed sound and glitched microscope footage of the artist’s blood, Data Leaks renders leakage as both exposure and obscurity, making visible the affective and bodily residue of systems designed to remain unseen. The result is a work that uses the modest scale of small file media to ask urgent questions about labor, surveillance, and what can or cannot be said under conditions of enforced silence.
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Digital America Interviewed Mihai Băcăran in April 2026.
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Mihai Băcăran is an independent researcher focusing on intersections of art and technology. His work uses an experimental methodology that combines theoretical writing and art practice. Mihai is particularly interested in engaging with processes of spectatorship that act as vectors of (dis)orientation by challenging, deconstructing, and remodeling the embodied experience of living in cultures permeated by digital technologies. His current research addresses the labour of audio transcription for AI projects as a performative process of spectatorship. Since 2013, Mihai has been active in the art collective dalpofzs: www.dalpofzs.com.
